L'homme qui compte ou Ferraris étude

The setting for the film is the The Compte de Ferraris administrative building, where the Ministry for the Flemish Community is located. An actor, dressed in grey suit and tie, seems to mingle with the background. Over several days, he counts everything he points at with a white-painted stick: people and objects, different items in the canteen, countless records. The ‘intervention’ takes place during office hours, which means that his activities cross paths with, and compete with, those of the staff. His calculating results in a film made up of 40 sequences; its full version lasts for several hours. With L’homme…, the artist is actually revisiting a place, but this time with a vengeance. As opposed to 1996, when her work Het Witte Moment (The White Moment) was ‘integrated’ in the Count of Ferraris building – together with the work of some 20 other Flemish artists –Tuerlinckx twists the logic of the artworld upside down: Instead of an artwork being annexed by, and incorporated into, a government building, we see a building being incorporated into an artwork: Ferraris étude. Besides being a work of art, the man counting in the film also challenges – on a poetic level – the building’s very function: that of calculating, administrating, governing. L’homme qui compte (’the man counting’) governs over his own kingdom, and by mapping, pointing and calculating the building’s content, it is the building that becomes the object of his scrutiny.