Vince Donders

When Vince Donders graduated from AKV|St. Joost in ‘S Hertogenbosch in 2017, he ended his art academy career with an installation called “The Zero Hour”. He was inspired by modern-day topics like pollution and climate change but also by the vast structures of our industrial fields. To build this installation he used all kinds of worn materials like wood, steel, pipes, tubes, a broken bike, basically anything he could get his hands on, to create structures that reminded of an oil pump or maybe a petrol-filter. The undefinable structures erected out of a puddle of oil and it seemed that they died in the same resource they were trying to excavate.

About the project

In this installation, Vince Donders pictured a scene from a possible future.  In this future, the earth resources have been depleted and by doing so, the environment has collapsed. He has tried to imagine how such a world would look like. And if possible, how would anyone survive there. This question “How would they do it?” has been the spearhead of my inspiration throughout my artistic career. Every time he build an installation, he discovered a different part of that desolate and filthy world. And thus, a narrative started to unfold. He used this narrative as a guideline to have the freedom to keep on creating and expanding a, possibly, never ending world. As designing his 7^th installation for the Fresh A.I.R. project, he decided that he did not just wanted to build a structure. He has always seen his work to be operated by a person. And even though this lonesome survivor is absent in the work, in his mind he very well exists. What does this person feel, what does he think and what are his views on the destruction mankind brought upon this world? This time his work won’t be just a machine build from scrap, but also the embodiment of this person’s perception.