Paranoid Obstructions

In this photo book, Els Vanden Meersch investigates the latent presence of violence and dominance in the everyday reality of the urban fabric. Subtle images contain combinations of banal details, through which emerges a restrained tension that points at the paranoid as it is felt in architecture. Control mechanisms such as surveillance cameras, spy holes and rear-view mirrors are set against one another. They gradually raise the stakes towards displaying an impenetrable control system that is built on the principles of military architecture, sophisticated technology and compelling viewing apparatuses. In this machine of anxiety, both the operator of the system and its target remain invisible. An aimless matrix of meaning appears, in which a mirror reveals as much as a dead-end corridor. In an astutely accurate way, this book offers a representation of what cannot be outspoken or imagined but which inevitably has happened. This book contains an essay by Hilde Van Gelder, and a poem by Alice Evermore. Els Vanden Meersch studied visual arts at the Sint-Lukas Hogeschool Brussels and was a post-graduate of the Higher Institute of Visual Arts, Antwerp, and she was a participant at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam. Her work consists of (site specific) installations and photography, in which she explores the psychological structures of architecture and how this defines the position of the individual and its self image.Meersch, Els Vanden is the author of 'Paranoid Obstructions ', published 2004 under ISBN 9789058674371 and ISBN 9058674371.