"Memento XXI (Farewell, Blue)" belongs to a body of work which is created directly at newspaper manufacturing sites in Belgium, utilizing the printing materials and techniques of the newspaper. The most recent works in this series take the ubiquitous image of the crowd as their subject, sourced from newspapers around the world. The crowd has become a marker for large-scale news events: mass crisis and tragedy, rising activism, and shifts in the socio-political landscape. Initially intrigued by the aesthetics of grief and the portrayal of collective catastrophe, Van der Auwera turns our attention to the witnesses of these stories, who, through their abject stares, never articulate the nature of their concern. As the crowd gazes out at the horizon, the reader isn’t privy to the the scene they are looking upon. Like the pictured crowd, we look towards something that isn’t actually there.

From a distance, this work resembles a color field painting or a monochrome print. Upon closer inspection, a subtle play of light subverts the viewer’s expectations, as high resolution details of an invited public attending the farewell speech of US President Barack Obama are revealed. The image itself is spread across six of the original newspaper offset plates, and is burned into them, or 'painted' with light. What the viewer sees at any given time depends on their position and the angles at which light refracts off its surface. At different times and from different angles, details are revealed or hidden, allowing the viewer to read a single static image as if it were always changing. To this extent, the work speaks very literally to how we interact with media and the necessity of viewing an image or a narrative from multiple angles. It embraces that the act of viewing is a proactive responsibility, as opposed to a passive act of consumption.