Daders van Dodingen (Perpetrators of Death) is an epic work on murder in Belgium: ±200 metal frames showing the eyes of male and female Belgian murderers from 1959 (my year of birth) onwards. The title of the work is also that of a scientific study published in 1990 by criminal psychiatrist Jean-Pierre De Waele, with comparative analyses and case studies like those we know from the FBI Behavioural Analysis unit at Quantico, which became famous for its ‘profiling’. To realise his work, I collected the photographs of all murderers ever published in four newspapers (Gazet Van Antwerpen, De Volksgazet, Het Nieuwsblad and Het Laatste Nieuws), which are kept in their entirety on microfilm in the newspaper archives of the Public Library of Antwerp. 

The national TV channel BRT broadcast a documentary by Konrad Maquestieau on the project in September 1996 in the series ‘Ziggurat’: the viewer can follow me during the months-long creation process. These range from my search for the pictures of the murderers in the newspaper archives, filling in my own database with data on the murderers, editing the pictures in Photoshop, printing the edited images and making the metal frames, to installing the ±200 frames in the gallery. I do not talk in the documentary, it does contain an in-depth interview with Professor Jean-Pierre De Waele about his scientific research.

After the end of the expo in Antwerp, I decided to recycle the installation’s rough wooden planks for storage and transport cases for the ±200 metal frames.