Ghent, March 24th 2009

To: Mr Jan Haek, head of the Belgian railway company NMBS
Holding

Dear Mr Haek,

For some time now, I’ve been thinking of writing you a letter. Our
respective professional activities are very different: your work affects
the entire Belgian landscape, while mine as an artist involves making
drawings in outlying suburbs. I draw in straight lines, using school
blackboard chalk and a ruler, on streets, walls and, with the
permission of their owners, on the exterior walls of houses. This is
not the same as graffiti. My drawings aren’t illegal and they don’t
protest against anything. The drawings should also not be confused
with the symbols, such as arrows and numbers, which railway
workers write on railway sleepers and other rail equipment. My chalk
lines create tracks that are much less planned than those of your
railway, though we are both makers of tracks that lead to a variety of
destinations.

Working on a commission from the Municipal Museum of
Contemporary Art in Ghent, I have been making drawings in the
Moscou district of Ghent for the last one-and-a-half years. Of
course, many people know the district because the Ledeberg railway
maintenance and repair depot is located there, and because of the
film Moscow, Belgium. In Moscou, my drawings have become a part
of a terrain that is, ultimately, under your control as boss of the
railway company that owns it. Now that my work there is nearly
done, I’d like to tell you about the drawings and reveal their exact
locations. However, my purpose with this letter goes further than
that.

My main aim is to tell you about a property of yours: an old railway
house threatened with demolition. Presently, it is the home of a
retired employee of your company. I made a drawing on the exterior
walls of the house that continues on the wallpaper inside. The
museum is keen to include the drawing in its collection. That’s why
I’m turning to you with the request that you prevent the demolition of
the house. The long journey to this house, and the reasons for this
request, are outlined in this letter.
———————— ——————

My name is Bart Lodewijks. When the museum asked me to work on
an art project in the public spaces of the district of Moscou, they
certainly ensured that I had a lot of work. Moscou is a working-class
neighbourhood like a hundred others in Belgium, only this one is
embraced by rail tracks and shunting yards. Like a frame around a
painting, the railway acts as a sort of frame around the
neighbourhood. Moscou, with its network of streets worn down by
residential traffic and delivery vehicles, is quite isolated, although a
viaduct and a pedestrian tunnel have recently made it more
accessible. Thousands of rail passengers get a view of this not very
glorious neighbourhood every day as they pass through it.

Why was I asked to take on this commission?

Well, the museum saw me as a sort of reverse-burglar: not a thief
sent out into the night to steal something unnoticed, but an intruder
who strikes in broad daylight to leave clear marks of his presence.
Here I’m referring to my chalk tracks, that is, my drawings on walls
and houses. I’ve found that residents often don’t object to drawings
on their houses if they are made of chalk, because the material can
easily be removed. The museum turned me loose among the rail
tracks, pedestrian tunnels and streets of Moscou, on the
understanding that I was not to intrude on private property without
the residents’ permission.

The neighbourhood I was given to draw on, so to say, first ignored
me for some time. From the beginning, I was aware that many
people could be against change, but my hope was vested in my
choice of material. Chalk isn’t threatening, it’s innocent. Chalk
drawings don’t change the appearance of a district permanently.
Chalk fades and gets rained on. It barely sticks to anything. If a chalk
drawing sticks anywhere, it’s in the head, in the memory.

I’d thought that some residents might approach me, but for a while
they left me alone. I wasn’t offered so much as a cup of coffee that
any street worker might have been. I carried on making drawings on
low walls that evidently belonged to everyone and no one, using
pieces of white chalk. I wasn’t conspicuous and I worked with my
back turned to the street, because that’s the only physical stance
possible when drawing on walls. I worked as long as no one asked
questions. For example, I made a drawing on the concrete walls that
block a view of your company’s maintenance area from the Jules de
Saint-Genoisstraat. I drew classic Flemish low walls of the kind seen
in paintings of Raveel. When a spring shower faded the chalk on the
concrete, first graders from the local primary school restored the
lines on the wall using coloured chalk. Their colouring of the partially
faded chalk lines happened without my knowledge. A dialectic
between the neighbourhood and me had begun as a surprise.

Kids from the school had decorated their classrooms with pictures of
trees made of cut-out squares, circles and triangles. As I thought of
these geometric constructions as akin to the drawings I was making
in the neighbourhood, I made a tree-sized copy of one of the
collages on the front of a house. This tree became a binding factor
between the neighbourhood and me when the kids started drawing
sharp-topped Christmas trees with decorative balls on the wall
below. Parents came to look at their kids’ efforts. The school made
photos of the drawings and sent them as Christmas cards.

