Found

Found is the second part of the trilogy Lost and Found – Caring for What Is (about to disappear). The exhibition is curated by Tine Hens, author of Archief van mogelijk verlies (EPO, 2025), and brings together the stories of larks, glaciers, fireflies and elms from her book with carefully selected items from the library’s collection, alongside the work of contemporary illustrators such as Jan De Kinder and Carll Cneut, and photographer Linde Raedschelders.

The result is a stimulating dialogue between past and present, between science and imagination, between reality and fantasy, between discovery and loss.

Items from the collection housed in the Boekentoren bear witness to a diverse and abundant living world that was once entirely ordinary, but now seems extraordinary. Cookbooks, herbals, atlases, herbaria, and studies of fish, mosses and fungi form an archive of potential loss and a bulwark against collective amnesia.

The exhibition embraces the grief for what has already been lost, invites a sense of wonder, and also gives form to the causes of this loss and to the traces we leave behind – whether we wish to or not.

Through Frans Masereel’s woodcut of the Milky Way from Die Stadt, the visitor enters a world in which Guido Gezelle wrote an ode to the stuffed animals in the museum of the Minor Seminary in Roeselare; where trees stand that died as climate victims of drought, wildfire and salinisation; where sea monsters populate the oceans in Gerard Mercator’s atlas; and where Georges Cuvier, upon discovering the fossilised lower jaw of a mastodon, conceived the idea that species could become extinct.

Special attention is given to the drawings of European plants, butterflies and insects by Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), who was the first to describe the intimate relationship between flowers and their pollinators. As an artistic project and a link between living and paper heritage, her plant world will come into bloom in the courtyard of the Boekentoren after the exhibition closes.

Yet the exploration of the natural world — attested to by travel accounts and beautifully illustrated floras — also went hand in hand with colonisation, plunder and exploitation. Even today, we drill deep into the earth’s layers to fuel and accumulate human wealth. This contrast and tension are reflected upon by visual artists Maarten Vanden Eynde and Lola Daels.

And then there is the question of future heritage, of what will remain and what may seem indestructible. Tentatively and searchingly, the exhibition opens a window onto tomorrow. For the first time, the Masked Gull from the ‘Dead Animals with a Story’ section of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam is shown on loan. Alongside the original article by Leo Baekeland on the development of Bakelite lie ‘plastiglomerates’ — new stones formed by the fusion of plastic and minerals.

As a provisional archive of a possible legacy.