Belgium

Clément Huylenbroeck

www.clementhuylenbroeck.com

Biography

Clément Huylenbroeck was born in 1988 in Belgium.
In 2010, he graduated from the image art school Le 75. He is currently based in Brussels, Belgium.

Between 2010 and 2012 he worked on the project Taxonomy. The project was presented in 2010 at the PhotoPhnomPenh festival and in 2012 at the Chambre Avec Vue festival. Taxonomy will be published in the book Mémoire Universelle at the end of 2014.

Since 2012, he has been working on the project Big Shit (financed by the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles) in collaboration with the photographer Pierre Liebaert.
The project has been presented at the Antwerp FOMU, at the Copenhagen Photofestival, at Amsterdam’s BrakkeGrond, at the Nuits Photographiques de Paris and at Arles festival. The project will very soon be the object of an indecent book (Alt editions).

In 2012, his sister won the Miss Soignies Haute-Senne title. Out of this fortunate event arose the Communal Dream work, a sour vision of beauty pageants, or at least of their worst replicates. The project has been selected for Circulation(s) festival 2015 in Paris.

Portfolio

Communal Dream

The Misses live the affordable dream. With their feverish performances and tartar-free smiles, they can almost grasp it.

Facing a crowd of excited eyes, they bend their bodies at the behest of an improvised choreagrapher. They surrender their hair, their flesh, their nails and their naivety to a cheap champagne soaked audience poorly dressed up in its Sunday best.

The attempt is beautiful; in the time of a pale performance inspired by the National Misses parade, they fantasize, imagine themselves the flagship of elegance.
Carried away by this vision that they curve themselves yet a bit more and make pants swell.

At the end of the night, the communal dream turns into a heartbreak, a hurtful disenchantment; the bulging eyes turn away, the mouths hereafter drool for another.

Portfolio

Big Shit (In collaboration with the photographer Pierre Liebaert)

Highways exist neither in time nor in space. they are in between.

They link things that matter and the real stakes of our lives; they are nothing, if not a means where humanity is put into parenthesis, where bodies fly at superhuman speeds, where encounters between individuals are formal and without seduction.

On this axis, we come across one-another, we catch one-another and we overtake one-another without politeness, lured by the gain of time, the one that counts.
Only primary life remains; we please our organisms like our vehicles, thanks to welcoming structures offering toilets, french fries and plastic hotels.

Highways are these marginal segments, which, freed from our usual societal constraints, enable anonymity, simple life, and sometimes a bit of bestial sex in the woods.