Boring, three evenings of soil readings

Thursday 04.09.25

1. 18:00 — 23:00 Living ground More info Less info

   How can we consider the ground as a living being? In a series of short interventions on site, filmmaker Fairuz Ghammam, builder Jeff Verschueren and architect Sebastiaan Willemen uncover various aspects of the terrain and its ecosystems by following roots, mycelium and other traces of imported and dreamt landscapes. In our adobe theatre, anthropologist Livia Cahn and architect Rachel Armstrong discuss the violence of drilling and extraction, to then explore the need for ‘soil literacy’ and alternative ways of relating to the living ground. A concert by Nathan Daems concludes the evening, unfolding vessels of sound.

   Fairuz Ghammam – Roots
   In a vertical movement, we’re travelling down from the mezzanine of Cassonade, through the compost and with a slight zigzag, all the way into the future park in Kortrijkstraat, populated with a fig orchard. As the perspective shifts, ‘we’ includes human eyes and ears, but also the minerals in the camera and an earthworm that guides us through an extensive root system.

   Fairuz Ghammam was born in Kortrijk, studied, lived and worked in Schaarbeek for a long time before moving to Vilvoorde. Her audiovisual work is deeply rooted in documentary practices, but lately she’s been curious to appeal more to the imagination and present her work ‘live’.

   Jeff Verschueren – Living between the layers
   After years of pollution from the steel industry, large accumulations of unbound heavy metal ions formed in the soil at the site on Kortrijkstraat. Due to the absence of organic materials in our urban soil, these metals are mobile and can spread unhindered via groundwater flows. Is it possible to use a certain type of mycelium, such as oyster mushrooms, to capture this spreading pollution in a tangible object? Using chromatography and chemical colour analysis, as a self-developed test method, we are investigating the influence of the living organism on the soil. This raises questions about history, slowness, relationships between the human and the non-human, and ultimately about responsibility.

   Jeff Verschueren investigates materials, their properties, and the impact they have on their wider environment, beyond the human or social, but organically in the broadest sense, through building and doing. His practice moves between building, scientific experimentation, storytelling, and establishing relationships. He searches for the presence and role of organisms in a man-made landscape. The city is approached as a layered ecosystem, in which visible and invisible life constantly interact, just as soil does not consist solely of (in)organic particles, but of a living system of inhabitants.

   Sebastiaan Willemen – Moving soil
   While detailed soil maps show the correlation between soil composition and rural geography, urban areas are left blank. Here, the link between soil and landscape seems to be lost. While building our cities, earth is excavated, transported into or imported from other ecosystems, with different conditions and ecological outputs. On top, parks are topped with a standardized enriched earth mix, creating similar conditions in every part of the city, regardless its position in the landscape or its role in the ecosystem. This lecture looks into various soils imported to the Kortrijkstraat and the landscapes from which they originate, in order the shape an idea of the ecosystems they were once part of.

   Sebastiaan Willemen aims to ground his practice of building architect and urban planner on a design-research practice that responds to the phenomenological urban and rural landscape. This results in projects which stem from a sense of responsibility towards the context and deal with the impact of landscape infrastructures and the metabolisms they result from. Ultimately, he aspires a practice, that is grounded in a critical perspective on the nature-culture dichotomy by exploring new perspectives through research, visual work, and landscape architecture projects.

   Livia Cahn – Boring core borings
   The underground is vast, hard, dark, wet, and eventually hot, which makes it difficult for humans to access and yet a lot of human life depends on minerals extracted from it. Drill cores are cylindrical samples from vertical incisions underground that seek to make visible portions of what otherwise remains out of sight and reach. Drilling cores requires heavy techno-electrical machines and big budgets but cores can reach great depths, which is why they are one of geologists’ main tools for grasping underground. The rock samples extracted are small, narrow in diameter and rarely spectacular, and yet they participate in informing huge landscape shaping projects. I propose to think through this jump from samples surfaced from the underground to massively altered landscapes.

