BRUSSELS.- When Silence Speaks: Heart of a Forgotten Land is a personal exhibition of the Belgian photographer Johanne Verbockhaven.

The Art & Design Atomium Museum welcomes, in Gallery 2, a collection of large format photographs from her ethno-photographic works realised in the Hornstrandir peninsula (north-western of Iceland). Through her photographs, Johanne Verbockhaven (born in 1974) touched on issues about memory and forgetting through the dimensions of silence, absence and trace. This region of the Islandic fjord was deserted by its population after the Second World War. The farmers, attracted by a rising modernity in town, have abandoned their lands and farms. At that time, the construction of the military bases in this pre-arctic area was also one of the trigger elements of this drift from the land.

For Johanne Verbockhaven, photographer and PhD student (Photography & Anthropology), this socio-historical event became an anthropological and artistic fieldwork carried out in the Laboratoire d’Anthopologie Prospective (LAAP) of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL, Belgium).

During the first 15 days of the exhibition, Johanne Verbockhaven, will work in the exhibition areas. It will result from it a multidisciplinary environment (photographs, sounds, videos, …)

In 2015, Johanne Verbockhaven received the Atomium price at the Salon EUROPE REFRECH II (Brussels). This financial support allowed the printing of the photographs today exposed at the ADAM.