Nucleo

Nucleo – Nucleo is a visual odyssey that retraces the life of Wouter Van de Voorde’s own family, ten years in which the artist photographs intimate moments lived in the Australian bush: from the birth of his son Felix to more recent times captured during a twilight walk on Cooleman Ridge, a nature reserve close to their home. A territory where Wouter and his wife Celia live in autarky. But if in Nucleo, the theme of isolation is at the heart of the project, the place where the Van de Voorde family resides, on the unceded lands of the Ngunawal, is a territory akin to a family member who comforts and nurtures, and arouses a great sense of belonging and strangeness.

Conceived and imagined as a vast territory and laid out horizontally in an order that respects the chronological evolution of the family over the last ten years, once folded the book changes the linearity of the chronology: the reader opens the book on the last image taken by Wouter in September 2023, thus reading backwards in time. This folding allows visual and natural motifs to confront each other, disrupting the temporality of this vast space. Each book has a numbered print, signed by the artist and inserted in the cover.