Dirk had been contracted by the Museum of Natural History in Brussels to realise a realistic, scientificially accurate sculpture of a beluga, the ‘white whale’ or ‘seacanary’ as early fishermen often called him. The beluga sculpture would feature in the show ‘Fatal Attraction‘, a show about animal communication, seduction and reproduction .

Rather than sculpting the beluga himself, Dirk proposed the museum to produce a real cast made in Greenland on a freshly killed beluga during the hunting season for the Inuit people.
The fact that the Inuit hunted a beluga for their own consumption made the relevance of the sculptural project balance into interesting ‘moral directions’, which I found an extra in the intensity of the project.
Kill to eat and quickly realise a cast when it is killed anyway shift the needs to their right value. From a primary need (food) extracting a tertiary need (culture) or how to speed up the history of human culture...