The timeless strangeness emanating from Antoinette d’Ansembourg’s installations is drawn from the urban landscape, where new construction sites sprout daily, exposing the aerial and underground networks of cables that pulsate with fluidity and electrical currents like living beings. In these forbidden realms, with uncertain temporality, she uncovers the connections between debris and plants that thrive in hostile environments, sensing the shifting nature of beings and things, their potential for transgenic transformation. The artist engages in a “confrontation between human construction and the development of nature,” exploring this dynamic in the very construction of her installations, where ineffable mutations take shape and organisms beyond nature emerge from the improbable combination of the living and discarded elements.

On the plundered and pillaged blue planet by the suicidal expansion of the human race, the igloo serves as a metaphor for a space of survival in the face of climate change and the disastrous failure of the Western socio-economic model. Constructed using refrigerator doors (symbolic safes of overconsumption), its interior is simple yet warm, aiming to be a space of resilience and, above all, resistance – where everyone is invited to come together and dream about building a new world that is more ecological, supportive, and egalitarian.

Benoît, a nomadic artist, travels the paths of artistic expression, carrying with him his 60 years of experience. In his campervan, he shapes poetic installations, giving a second life to abandoned objects and weaving stories of wonder and reflection on our consumerist society. His work embodies his profound commitment to ecology, resilience, and questioning the dominant socio-economic model.

Emma Cogné (1993) is a French designer and artist who lives in Brussels. Her body of work finds its process in the revaluation and transformation of used materials and craft techniques. She sees her practice as an experimental playground to investigate materials, human influences, and the interconnectivity between cultures. By showing our houses’ bare structures and layers, she reveals the unique aspects of matter and color, involving a bond with her everyday built environment. Her work gives rise to textile pieces of furniture and site-specific installations that echo what builds our intimacy needs. Guided by the desire to make, her recent projects as her collaboration with Zerm architecture association focus on the urban and contextual challenges found on the sites where the works unfold. This practice of the field allows her to enable a dialogue between craftsmanship, art, and architecture and is what drives her everyday research. For Specters of the Future,  she will specially design and create a piece that resonates with the context.

4Between desire and rejection, profane and sacred, Leo Luccioni develops a body of work where the material world is disrupted. His art is polysemic and allegorical, encouraging critical thinking, inviting reinvention, and providing surprises. With a counter-poetry that is both popular and existential, he questions the absurdity of mass production and the illusion of a promoted material ecstasy. His installations oscillate between seemingly benign entertainment and a latent seriousness that can resurface at any moment.

Leo Luccioni’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions, including ones in 2020 at Everyday Gallery in Antwerp, in 2021 at NADA New York and Stems Gallery in Brussels, in 2022 at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, and at La Chapelle des Dames Blanches in La Rochelle. Currently, he is preparing two solo exhibitions at Galerie Romero Paprocki in Paris and Stems Gallery in 2024.

He has participated in exhibitions at Garage Rotterdam, Fondation Boghossian, Studio-Orta, New Space, Cassina Project, and various art fairs in Paris, Milan, Miami, Hong Kong, and Dubai. In 2021, he was awarded the Young Belgian Artist Prize for sculpture and installation.

As part of the exhibition “Specters of the Future,” Leo presents “Egregorien Song.” An album consisting of eight original compositions created in collaboration with composer Line Luccioni. The album is presented in the form of eight karaoke videos using the original typography “Égrégorien font,” specially designed by Laurent Muller.

Prosper Legault’s practice resides at the intersection of sculpture and poetry – he himself refers to his installations as “street poems.” Through the assemblage of discarded signs or urban furniture gathered during his wanderings in cities and suburbs, he creates sculptural compositions where lights, signs, and words that punctuate contemporary cities collide, often with a touch of humor, offering them a new status, a new way of being seen. Within these compositions, words frequently adorned with neon clash together, forming phrases akin to cinematic montages. Prosper Legault’s art captures the essence of globalization and its excesses, depicting how capitals digest and blend things and cultures from which they originate.

Brussels-based artist duo from Istanbul, :mentalKLINIK, composed of Yasemin Baydar & Birol Demir began their collaborative practice in 1998 with undisguised dexterity in bringing out the invisible political strategies and the social dynamics through ultra-contemporary devices of an apparent lightness. Like a multifaceted disco ball, :mentalKLINIK shows present an ambidextrous approach to their versatile universe. Their festive universe resists the limitations of a single vocabulary or style. It is playful and hedonistic, glamorous but also surprising, bearing violence that evokes the state of a bad trip after a great party or a creepy new beginning rising from a dead-end.

Their works shift between emotional and robotic attitudes. Artist duo reclaims the sparkling and authoritative visual language of the media and night spheres in a climate of sensory hyperstimulation engendered by multiple neon lights, slogans, light beams, mirror balls and confetti while playing with our unanimous attraction to objects glittering and seductive. It is a work of encryption to which they summon us, between the true and the false, the artificial and the superficial, as if everything was a case of falsification. :mentalKLINIK has an open laboratory approach to process, production, roles, conception and presentation. Their works are a mix of oxymorons and paradoxes, darkly humorous, self-contained range from immersive time-based installations to sculptures and objects that thwart categorization.

Meet our curator: Zoé Van den Boogaerde. Zoé is a Brussels-based exhibition conceptor and creative, specializing in artistic project management, exhibition production, and a holistic creative approach. With a background in painting from La Cambre, she now focuses on curating and producing exhibitions while serving as an artistic director.

She leads the visual arts programming for this second edition of Doel Festival and is responsible for exhibition programming at Espace Triphasé in Brussels.

Her curatorial experience includes organizing exhibitions at the Zaventem Ateliers, featuring artists like Fabien Cappello and Stéphane Barbier Bouvet. Additionally, Zoé was involved in organizing the “Baranzate” event at the Milan Design Week 2022, showcasing the creations of over 20 artists and designers.

Zoé believes in the power of art to bring people together and share unique experiences. She values collaboration, synergy, and connection with reality as essential elements in creating meaningful and inspiring artistic projects.