Michel François (b. Sint-Truiden, Belgium,1956, lives in Brussels) constantly explores the essence of art. He does so in various media, including photography, video art and installations, and with materials such as plaster, metals, broken plates, water, plastic, brick, cans, pollen, plants, textiles and food – which he sometimes makes himself and sometimes collects like an archaeologist.

By combining, magnifying, zooming in on all these different things, contrasting opposites such as concave and convex, liquid and solid, organic and artificial, and hard and soft, François disrupts expectations and generates new meanings for familiar images and everyday situations.

For the 2004 edition of Lustwarande, he created a mesmerising performance for the French pond, Your paradise is my hell (2004), in which a South American opera singer stood in the pond, with his head above the water lilies, singing angelically into a microphone strung almost invisibly above the pond, while at the edge of the pond a stamping, almost bare African man fulminated against the poetic singing.

For STATIONS, François invited the British artist Douglas Eynon (b. Lewisham, UK, 1989, lives in Brussels) to take part in a collaboration. Fictional and surreal landscapes are a common subject in Eynon’s sculptures, drawings and paintings. In the landscapes, the various elements such as trees are repeated in such a way that a certain degree of alienation develops. François and Eynon have increasingly been exchanging artistic ideas in recent years, and Yawning Stones is their first joint work. It consists of two human-height stones, which stand a short distance from each other. Near the top of each of the two facing surfaces, there is a small but rather deep opening, a ‘yawning’ mouth, slightly larger than a human mouth. One of the two mouths is based on the sculpture The Yawner by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), a bust from his famous series of self-portraits with extreme facial expressions. The opening in the other stone is derived from the pod of an exotic fruit. In this age of isolation, distance and loneliness, you couldn't help seeing the two stones as people who are reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream (1893), shouting out their pain and desire at each other. But you could also see the stones as people taking deep breaths in and out in this almost post-corona time or as an expression of yearning, even of desire and lust.