About The Mental Masonry Lab, also referred to as TMML
Founded in 2014 by Mira Sanders and Cédric Noël, The Mental Masonry Lab is an artistic and interdisciplinary platform. From project to project, it brings together artists, designers, writers, scientists, inhabitants and passers-by who pay attention to urban contexts and to what settles there.
The residue is its starting point: what remains outside common use and the visible signs of public space. Each project invents its own repertory of residues. A detail, a remainder or a trace shifts in meaning. Social and territorial tensions appear through forms that are sometimes staged.
This approach runs through projects such as Game of Stones, a collective excavation of fragments from a construction site in Charleroi; Substance Data, a parallel file to museum archiving and its official nomenclature; and TMMRadio, where conversations, voices and books become the materials of a radiophonic exhibition.
Mira Sanders [BE]
°1973 — studied Fine Arts at Sint-Lukas Brussels and is lecturer / researcher at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels/Ghent. Her oeuvre consists of video works, drawings and installations, in which a constant quest emerges for the places, people and stories they contain. Mira Sanders’ current work focuses on how objects, people or events in physical spaces and on the actual terrain ‘inhabit’ place. Her visual language consists of meticulous lines, markings, borders, routes, maps, plans and drawings that describe, read spaces, and outline imaginary journeys in an attempt to surpass the limits of language.
In 2007 she was one of the laureates of the Young Belgian Painting Award. Her work has been shown, among other places, Galerie VidalCuglietta (Brussels), Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris), ARGOS centre for art and media (Brussels), MDAC Rochechouart (Rochechouart), BOZAR (Brussels), deSingel (Antwerp), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Huize Frankendael (Amsterdam) and CEAC (Xiamen).
Cédric Noël [FR]
°1978 — explores the relationship between representation, brain and territory, through meticulous researches and collaborations with scientists, curious amateurs and artists. From field surveys that combine fiction and reality to the point of confusion, he develops works (video, text, installation), both authentic and bizarre, that rely on participation in the activation of the work. His works on paper, while playing with the gap between the reduction of means and the degree zero of the act of drawing, call for the expression of an interiority, through repetition and random encounters.
Art studies at La Villa Arson (Nice) and Laureat of the HISK (Antwerp) in 2005. Exhibitions at BOZAR (Brussels), ERBAN (Nantes), CAC (Vilnius), MUHKA (Antwerp), Museum of Architecture (Tallinn), VAI De Singel (Antwerp), Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem), WIELS (Brussels), Botanique Museum (Brussels), Frac Grand Large — Hauts-de-France (Dunkirk). Prizes AON Prijs Beeldende Kunst 2006, Médiatine 2006, Emile et Stephy Langui de la Jeune Peinture Belge 2007. Research grant FNRS-FRArt 2019.