   Livia Cahn is based in Brussels, currently doing research for a PhD at the Rachel Carson Centre (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) on the drilling and storing of geological tools for mineral prospection. She is trained in social anthropology, and her focus on the mineral underground builds on a concern for human relations with the environment. Former research projects developed in collaborative contexts focus on urban ecologies.

   Rachel Armstrong – Soil as storyteller: Architectures of living ground
   What if soil is not just the ground beneath our feet, but an active storybook – an earthen skin that is rich with memory, myth, and transformation? This soil reading invites us to rethink our most fundamental relationship: our bond with the earth. Drawing from speculative fictions (Jules Verne’s subterranean journeys, the Golem’s clay body, Dracula’s haunted soil) and emerging scientific ‘living’ technologies teeming with microbes, soil is framed as a collaborator rather than a resource – a vast, intelligent membrane that shapes us as much as we shape it.
   The soil reading will explore urgent questions: How does land ownership privatize not just space, but life itself? Can we shift from extractive geological thinking to regenerative ecological practices, rewilding urban terrains with microbial kinships? What rituals might prepare soils for future generations – especially as we confront off-world settlement’s sterile horizons?
   By examining the soil structure of a site, it becomes possible to weave these threads into a manifesto for soil literacy, where boreholes become time capsules, and buildings grow from organic matter part-digested by fungal roots. Using literal fragments of earth displayed as living archives, these stratified samples, illuminated and magnified, serve as material witnesses to stories of pollution, care, and rebirth reminding us that life begins not with steel, but with humus. To design for soil is to design with time – and to remember that every wall, like every myth, rises from dirt’s slow, sacred alchemy.

   Rachel Armstrong, architect, scientist, and storyteller, envisions soil as the connective tissue of life. With expertise spanning medicine, architecture, and regenerative design, she cultivates buildings from responsive materials that host microbial life and metabolize waste. As a Senior TED Fellow and Professor at KU Leuven, Armstrong pioneers living architecture – structures that nourish rather than occupy the earth. Her work, including the EIC Pathfinder Challenges Microbial Hydroponics project, explores symbiosis between humans and the built environment. Through books like Liquid Life, she invites us to see soil as collaborator, not commodity. Her visionary practice reawakens belonging, biodiversity, and a renewed relationship with life – reminding us to build as if the earth matters.

   Nathan Daems – The environment as a sound vessel
   How can a space hold sound, what’s the sound of a space, and how to build spaces with sound? Matinée invites jazz multi-instrumentalist Nathan Daems to build castles with sound. He presents a solo set with the alto-saxophone as main character.

   Nathan Daems is a Brussels-based musician who is proficient in the nuances of jazz with an open mind, and in studying musical gemstones in this historical age of intense cultural encounter and exchange. While still managing to stay grounded in his Occidental roots he gradually shaped his own recognisable and ever-evolving voice, dialect and vocabulary. Several journeys and tours in the East, in South America and of course in Europe have left their old traces in his contemporary improvisations and compositions.

   Matinée is the Brussels-based slow music concept hopping from one place to another in the city, transforming spaces into cosy, cushion-filled listening environments. They curate DJs, musicians and artists, offering a relaxed, community-driven platform – a light-filled counterbalance to nighttime music culture. Finding a temporary home as summer resident in Decoratelier, they host ‘listening events’ in the growing, blooming structure built by the Summer Birds.

Friday 05.09.25

1. 18:00 — 23:00 Excavating past and future (« Mettre au jour le passé et le futur ») More info Less info

   In a series of short interventions on site, filmmaker Fairuz Ghammam, architect Bernardo Robles Hidalgo and urban researcher khalda el jack dig into the roots of a place and the challenges posed by historical pollution and displacement. In our adobe theatre, geo-archaeologist Yannick Devos and visual artist Rossella Biscotti follow the activities of archaeologists who read the ground as if it were a book, excavating both past and future forms of living and dwelling. A world of clay is brought to resonate in Maika Garnica’s concert.