The connection with the neighbourhood began slowly, sluggishly,
but picked up tempo. Sometimes it fell away, and then picked up
steam again. The headlights of the shunting trains drilled through the
layer of morning mist in Moscou. I assumed that as far as the
residents were concerned, the white chalk lines were not much
different from the particles of dust or the soot from locomotives that
settled on their houses.

I don’t know if the residents wondered what the drawings
represented, or what they referred to – they didn’t ask anything. All
the same, instead of excluding me as a stranger, they showed a
measure of generosity. Sometimes I suspected that they allowed me
go about my project out of nonchalance, as if it didn’t matter to them
what the fronts of their houses looked like. As I saw it, the drawings
were like immigrants who fit in and at the same time remained
themselves. They didn’t belong to the neighbourhood but they did
become a part of it. As the drawings folded themselves around the
architecture and the brickwork of the houses, they began to play a
role in the social life of the neighbourhood.

The first resistance I encountered occurred about nine months into
the project. A resident came outside and asked why a drawing had
been made on the front of his house. He was angry, as if I’d drawn
on his face while he was sleeping. ‘Your wife thought it was okay
when I rang the bell yesterday’, I said. ‘My wife is crazy’, he
grumbled. When he realized that the chalk lines weren’t permanent,
however, he invited me to lunch in his home and tried to persuade
me to sell perfume – his sideline. Selling perfume, wouldn’t that be
something for me? ‘You meet so many people during your work, you
could be rich’, he said. In the end I took a box of perfume with me,
because its scent is as fleeting as the chalk I had used on his house.
The front of the house was too small for the drawing I had in mind,
so I went to his neighbours to ask if they would agree to a drawing
on the front of their house as well.

My drawings spread through the neighbourhood, from neighbour to
neighbour, from house to house. If a resident didn’t want to
participate, I skipped that house and moved on to the next one.
Some of the drawings ran along the outsides of houses, disappeared
into family sitting rooms and kitchens, and reappeared to cover other
parts of the street. The drawing expanded in proportion to the
residents’ hospitality.

When I began this letter, I had as much difficulty finding a way to
address myself to you as I had at the start of the project in
addressing the people living in Moscou, whom I did not know.
Whenever I rang a doorbell, I felt both conviction and
embarrassment. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be understood. Afraid,
too, that they’d close the door in my face and leave me standing
there like a kid in the street, with nothing but the sticks of chalk his
hands to hold on to.

In the attics and upstairs rooms of houses I often came across
miniature railway scenes that included houses and rail guards’
homes. They’d been made by former employees of your company;
in this way, they’d continued to shift goods along complex
infrastructures, only in miniature. There was often more space
between the houses and the railway tracks in these miniature scenes
than there was in reality. Outside, as if steered by an invisible hand,
train wagons seem to miss some of the houses by inches. Let’s
zoom in on the Zetternamstraat, the most closed-off part of Moscou.
The ends of the street are crossed by railway tracks, so that it can
look as if the trains are cutting through the back gardens of the
houses. This is no miniature landscape or imitation of some earlier,
smaller reality, although the railway house at number 11 does
suggest something like that. It’s right by the rail track, and the only
free-standing house of the street. A retired rail worker, Louis de
Bock, lives there; he is now almost completely deaf. Your company
built the guard’s house of good material a long time ago. Forty years
ago, when it had served its purpose, it was rented to De Bock.
Sometimes you’ll see him weeding the vegetable garden that
surrounds his house.

When I first visited Louis, I had some of the school Christmas cards
with me. I hadn’t yet become acquainted with him, but the sheets
waving above the rows of lettuces indicated that someone was
home. It appeared that two people lived there; Louis, who is 82-
years old, is cared for by his daughter, Marina. She told me that her
father had worked with railway sleepers. Some of them were still
doing service in his vegetable garden as the poles of clotheslines.

When I handed him a Christmas card, he looked at it like a
conductor examining a ticket. The card with the children’s drawings
pleased him. He showed me photos of his grandchildren, while his
daughter brought us cups of Senseo coffee and biscuits. That
afternoon, Louis agreed to allow me to make a chalk drawing on his
house. And from then on I had a base in the neighbourhood, at the
railway house.

