How was this work conceived?

One day in 1985, just after my eleventh birthday, my father took me to the new McDonald's near the station in Luxembourg. He was brimming with excitement. “You’ll see, Aline,” he said, smiling, “we're going to a restaurant with no cutlery — you'll eat with your hands!” I spent my teenage years there, fuelled by the same ritual: a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets with sweet and sour sauce, fries and a coke. Sometimes I wonder if it's because of McDonald's that I grew to 180 cm, far taller than my parents or my sister.

What is your favourite window?

My favorite window is the one in my studio that looks out onto the Cathedral of Saint Gudula. I like to think that, like many sacred sites throughout history, it was placed there for the energy flowing through the land — both telluric and cosmic. And perhaps, in some subtle way, we benefit from that presence too. Though a place like McDonald’s may seem worlds apart from a church, they share certain traits: ritual, familiarity, the promise of comfort. But early fast-food spaces often upheld exclusion through design, location, and discretionary service. As Angela Jill Cooley points out in 'Golden Arches and White Spaces', these seemingly neutral environments quietly maintained social hierarchies — embedding them into the everyday act of buying a meal.