   Fairuz Ghammam – Roots
   In a vertical movement, we’re travelling down from the mezzanine of Cassonade, through the compost and with a slight zigzag, all the way into the future park in Kortrijkstraat, populated with a fig orchard. As the perspective shifts, ‘we’ includes human eyes and ears, but also the minerals in the camera and an earthworm that guides us through an extensive root system.

   Fairuz Ghammam was born in Kortrijk, studied, lived and worked in Schaarbeek for a long time before moving to Vilvoorde. Her audiovisual work is deeply rooted in documentary practices, but lately she’s been curious to appeal more to the imagination and present her work ‘live’.

   Bernardo Robles Hidalgo – Soil and membranes in public space construction
   Polluted post-industrial grounds present both a financial challenge and a serious public health concern when constructing public spaces in urban environments. In this context, how can public safety be ensured? And how are these polluted contexts shaping urban transformation? Through the case studies of Decoratelier and the nearby Parc Ouest, I examine these questions, exploring strategies for remediation and design in complex urban environments.

   Bernardo Robles Hidalgo is an architect, painter and illustrator with an interest in revitalizing urban spaces. Currently he leads projects at La Rue and Toestand, focussing on creating dynamic, inclusive and accessible public environments. He is a member of two collectives: MAMA, which develops a critical perspective on the built environment through the lens of maintenance, and BOSCH, a co-housing and shared domestic/community space in Brussels’ Marolles neighbourhood.

   khalda el jack – When the soft hardens: Soil readings from elsewhere
   Between earth transported, shoveled and filled in degradable sacks, exist stories from a repurposed factory in Molenbeek and the riverbanks of the White Nile. Through video and sound projections from an elsewhere in Sudan on a similar surface in Molenbeek, this intervention transports us through layers of violence, displacement and construction of landscape and bodies that soften as the Nile rises and harden as it recedes.

   khalda el jack is an urban researcher who works on the movement of land(scapes), people and violence, and how their intersections breed ecologies of spatial knowledge and practices in contested geographies.

   Yannick Devos – Reading the soil: Revealing hidden stories
   The soil beneath our feet is often only noticed during road works or when buildings are demolished. On these occasions, we can observe in the trenches how diverse soils are and what a wide range of colours they can display. Carefully reading these soils can provide us a unique insight into how the soil was formed, which natural processes and human activities played a role in this, and ultimately allows us to reconstruct the biography of a location. On a larger scale, soils can also inform us on how the larger landscape modified over time. When no large trenches can be made, augering – the drilling of a small hole in the ground – offers an alternative. On a small scale, details about the build-up of the soil can be observed. During this presentation, we will go one step further and take on the challenge of reflecting on what a borehole taken at the location of this symposium in 200 years' time might look like, and what stories it may reveal to future generations.

   Yannick Devos is a research professor at the Archaeology, Environment and Geo-Chemistry (AMGC) research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research focuses on urban geoarchaeology, the study of urban soils and sediments. Research topics include the Holocene evolution of the Senne Valley in Brussels, the study of urban Dark Earth, (pre)urban agriculture and horticulture practices, the evolution of urban spatial organisation with an emphasis on “open space” and ancient pollution. Other research themes he worked on include the study of ancient terraces in the Mediterranean, the use of fire in ancient societies and issues of site taphonomy and preservation. Since 2006 he is scientific coordinator of the palaeo- and archaeoenvironmental team in the Brussels-Capital Region.

   Rossella Biscotti – The City
   Revisiting extracts from the video work The City (2018), I will develop a speculative reflection on excavations and the interpretation of ancient stratified soil. The City explores how the past is narrated, interpreted, and shaped by the present. Set in Çatalhöyük – a Neolithic site in Konya, Turkey – the work engages with a place often described as one of the earliest urban environments. Founded around 9,000 years ago, Çatalhöyük consists of 18 distinct layers of built civilisation, each marking a phase of human settlement. The work investigates the ideological and methodological dimensions of archaeology, revealing how excavation practices reflect contemporary systems of power, hierarchy, and interpretation. Excavation becomes a metaphor for how societies are constructed – materially and ideologically.

