Limburg

Limburg is a photo series by Lars Duchateau (BE) based on articles that appeared in the regional section of Het Belang van Limburg, the newspaper of a rural region in the north-eastern part of Belgium. The articles were published between November 2019 and October 2023 and have in common that they focus on often small and mundane stories, such as the sudden appearance of hundreds of mushrooms, a court case against a peeping Tom, three women stuck in a swamp, and the discovery of a long-lost wedding ring.

As these news stories were not accompanied by an image or used simple stock photos, Duchateau decided to create new photos. Large, timeless, and serene – often produced weeks, months, or even a year later – they contrast heavily with the concise texts, which are often more questioning than illuminating. Using medium and large format cameras, Duchateau created the images with care and concentration, providing a high level of detail to these relatively insignificant stories.

In Limburg, Duchateau offers a renewed stage to the seemingly trivial events of life. Those that give us hope and the ability to put things into perspective.

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Lars Duchateau (1997) is an artist who mainly works with photography. By applying a wide variety of contemporary strategies. His photos are an investigation into representations of seemingly concrete ages. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, he makes work that generates diverse meanings and associations. Space becomes time and language becomes image. His works are characterised by the use of everyday events in an atmosphere in which recognition plays an important role. By taking daily life as subject matter, he plays with the idea of the mortality of an artwork. His works question the conditions of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. He makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. He is interested in the long-term effect of things.