Josse Pyl
‘We’ll Dig and Dig And We’ll Dig and Dig Well’
30.08.2025 — 04.10.2025
Language is never stable. From the moment a thought takes form, it already begins to erode. Words shift, falter, and fragment; walls crumble, leaving behind the traces of what was once said, believed, or remembered. In We’ll Dig and Dig And We’ll Dig and Dig Well, Josse Pyl transforms the gallery into a landscape where language appears as both ruin and relic: fragile, bodily, and endlessly reshaped.
The exhibition unfolds like a spatial poem. Tongues rest broken along the hallway, no longer contained within the mouth but scattered as muscles without bodies. Nearby, a speaker breathes sound into the space, evoking the tongue’s role in shaping words before they leave us. Further inside, an intercom clicks and grinds as if alive, chewing meaning into fragments of letters and signs. It seems to generate a living archive of failed attempts to speak, or perhaps a code waiting to be unlocked.
A stop-motion film carries viewers deep into the mouth itself: teeth as memory, bone as archive, language preserved and released frame by frame. Here, communication is stripped back to its physical origins, the pressure of teeth, the imprint of sound, the intimacy of the body.
Throughout the exhibition, walls and surfaces act as silent witnesses. They preserve marks both accidental and deliberate: inscriptions eroded into stone and glue clinging like saliva. Pyl treats these imprints as forms of communication, questioning when a trace becomes a word, when a gesture becomes a sign, and when silence itself begins to speak.
Letters, figures, and abstract shapes scatter across the works like fragments of a lost language. They resist easy reading and instead invite the viewer into a kind of phonetic play, a game where meaning slips between tongue and tooth, gesture and ruin. The exhibition becomes both an excavation site and a living mouth, where language is continuously chewed, spat out, and reassembled.
By materializing the fragile threshold between body and speech, Pyl reminds us that language is not only something we inherit but also something we leave behind. Like ruins, our words persist as traces, broken, layered, and open to reinterpretation.
Exhibition view
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Josse Pyl (1991, St-Niklaas, Belgium) explores the production of language and how it substantiates and influences our interpretation of the daily reality and our communication with others. Pyl works in a variety of media, from works on paper to sculptural works, to emphasize the way in which our use of objects and symbols influences how we know and experience the world around us. A grammar of works attentively articulates our relationship with language and how it functions as a cultural artifact that contains (un)pronounced—therefore, sometimes involuted and intuitive—ideas. The drawings and objects can be considered as characters or symbols that re-create a separated linguistic world; one that exists and is permeated with its own internal logic, in which the forms of communication are made tangible and plausible, yet alienated.
Josse Pyl studied at Werkplaats Typografie (NL), before completing his residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (NL). Recent solo exhibitions include shows at: Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL (2024), Ornamenta Biennale 2024, Pforzheim, DE (2024), Typojanchi Biennale 2023, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, KR (2023), Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, NL (2019), and 019, Ghent, BE (2018). Pyl is currently teaching as a mentor at KASK, Ghent, BE.
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Exhibition: 30.08.2025 - 04.10.2025
Opening 30.08.2025 1-6pm
PLUS-ONE Projects
Vlaamsekaai 73
2000 Antwerp (BE)
