Commissioned by Operating Collective, we developed a spatial design concept for the Kolveniershof. The brief was to create a temporary scenography for this historic site beside the Rubenshuis (Antwerp) transforming and reactivating the building as an event space. To ground our proposal, Andampersand and Jonas Van Put immersed themselves in the history and context of painter, artist, and world citizen Pieter Paul Rubens.

In seventeenth-century Antwerp, power, religion, and art formed a triad. Within this constellation, Rubens developed an atelier practice in which image-making functioned both as ideology and as a visual representation of authority. Mythology, theology, and dynastic legitimacy merged in oil on canvas. Today, however, that shared symbolic framework has largely disappeared. This raises a question: what does it mean now to create a work, or in our case, a spatial design, that ‘refers’ to Rubens? Should we quote him in a language no longer spoken, or reproduce a baroque composition that has lost its context? To extract Rubens from his time and place him in ours would do injustice to both worlds.

We therefore sought another starting point. What remains when court, church, and guild fall away from Rubens’ frame of reference? In his later work, created in Elewijt, beyond the reach of altar and throne, an alternative emerges: the landscape. Small-scale works, direct and unmediated, guided not by representation but by observation. These paintings reveal another sensitivity: a Rubens recalibrated through silence and attention. Perhaps this is the most relevant gateway to engaging with his legacy today.