   Rossella Biscotti is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, performance, sound and filmmaking. Stemming from extended research processes, personal encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations and subtle interrogations of sites and histories, her work engages with spatial installations and material experimentation, linking themes of memory, identity, and social structures. In recent years, Biscotti has focused on the relationships between body, state, and environment – developing works on circular economies, and the redistribution of matter and value across human and more-than-human realms. She is interested in creating new alchemical imaginaries that connect institutional critique with ecological and speculative methodologies. Biscotti has participated in major exhibitions internationally, including the Sharjah Art Biennial 16, UAE (2025) and the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, SA (2024). Her most recent solo exhibition as held at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in 2024.

   Maika Garnica – How the static is dynamic
   How to unlock the story of an object, what happens when bodies co-resonate, and how to sculpt a sound in clay? Maika Garnica makes ceramic sound objects whose spiked and scaled clay forms embody the potential for performance. The Wire said that her creations “suggest a parallel world, presented like a showcase of archaeological findings.”

   Maika Garnica makes ceramic sound objects. Through various contextual variations the nature of her work shifts spontaneously from sculptures, utilitarian objects to sound installations. The artist makes their undulations reverberate through touch, using air, fluids and granular material. Garnica thinks in resonance; mentally visualising waves travelling, bouncing around the chamber of her sound vessels.

   Matinée is the Brussels-based slow music concept hopping from one place to another in the city, transforming spaces into cosy, cushion-filled listening environments. They curate DJs, musicians and artists, offering a relaxed, community-driven platform – a light-filled counterbalance to nighttime music culture. Finding a temporary home as summer resident in Decoratelier, they host ‘listening events’ in the growing, blooming structure built by the Summer Birds.

Saturday 06.09.25

1. 18:00 — 23:00 Narrating more-than-human worlds (« Raconter des mondes plus qu’humains ») More info Less info

   How do we narrate and make sense of underground worlds? Do we need consent or rituals to descend into the holes of earth? In a series of short interventions, architects and urban researchers khalda el jack, Bernardo Robles Hidalgo, Jeff Verschueren and Sebastiaan Willemen uncover various aspects of the Decoratelier site, relating to pollution and remediation, displacement and resilience of ecosystems. By listening to the soil, Marie Brumagne David and Bram Van Cauwenberghe evoke a ‘sonic diplomacy’ with more-than-human worlds. In our adobe theatre, Aga Batkiewicz and Stefanie Wenner seek guidance from rubble and minerals, diamonds and stars to experiment with storytelling ancient and contemporary that seeks to narrate our entanglements with history and with the earth. Afterwards, Inne Eysermans invites us to prick up our ears and listen critically to songs carried by the soil.

   Jeff Verschueren – Living between the layers
   After years of pollution from the steel industry, large accumulations of unbound heavy metal ions formed in the soil at the site on Kortrijkstraat. Due to the absence of organic materials in our urban soil, these metals are mobile and can spread unhindered via groundwater flows. Is it possible to use a certain type of mycelium, such as oyster mushrooms, to capture this spreading pollution in a tangible object? Using chromatography and chemical colour analysis, as a self-developed test method, we are investigating the influence of the living organism on the soil. This raises questions about history, slowness, relationships between the human and the non-human, and ultimately about responsibility.

   Jeff Verschueren investigates materials, their properties, and the impact they have on their wider environment, beyond the human or social, but organically in the broadest sense, through building and doing. His practice moves between building, scientific experimentation, storytelling, and establishing relationships. He searches for the presence and role of organisms in a man-made landscape. The city is approached as a layered ecosystem, in which visible and invisible life constantly interact, just as soil does not consist solely of (in)organic particles, but of a living system of inhabitants.

