Juan Pablo PLAZAS - Wat Later (A Little Later) (2021)

The artist came up with the idea of creating Wat Later (A Little Later) on his first visit to the VUB campus. He was fascinated with the design of the site, which boasts both private, intimate spots and open, public spaces, created through the well-thought-out positioning of footpaths and plants. It’s a fine example of an English-style landscape design, which aims to craft an environment that looks natural while concealing all human intervention. 

On campus there are several fake hills, but the artist noticed that no fake rocks were used to create the landscape.

He made it his goal to provide the university campus with its first fake rock. The project grew into a thought experiment about the past and future of landscaping. 

For the design of the rock that forms part of the sculpture Wat Later (A Little Later), Plazas sought inspiration in the illustrations he saw in a Jommeke comic book. In this visual story, Flipke’s parrot got lost in a trap shaped like a rock formation. The artist was mostly fascinated with the first sentence in the comic strip: Wat Later (A Little Later), which became the title of his open-air sculpture, a cartoonish scene that claims to offer a glimpse of the near future.