Erris Huigens, Anti-Monuments at FORM, Wageningen / Amsterdam

Anti-Monuments by Erris Huigens, at FORM, Wageningen / Amsterdam, 5–30 January 2026.

“They are not meant to be read, they are meant to be encountered.”

We began in silence. Or rather, we were received by silence, the kind of dense quiet that does not precede speech, but presence. Before images, before gestures, before meaning, there was concrete: bare, self-contained, unyielding. What are we to make of a block that explains nothing, of a gesture that offers no path toward us? Perhaps this is precisely the point, to be thrown into a space that resists deciphering, asking instead to be inhabited in its density. This is Anti-Monuments, and rather than beginning, it continues, without our consent, and without the promise of revelation.

Erris Huigens’s exhibition unfolds as a single-channel video work. No rooms to traverse, no customary objects. This time, no labels to guide us, no surfaces to touch or scrutinize. We move instead through a sequence of sparse, motionless shots: transitional sites, half-built, half-forgotten, where blocks of concrete have been inserted not as additions, but as interruptions. In this video work, viewing itself becomes architecture. The rhythm is slow, controlled, indifferent to narrative expectation. We find ourselves drifting through a geography of friction.

There is something obstinate in the way these forms appear. These concrete parallelepipeds, elemental, heavy, mute, occupy the screen without ornament. They speak only of themselves. And yet, the decision to exist solely through video is crucial, an ephemeral medium entrusted with a material associated with endurance. It is a paradox we register bodily. Concrete is meant to outlast us, here, it wavers, subject to the edit, the fade, the cut.

Huigens does not build monuments, contrary to what the images might initially suggest. Instead, he offers something more fragile, and more exact, presences that acknowledge their own ephemerality. There is no appeal to memory, no commemorative gesture. These works hover at the edge of disappearance. They interrupt, but only briefly. Then they withdraw.

Technically, the film is restrained, composed. Each frame resists dramatization. No emphatic pans, no insistent soundtrack. The eye is left free to study texture, angles, inertia. The materiality of concrete is not aestheticized, it is disclosed, slowly, and then allowed to recede. A subtle choreography of subtraction. Nothing insists. Nothing resolves.

Anti-Monuments, as a video work, does not persist in the image, but instead takes up residence in the imagination. In what eludes us. In the heavy presences that stand out against these silent, luminous Dutch landscapes.

-FW