   Bernardo Robles Hidalgo – Soil and membranes in public space construction
   Polluted post-industrial grounds present both a financial challenge and a serious public health concern when constructing public spaces in urban environments. In this context, how can public safety be ensured? And how are these polluted contexts shaping urban transformation? Through the case studies of Decoratelier and the nearby Parc Ouest, I examine these questions, exploring strategies for remediation and design in complex urban environments.

   Bernardo Robles Hidalgo is an architect, painter and illustrator with an interest in revitalizing urban spaces. Currently he leads projects at La Rue and Toestand, focussing on creating dynamic, inclusive and accessible public environments. He is a member of two collectives: MAMA, which develops a critical perspective on the built environment through the lens of maintenance, and BOSCH, a co-housing and shared domestic/community space in Brussels’ Marolles neighbourhood.

   khalda el jack – When the soft hardens: Soil readings from elsewhere
   Between earth transported, shoveled and filled in degradable sacks, exist stories from a repurposed factory in Molenbeek and the riverbanks of the White Nile. Through video and sound projections from an elsewhere in Sudan on a similar surface in Molenbeek, this intervention transports us through layers of violence, displacement and construction of landscape and bodies that soften as the Nile rises and harden as it recedes.

   khalda el jack is an urban researcher who works on the movement of land(scapes), people and violence, and how their intersections breed ecologies of spatial knowledge and practices in contested geographies.

   Sebastiaan Willemen – Moving soil
   While detailed soil maps show the correlation between soil composition and rural geography, urban areas are left blank. Here, the link between soil and landscape seems to be lost. While building our cities, earth is excavated, transported into or imported from other ecosystems, with different conditions and ecological outputs. On top, parks are topped with a standardized enriched earth mix, creating similar conditions in every part of the city, regardless its position in the landscape or its role in the ecosystem. This lecture looks into various soils imported to the Kortrijkstraat and the landscapes from which they originate, in order the shape an idea of the ecosystems they were once part of.

   Sebastiaan Willemen aims to ground his practice of building architect and urban planner on a design-research practice that responds to the phenomenological urban and rural landscape. This results in projects which stem from a sense of responsibility towards the context and deal with the impact of landscape infrastructures and the metabolisms they result from. Ultimately, he aspires a practice, that is grounded in a critical perspective on the nature-culture dichotomy by exploring new perspectives through research, visual work, and landscape architecture projects.

   Marie Brumagne David & Bram Van Cauwenberghe – Sonic diplomacy
   Sonic Diplomacy, a project situated at the intersection of science, art and ecology, explores soil life – the thin upper layer of our biosphere and matrix of terrestrial life. Soil is a space whose functioning, entirely relational, intrinsically contradicts any extractivist logic of separation and division. We develop listening devices that enable sonic mediation between more-than-humans and humans sharing the same territory. This work is part of a broader reflection on what certain philosophers call “interspecies diplomacy”. It involves rethinking relationships between species by establishing a sensitive dialogue, founded on deep listening and care. Through sound, listening and creation, we explore the multiple relationships that configure these territories.

   Aga Batkiewicz – Gruz i Gruda: On rubble, soil and the politics of ground
   Beneath our cities lies not only earth, but a restless composition of remains. Unlike natural soils, urban ground is assembled – layered with debris, compacted histories, and displaced materials. In Polish, two words evoke this unstable terrain: gruz (rubble) and gruda (clod). Though etymologically unrelated, they share a symbolic resonance – both are heavy, raw, earthy. Gruda evokes origin, fertility, and belonging. Gruz, in contrast, speaks of collapse, ending, and violence.
   This contribution explores how rubble (gruz) has shaped urban ground and memory in two different, yet strangely connected contexts: Warsaw and Brussels. Both cities underwent massive post-war transformation through destruction. In Warsaw, the process was abrupt and violent – the war reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble. In Brussels, transformation was driven by ideology and planning: mid-century modernisation brought demolition, clearance, and reconfiguration. Two openings in the ground – one in Warsaw’s Muranów, the other in Molenbeek – reveal an underground archive that speaks of displacement, survival, and the politics of rebuilding. In both places, rubble became the physical trace of socio-political change: in Warsaw, the trauma of war and the urgency of rebuilding; in Brussels, the social costs of progress and economic shift.
   Can we understand gruz as more than debris? Can we see it as material evidence of transition – a medium through which buried narratives can surface? By examining it closely – as both substance and metaphor – we begin to uncover the layered ideologies embedded in the ground itself.

