WHAT ENDURES, WHAT TRANSFORMS
MARIE DE DECKER — WHAT ENDURES, WHAT TRANSFORMS
Visual artist and performer Marie De Decker has developed a practice grounded in sensory experience, at a distance from any predetermined intention. Her approach does not seek to represent, but to capture intensities and establish a relationship with reality as it manifests in the present moment. Her artistic gesture is rooted in an attentive presence to the world, close to contemplation, in which body, perception, matter and temporality are intimately connected and mutually responsive.
Situated within an inquiry into the living world, her work explores the tension between stability and change, making art a space for observing and experimenting with processes of evolution. Guided by a holistic understanding of living systems, the artist rejects oppositions and hierarchies between scales, states and modes of perception. She brings the visible and the invisible into relation within a continuum in which works are not closed objects, but spaces through which to think, feel and understand the living world, with materiality acting as a means rather than an end.
The artist’s discovery of the mangrove forest surrounding the village of Poudre d’Or, in the Indian Ocean, acts as a revelation. An in-between environment, neither entirely terrestrial nor fully marine, the mangrove becomes a model of coexistence, resilience and continuous transformation. It nourishes a visual imagination founded on the interdependence of forms and flows.
Inspired by this ecosystem, Marie De Decker creates fantastical herbaria through drawing, in which hybrid forms unfold, continually shifting from the observation of living systems towards fiction. The motifs of feather and scale that structure these compositions operate as conceptual tools. Through repetition, variation and arabesque, they generate a non-hierarchical organisation akin to that of natural systems.
Marie De Decker’s practice is rooted in a dual cultural genealogy, Flemish and Fulani, conceived as a space of productive tensions. Embodied by a grandmother who was a seamstress and a grandfather who was a monk before becoming an artist, these inheritances place her work within a continuity of making.
The thread of the tapestry, understood as a line in circulation, becomes a language in its own right, capable of crossing before becoming an artist, these inheritances place her work within a continuity of making.
The thread of the tapestry cultures and borders. The work unfolds as a relational field, activated by light, movement and the viewer’s presence, engaging a temporality founded on duration and persistence. Domestic and craft-based forms of knowledge have led the artist to invent her own techniques, while her training in photography informs her attention to the visible and sustains a rigorous relationship with light, contrast and matter.
Within this visual and conceptual structure, gold occupies a central place. Removed from decorative or economic value, it is approached for its capacity to condense multiple temporalities and inscribe memory within matter. Working with gold thread relies on the irreversibility of the gesture. Every action commits the form definitively.
Gold therefore ceases to be perceived as a precious material and becomes a flow, guiding the gaze and revealing forms destined both to appear and to fade. It makes perceptible the very fragility of living structures and places the work within a cyclical temporality shaped by transformation and disappearance.
Every work created by the artist sets in motion devices of memory and preservation. The fabrics, fishing nets and boxes she uses act as objects of gathering, conceived to preserve what lies at the core of her practice.
Beyond their function of capture, the fishing nets pay tribute to the former fishing village of Ostend, where the artist’s family originated, and become vehicles of collective transmission. Formed from threads arranged into a mesh, they operate as selective, permeable and flexible filters, capturing without enclosing and maintaining a balance between retention and circulation.
Like fishermen who cast their nets, allow them to drift and then retrieve only what is necessary for sustenance, Marie De Decker’s works bring essential fragments to the surface, contributing to the continuity and endurance of human histories.
Alongside their function of transmission, the boxes are conceived as vessels of preservation. Made using stones originating from the commissioner’s birthplace, they establish a direct relationship between the object, the individual and their personal history. Opening them introduces a period of anticipation and attention specific to the act of contemplation.
Within this system of forms, gold is not an instrument of capture but a medium of revelation. It makes visible and enduring what has been retained, acting as a guiding thread between processes of retention and preservation. Far from denying fragility, it brings it to the fore and emphasises its persistence.
When transmission is already at work, Marie De Decker’s practice accompanies its existing dynamics. When transmission is absent, the work becomes a means of inventing new forms for it.
Alongside her visual practice, performance has become an essential extension of Marie De Decker’s artistic inquiry. In one of her performances, the public is invited to encounter the artist’s preparatory work, revealing the creative process from which her works emerge.
This practice extends into other formats, including the concert-performance Et si Louis XIV était resté — What if Louis XIV Had Stayed? Far removed from historical re-enactment, the work explores what might have unfolded following the king’s visit to Luxembourg in 1687.
Conceived as an immersive experience combining live music, projections and performative gestures, it becomes a space of active fiction and shared sensory experience, in which art is lived collectively.
Marie De Decker’s work unfolds as a space of passage, where memory, matter and imagination are woven into a single movement. It opens a space for contemplation, inviting the viewer to experience an expanded sense of time: fragile, transmissible and continually transforming.
Agathe Anglionin
Architect | Curator | Art Critic