The Geophysical Centre of Dourbes

This book presents the Geophysical Centre of Dourbes after more than 7 decades of existence, viewed through the lens of visual artist Bram Van Stappen. His interest in radiation and visualising physical phenomena brought him to the Geophysical Centre of the RMI in Dourbes. An added inspiration to his work was the coexistence of the numerous scientific instruments continuously registering events occurring at distant locations (on the Sun, within interplanetary space and the magnetosphere) or at the core of the Earth and the intact nature within the domain.

The opportunity presented itself naturally to dedicate this book to the 70th anniversary of the centre and to include a concise history.

Bram Van Stappen’s work questions the photographic medium in itself. He scans image element after image element, subject after subject, switches between abstraction and figuration, and focuses on the materiality of the subject or print. He searches for the uniqueness of an image or tries to arrive at an archetype through obsessive repetition. From medium format to cheap point-and-shoot cameras are employed to get a grip on the sometimes unreal everyday, to extract a comprehensible microcosm from a complex pool of impressions, atmospheres, people, places, and situations. All this with an often anomalous photographic frame and a disorienting point of view to reduce his motifs to their most abstract form in an endless search for the code of the aura of the image.