Resilience

Tijdsbeeld by Jan Balliauw, translated into bronze by Geert De Smet

What does resilience mean in a time when conflicts no longer seem distant, but once again become part of our daily consciousness? What does it mean to hold one’s ground in a world in which threat is often invisible, yet permanently present?

For this Tijdsbeeld, journalist Jan Balliauw starts from that very question. For more than forty years, he has reported on war, geopolitics, Russia, Eastern Europe and international conflicts. As a correspondent, he witnessed how resilience rarely begins with power alone, but much more often with position and collectivity.

As a point of departure, Jan Balliauw and sculptor Geert De Smet chose a stance derived from JODO, a Japanese martial art in which a practitioner defends himself against a swordsman using nothing more than a staff. No superior weapon. No advantage. Only attentiveness and self-control. The sculptures of Geert De Smet often exist somewhere between presence and absence. His figures never seem entirely finished, as though time, erosion or history itself had helped shape their final form. Many of his works begin in plaster before being cast in bronze using the lost-wax process. His figures are at once fragile and monumental: human bodies that never appear triumphant, but remain vulnerable and searching.

In this Tijdsbeeld too, the figure is not depicted as a victory, but as a stance. A moment suspended between attack and response. Between vulnerability and control. Because resilience is rarely individual, the work is not conceived as a single sculpture. Several castings of the same figure together constitute the work. Not I, but WE. Upon the head appears an abstracted detail referring to a drone. Not as a technological object, but as a sign of an era in which conflict, observation and distance increasingly converge.

‘Resilience’ is an exercise in maintaining one’s position while the world is in motion.