Jan Fabreartist • printmakerAntwerpen (België) 1958

The Antwerp artistic jack-of-all-trades, theater maker and visual artist Jan Fabre works in a groundbreaking and cross-border way. In that respect, he is considered a worthy successor to Joseph Beuys. Fixed motifs keep recurring in his work. One is his fascination with beetles and insects - Fabre calls himself a relative of the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. 'The Tomb of the Unknown Computer' was an installation that stood for four seasons in 1994. The installation consisted of 250 crosses, 5 rows wide, placed one behind the other as in military cemeteries. On the crossbars the names of insects. The installation refers to the identical fate of humans and insects. The Flemish name of an insect family is carved into each of the crosses, a metaphor for the fate of the common man. In our collective subconscious, the insect is the pariah, the creature unworthy of divine creation, yet the oldest living thing on our planet. They are living proof of our most primitive, aggressive instincts. Fabre chooses the miraculous to show the baseness of our desires and senses.