Douglas Park with Simon Delobel and Oriana Dierinck

Debating chamber: On traps in art history

Debating Chambers serve as the public forum of the Département des Pièges. During discussions in the exhibition space, speakers are encouraged to draw inspiration from the objects, paintings and artworks on display. These conversations aim to loosen rigid systems of classification and expand the limits of contextual information. Four sessions will be held during the exhibition. At each session, two speakers explore a specific theme, followed by an open discussion with the public.

As part of: Département des Pièges
Date: 27.03.2027 16:00 — 18:30
Type: Talk
Location: Room 9
Rates: Free
Tickets: Tickets available soon

Clémentine Deliss, director of the Metabolic Museum-University and creator of the Département des Pièges, will moderate the discussions.

Seating is limited, but recordings of each Debating Chamber will be available to watch online.

Douglas Park is a poet, writer, critic, curator and artist based in Antwerp. Around 2000, his visual arts practice shifted towards text-based storytelling and what he calls 'meta-literature'. He uses words, encyclopedic memory and associative thinking as the main carriers of his art. His writing has been translated into Arabic, Welsh, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Italian, Korean, Danish and Indonesian.

Simon Delobel lives in Antwerp. He works as the director of KIOSK in Ghent and since childhood has collected "problems", comics, art books and works by artists he admires or has worked with – and, more recently, kaleidoscopes.

Oriana Dierinck is a flautist and artistic director who trained at the Brabant and Rotterdam conservatoires. She has performed internationally as a soloist and freelance orchestral musician. In 2009 she founded the ensemble

Z V E Z D O L I K I and in 2024 The Romantics / Belgian Chamber Orchestra. Today, she leads the charity project Noot voor Nood.

About the exhibition

With a wink to Brussels artist Marcel Broodthaers, Clémentine Deliss invites you to enter the Département des Pièges. Here, you will find a selection of unexpected artefacts and paintings from 11 Brussels museums as well as works by contemporary artists. From elaborate fishnets to hunting decoys, psychiatric tests and trompe-l’oeil paintings, each exhibit relates to the concept of the trap. You are invited to study these diverse traps and participate in this "museum-university".