Louis didn’t get about easily, so he didn’t see what I drew on the
back of his house for some time. Then one day he took a stroll and
saw that the drawing covered an entire wall. He told me to stop what
I was doing. He was worried that my drawings would cause
problems with the railway. There’d be questions. He was only a
tenant, after all. ‘The house is no longer on the council register’, he
confided in me. ‘Your lines draw attention, and maybe they will
remind people that the house is still standing. This old house will be
demolished if I’m not here – if I have to go to a hospital one day, or
to the old age home. I won’t live forever. If people start blabbing
about your drawings, the railway will get to hear of it.’ His daughter,
however, signalled to me that I shouldn’t despair. Her father hadn’t
understood that my material, the chalk, wasn’t permanent.

Louis worried about the problem, and came up with a response in
case any difficult questions about the chalk lines were raised. If the
railway company wanted an explanation, his argument would be that
the chalk lines were part of the insulation of the house: markers for
an insulating lacquer that would be applied the following winter.
Feeling more secure now, Louis allowed me to continue my drawing.
He even gave me a set of the house keys, in case he had to go to
hospital unexpectedly.

Louis allowed me an immense deal of freedom. The drawing covered
not only the exterior of the house; it went onto the wallpaper in the
living room and right up into the bedroom on the first floor.

In the summer, Louis sat in front of his house on an upside-down
bucket and admitted that he didn’t like the drawing on his house. It
wasn’t my fault; it was because of the rough brickwork of the house.
If someone from the railway company asked what was going on,
he’d defend me by pointing out the imperfect brickwork. ‘The artist
can’t do anything about that’, he’d insist. It bothered him that the
brickwork hampered the drawing. Still, the drawing had given the
house a new status in the neighbourhood, and that pleased him.

I explored Moscou by drawing on it. As I explained earlier, at first my
back was turned to the people who live there. Now, a year-and-a-
half later, I find it difficult to leave this place that I found so
unattractive to begin with. Many of the drawings I’ve made have
been removed by rain, but the weather has little influence on the
drawings I made on the old railway house. The house front is out of
the wind, so the rain hits elsewhere. The drawing has had time to be
drawn into the poor brickwork. ‘Its good luck is in the relationship
between the position of house, the bricklaying and the drawing. But
above all, in our getting acquainted’, I tell Louis.
———————— ——————

Having commissioned it, the museum has been following the
Moscou project closely. Director Philippe van Cauteren has
expressed interest in including the chalk drawing on the railway
house in the museum’s collection. But how is this possible if the
drawing has been made on the exterior of a house – and, in fact,
runs into the house and onto the wallpaper?

The museum specializes in fragile forms of art; it focuses on
preserving artworks that were originally intended not to last for
eternity. A large proportion of the collection consists of items that are
difficult to preserve, so-called ‘Arte Povera’: made by artists who
express their view of the world with ephemeral materials. Often, this
kind of art functions in public spaces. The chalk drawings on the
railway house are in line with the philosophy and mission of the
museum.

I was shocked when the inhabitants of the railway house told me
that it wasn’t on the council register. Earlier in this letter, I mentioned
the miniature railway scenes that I encountered in attics and
storerooms. Looking at them, I imagined how easy it would be to lift
one of the tiny houses out of the scene to make space for something
else. However, I realize you don’t manage mini-transformers, and
you don’t carry out repairs using super glue; you don’t play with
trains any more than I do with chalk.

I had nearly finished writing this letter when I read in the newspaper
that half of the employees at your company are due to retire within
the next ten years. You suggested that this would be a good
opportunity to make important changes in the company culture. ‘As
a company, we must be open to what is happening in our external
environment. We must learn to listen to the outside world. We must
look to engage many kinds of skills and talents besides those that
have a direct connection with the world of rail.’ The space you open
with this last sentence brings me back to my desk this morning in
the conviction that I have at last found the track that leads to you.

It would be within your powers to grant special status to the railway
house, so as to let it be preserved. This would put a seal on the link
between the temporary and the permanent. I cannot achieve this on
my own, nor can the museum. But if we all work together – that is,
your company, the museum and myself – we can. Together, we can
change the way train passengers see the landscape. The people in
the trains passing by the Moscou neighbourhood would always see
the house with its lines of chalk where Louis sat looking at the world
from his upside-down bucket.

Looking forward to your response,

yours sincerely,

Bart Lodewijks