For Beelden in Leiden 2025 – Knowledge of the Heart, Alban Karsten created I deserve to believe in myself — a large temporary, semi-functional public sculpture. With this sculpture Alban won the 2025 BiL Audience Award, at the end of the exhibition period.
On Hooglandse Kerkgracht in Leiden, three disproportionately shaped archetypical folding chairs block the passageway; they are clearly too wide for the space available. Underneath the seats, wooden objects have been installed: misericords. Misericords were small hand carved structures attached to the underside of a folding church seat in Gothic churches. When the seat was folded up, misericords acted as a shelf, offering merciful support to monks in a partially standing position during long periods of prayer.
The seats and backrests of the folding chairs are made from heat-pressed panels of waste plastic, designed to resemble precious minerals. The sculpture contains around 210 kilograms of waste plastic, which is no coincidence, as this is the average amount of packaging waste produced by a Dutch person per year. The white, pink, and red plastic has served in a previous life as toys, bottle caps, laundry soap bottles, and stacking crates, and has been fished out of the ocean, among other places.
The folding chairs are frustrating. One chair is too small to sit on, another is inhumanly large, and another refuses to budge. Disproportionately large or small, the folding chairs confront us with how unfairly people take up and share space, almost always at the expense of the non-human world. By distorting scale and exaggerating the mundane, the work highlights the unequal distribution of space in urban planning, architecture, and eco-systems.
Alban adds his own misericords to the underside of the seats. These merciful supports are not only a hidden sculptural element, but also a reference to a form of spiritual grace: when you find the courage to stand up for something you care about, even if staying seated is so much more comfortable.
