‘je suis l’espace où je suis’

Lucia Bru (1970, Brussels) likes to receive guests at the studio, she tells me with a smile when I arrive at her door during the dog days of summer. Bru’s studio, her tenth in thirty years, is on the first floor of a former textile factory in Anderlecht, Belgium. Here, says Bru, is where her sculptures are at home. Here are her materials and her oven. Here she ‘resonates’ with the space. Here is also the place where, over the years, she has created her sculptural archive — her brolomie (‘bric-a-bracery’) as she puts it, with a note of self-deprecation. ‘It contains all the beginnings since I started sculpting, the origins, the departures,’ she says. Bru will sometimes return to a form from the archive years after. ‘Sometimes I rework, sometimes I modify, sometimes I rematerialise in other ways.’ For Bru, the archive functions like a lib…