"The River Thames is why London is here, it’s basically a mercantile story. You can stand on the deck of Roi des Belges and look across to the City of London, it connects with Heart of Darkness, a story about a journey from the Thames into unknown Africa of the 1890s, which is told on a boat on the Thames.
It’s odd that a novella written at the end of the 19th century, somehow ricochets through history and becomes a lens for different generations to look at themselves through.
For me Roi des Belges is about how stories are made and retold, how myths and history collide to form a third truth. It’s a vessel, a setting for other people to be creative in. It starts as a collaboration between architect and artist, and then becomes collaboration between visitor and building, a project that will only be realised fully at the end of 2012 - at heart it’s an experiment."
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