Category: practice

• L’Agence Saint-Gilloise [Brussels, 2022]

  L’Agence Saint-Gilloise was a project developed by Laboratorio Popolare (Priscilla Suarez Bock and myself) in response to the Open Call for a participatory project in public space (Kunst in co-creatie) launched by Pianofabriek in 2022, and which encouraged applicants to address the ‘growing polarisation’ in Saint-Gilles (Belgium).

  

  

  

  As a way of understanding the complexity of the multiple narratives co-existing in the municipality, Popolare set up an ‘agency for community intra-tourism’, a speculative institution aimed at uncovering and visibilising initiatives, projects and tales of Saint-Gilles that challenged the ‘dual perspective’ of polarisation. To this end, they (1) met with different actors that allowed them to collect and map the stories; (2) published the Gazette Saint-Gilloise, a wall-journal aimed at visibilising various initiatives from the municipality; (3) hosted two co-creation sessions with various relevant actors, wherein they defined and designed together a narrative route; and (4) organised a narrative and collective walking tour entitled Flux Saint-Gilloise.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  2025.10.01

• Walking the word of design in Genk [Genk, March 2021]

  The 19th of March of 2021 I made a performative walk around Genk, through which I shared the central elements of my doctoral research while grounding them in concrete places of Genk. The walk represented a part of the artistic component of my doctoral defence, which took place one month later, the 19th of April.

  Here a video reporting on the walk:

  2021.03.20

• Funghi Lab [Genk, 2016]

  How can the circular economy be put into practice in a local context, starting from the existing local skills?

  Funghi Lab was an exploratory process of designing, prototyping and testing a system to produce, distribute and market mushrooms from waste (resources) in Genk. In several cities have the potential of growing food based on organic waste material has already been explored. Some of these possibilities were concretely experimented with and tested in Genk. During this experiment, existing tools and techniques were used and brought together in a new system adapted to the context of Genk, facilitated in a series of labs with local partners.

  During MANUFACTUUR 3.0, together with Ben Hagenaars and Fungimama, we designed a system to grow and market mushrooms in three phases and in collaboration with local actors: (1) the collection of fresh coffee grounds that are abundant in the neighbourhood of Winterslag, (2) the production and (3) the distribution of the mushrooms. The main ambition of Funghi Lab was to support local actors in designing and testing different processes of producing, distributing and marketing mushrooms based on their skills. At MANUFACTUUR 3.0, all the Fughi Lab experiments were made open source, which means that the results were shared within the community to develop them further.

  Modular bicycles by N55.

  2017.12.04

• TRADERS Open School [Hasselt, 2017]

  The TRADERS Open School was a 10-day academy that brought together art and design thinkers, practitioners and various publics to critically engage in urban processes and discourses through the lenses of agency, participation and public space. The event was premised on the notion that ‘things can be otherwise’, it acted as a challenge to rethink and conceptualise potential urban futures by way of art and design. To do this, the Open School was structured as an academy, a place for learning. Accepting that knowledge is not only held in the head but being actively constructed in situ and practice, we saw the academy as moving from a celebration of genius to a focus on the creation of what Brian Eno termed ‘scenius’, the intelligence that comes from a collective ecology of thinkers. The structure of the 10 days intertwined practice and theory, established thinkers and students, emergent practices and traditional methods, in what we considered an experiential and cognitive generative dance. This dance was a key metaphor for the academy’s organisation, which created an environment and structure for ideas and practices to come together in dialogue without an overly curated programme, instead ‘thinking on our feet’.

  *TRADERS OS was organized and co-curated together with Michael Kaethler and Anne van Oppen.

  2017.06.01

• Minga! in three acts [Hasselt, 2017]

  The minga was organized in ‘three acts’: a first one to brainstorm and draft ideas on the space and elements that ought to be built (as well as clean-up and organize the space to be built upon); a second one, of two days, for actually building the space; and a third one to collectively cook and share a meal.

  A minga is a Latin American indigenous tradition of collectively working for a common good. In the context of the TRADERS Open School and in collaboration with studio Socialmatter, I decided to organize a minga to collectively design and build the front terrace of the restaurant Tajine, in Hasselt, as a semi-public space to be used by all in the city and a contribution to the improvement of the run-down station-area neighborhood of the city. 

  

  For the first and second acts we collaborated with youngsters from Halte 24, a local youth house and for the third with local artist and amateur cook Shun-Ying Lu, who led an activity for cooking dumplings.

  Act 1: organizing and brainstorming / April 5

  Act 2: collective building  / April 22-23

  Act 3: cooking  / April 30

  2017.05.02

• The Politics of Queuing and the Architecture of the Queue [The Hague, 2016]

  The Politics of Queuing and the Architecture of the Queue deals with the spatial, mental, political, economic and social implications of the queue, its taxonomies, preconditions, procedures and the parameters of interdependence between its actors, and it will manifest in a digital research database and in physical interactions with queues.

  Protocol #1 – Todays Art (The Hague, Sept 2016)

  People line up in railway stations, shops, border controls, museums. Queues are an increasingly dominant spatial phenomenon that presents us with a powerful metaphor for the ambivalence of the Western notion of public space as we encounter it today.

  The queue as such is used as a managerial tool to control individual bodies, spaces and publics, but at the same time, it represents equality. While queuing, social differentiation appears rather arbitrary. Queues bear the spatial and mental condition of being nor inside nor outside: while queuing you are nowhere, in between, on a threshold, in constant flux. We experiment with collective dynamics and movements to raise questions about the democratic qualities of public space and the agency of the ‘public’. Through a series of four public interventions, each deploying a set of rules, layouts, and instruments, through this project we explore both the spatiality of queuing systems and the experience of queuing itself.

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  * The Politics of Queuing and the Architecture of the Queue is a common undertaking of Pablo Calderón Salazar, Rebekka Kiesewetter [Depot Basel], La Jetée, Marginal and Parasite 2.0. We are interested in the spatial, mental, political, economic and social implications of the queue, its taxonomies, preconditions, procedures and the parameters of interdependence between its ‘actors’. The project will manifest in a digital research data base and in physical interactions with queues.

  2016.10.31