Billboard Series #33:
Joselito Verschaeve
As Long As The Sun Lasts
November 2024 – March 2025
This billboard is the result of our recent open call. Recognising the interest from local artists to showcase their work as part of our Billboard Series, we sought to strengthen its relationship with the artistic community in Ghent by providing an opportunity for artists to apply and share their work. In response, we received over 100 different proposals, reflecting a strong enthusiasm for the project. A jury composed of representatives from artlead, 019, Curatorial Studies, and the neighbourhood, faced the challenging task of selecting from many interesting submissions. Ultimately, we chose the work of Joselito Verschaeve to be featured on the billboard.
Joselito Verschaeve (1996, BE) is a Ghent-based artist whose work explores the power of visual storytelling. He pursued a degree in photography at KASK, where he cultivated a unique narrative style and discovered the photobook format as an impactful medium for storytelling. “I really like how the arrangement of images can deepen a narrative”, Verschaeve explains. This method of weaving images into stories became a defining feature of his work, distinguishing it from the traditional format where images often stand alone.
Verschaeve primarily works with black-and-white photography. “Black and white allows me to hide certain features of time, making photographs from different places feel coherent,” he notes. This choice is not merely aesthetic but also functional, helping to create connections between images taken in different locations and moments. By removing colour, Verschaeve blurs the boundaries between places and times, and “suddenly, photos from Athens or photos from Ghent become the same, with the same feeling”. He is particularly inspired by the genre of magical realism and the aesthetic of surrealism. His projects reflect personal fascinations and visions of a dystopian world that resonate with contemporary threats and events, where an ‘extra’ element is woven into the ordinary. Through this lens, he explores history’s cyclical patterns and human intervention, crafting narratives that invite reflection and stimulate the imagination.
A key element of Verschaeve’s practice is his use of vertical images, which evokes a sense of fragmentation and immediacy. Vertical formats highlight isolated moments and limit what the viewer can see. This creates tension and curiosity, as the viewer instinctively desires to see beyond the frame. In his photobooks, this design choice serves a narrative function: the viewer is encouraged to turn the page, suggesting that the story continues, unfolding through the sequence of images that follow.
Sequencing is essential to Verschaeve’s work. He approaches photography like an archivist, taking many photographs to build an extensive collection. From this archive, he selects and arranges images in sequences, creating a flowing narrative similar to writing a poem or a novel. The arrangement of seemingly unrelated images together creates an open-ended dialogue, allowing viewers to interpret the narrative in their own way. This method, based on sequence and repetition, reflects Verschaeve’s understanding of the photobook format as a dynamic storytelling medium.
Such an approach is evident in As Long As The Sun Lasts, the series of images displayed as part of our Billboard Series. “Aesthetically, I like them together,” Verschaeve says of the four photographs. These images were taken at different times and places, depicting distinct subjects—the artist’s eye, a cliff in Iceland, a tower in Athens, and the artist’s hand holding an egg. Although each image is tied to a specific location and context, they become decontextualised when placed together, thus forming a loose narrative that the artist leaves open to interpretation. Two large images are followed by two smaller ones, mimicking the experience of turning pages in a photobook, and sparking curiosity about what comes next. This sense of continuation—of “there is much more to it”—is central to Verschaeve’s work, whether in a photobook or, in this case, on a public billboard.
The combination of these images creates a quiet but powerful sense of dystopia. They depict a world where beauty coexists with hints of uncertainty, making it hard to tell where reality ends and imagination begins. This blend of dystopian themes and poetic imagery blurs the lines between truth and fiction, revealing how beauty and darkness often exist side by side.
Through his lens, Joselito Verschaeve is not just a photographer but also a storyteller and archivist, creating sequences of images that explore the complexities of life and fiction. His work emphasises that photography is more than capturing single moments; it is about creating connections, sparking conversations, and inviting viewers into a shared experience of visual narrative. The essence of his practice remains grounded in the belief that storytelling—through the archive, sequence, and narrative—is at the core of his art.
All images courtesy of the artist
Text: Martina Lattuca
Billboard Series is a long-term art project in public space, for which every three months an artist is invited to create a new, site-specific work for a 50 m2 billboard on Dok Noord, Ghent. Through changing presentations, Billboard Series wants to build a sustainable and productive dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood and urban landscape, reflect on the changes that this neighbourhood is currently undergoing, and introduce a broad audience to different visual languages and ways of looking at the world.
Billboard Series is a project of artlead, together with 019. Billboard Series is curated by Thomas Caron, takes place within a scenography by architect Olivier Goethals, and is being developed with the support of the City of Ghent.