   Aga Batkiewicz is a Polish architect based in Ghent. Since graduating from the Technical University of Delft, she has worked on projects at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and storytelling, often in collaboration with an international network of like-minded makers. Recurring themes in her work include the interfaces between the man-made and the natural, the relationship between architecture and graphic representation, and an attentiveness to often overlooked users of space. She approaches the built environment not only as a physical structure, but as a medium that carries stories, histories, and shifting relationships. Batkiewicz currently collaborates with NU Architectuuratelier and teaches at KU Leuven (Sint-Lucas) and the University of Hasselt.

   Stefanie Wenner – Holy holes: Shining bright like diamonds
   There is a desire to descend. To go below the surface of the earth. De-sire comes from the stars; shining bright are the diamonds of earth below, made of the same stuff as the stars above, there is no difference. Going underground might be done with the wish to meet wholeness, diving into a night of full awareness, untethered by rushes of daylight. To go below needs to be done with protection though. In ancient times you needed a psychopomp to guide you below, a trickster between day and night; sacrifices needed to be offered and Gaia asked to invite you in. Boring and digging into the ground to hunt for treasures of earth is an entirely different endeavour.
   This lecture invites you to entrances into various underworlds. We will visit imagery of prehistoric caves and venues of dream incubation in ancient Greece, which could be visited searching for healing or with a wish for initiation. With the slow decay of Pythias’ power to predict futures with the smoke coming from the deeper grounds of the world, theatres began to be built as bunkers for the human. From then on the human gaze was merely directed to the human body, all the other bodies of earth became a resource and scenery of human behaviour. The rise of extractivism was enabled with a little help of theatres becoming a showroom of just the human affairs. That was long ago and is still valid today. How can we leave the boring blindfolded focus on human affairs behind and shine a sparkling light on our entanglements with the stars, the rivers, plants and the holy holes of earth?

   Stefanie Wenner is a mother of three, a companion to a dog and holds a PhD in philosophy (Vertikaler Horizont. Zur Transparenz des Offensichtlichen, Berlin 2004). She is an artist and astrologer, Prof. of Applied Theatre Studies at HfBK Dresden. Her new book The World is Not a Stage: Wandering with planets is due to be published in 2026. She worked as a curator, dramaturg and performer and established the label apparatus Berlin with Thorsten Eibeler. Currently she is working on a series of painted portraits of stars and planets as well as a next book with the title Dead Stars.

   Inne Eysermans – (Critical) listening
   How to listen (critically) to the soil we walk on, and what’s our relation to the history it carries? Invited by Matinée, Inne Eysermans concludes the symposium by sharing her current practice that approaches the ‘milieu’ of (pop) song – including the social and ecological networks of processes, resources and infrastructures – as integral to listening, songwriting, and song itself.

   Inne Eysermans is a musician who founded the band Amatorski in 2007. Her practice explores hearing - shaped in part by her partial deafness - along with (critical) listening, songwriting, and storytelling through field recording, interactive applications, and scripting as scoring, which she also enjoys exploring in educational contexts. She has created sound and music for film, theater, radio, and installation, collaborating with artists across disciplines and performing as Velma Spell with Liew Niyomkarn. (link)

   Matinée is the Brussels-based slow music concept hopping from one place to another in the city, transforming spaces into cosy, cushion-filled listening environments. They curate DJs, musicians and artists, offering a relaxed, community-driven platform – a light-filled counterbalance to nighttime music culture. Finding a temporary home as summer resident in Decoratelier, they host ‘listening events’ in the growing, blooming structure built by the Summer Birds.