Build and Destroy – David de Beyter

‘Build and Destroy’ presents David De Beyter’s immersive project from between 2014 and 2020, which focuses on the Big Bangers, a community of stock car enthusiasts who fix up and then demolish vehicles that would otherwise be consigned to the scrap heap. In its combination of artistic and anthropological approaches, the book resonates with the experience of destruction as observed by De Beyter and offers a fragmentary reading of this culture of creation and destruction. Engaging with the pure nihilistic pleasure of the spectacle, it is a visual essay that examines the material as subject as much as it investigates the formal possibilities of the images’ own materiality.