Wim Cuyvers
Dug-Outs – Primitieve Hut
2025
As part of the inaugural edition of RHIZOMA – Our Future Is To Live With Bruises, Wim Cuyvers installed a temporary wooden construction on a triangular plot of land located between an expansion district and some wooded strips, some hundred meters from MASEREEL.
The work, called Dug-Outs – Primitieve Hut [Dugouts – Primitive Hut], is constructed from beams and planks that were cut from the trunks of a few pine trees (pinus sylvestris and pinus nigra subsp. laricio) using a mobile sawmill. These trees were recently uprooted on the MASEREEL site as part of sustainable forest management. Slates recovered from the recently demolished artist residences were used for the roof covering.
Dugouts are temporary or permanent shelters for both people and animals. Generally, a hole is dug and a simple, low roof construction is built over it. Dugouts are also the low shelters next to sports fields where substitutes wait to come on. The history of architecture includes a long series of ‘primitive huts’ (Vitruvius, Laugier, Viollet-le-Duc, Rykwert, etc.). In contrast to these historical examples, Dug-Outs – Primitieve Hut does not aim to shelter, but to expose and exhibit.
Dug-Outs – Primitieve Hut consists of two rows of six benches, each two metres long. The benches are separated from each other by lateral partitions and a wall at the back. A sloping roof covers the benches. The spatial perception and the way of looking at one side are completely different from the other side. The structure provides twelve different frames of people waiting.
‘When we wait, we are not productive, we can think. We can only think outside. Thinking put on display.’
The construction is made of undried, unplaned, non-tropical wood: the opposite of the industrial urban furniture we see everywhere in the public space today. The warping and weathering of the wood are an essential part of the work.
After RHIZOMA 2025, Dug-Outs – Primitieve Hut will remain part of the streetscape for some time to come. All the while, it will always be accessible to the public.