information, lecture, research center, seminar, workshop

OpenField: program

4-8 May 2026 / bodeek, Birminghamstraat 30, 1080 Molenbeek

a gathering - May 4-8 2026

artwork by Chloe Janssens

OpenField is a five-day gathering dedicated to the possible futures and autonomies of artistic research. 

What comes to mind when you hear the words autonomy and future in relation to artistic research?
Can you imagine them, or notice where they already unfolding?
What tools do you have, or need to develop, to practice them and make them sustainable, especially within collective practices?

Through these questions, a.pass invited three artistic collectives, One Field Fallow (BE), Topote de Acahual (MX), and Arquitectura Expandida (CO), to each identify an urgent topic at the end of their research residency. Their responses have become the titles of the first three days of the gathering: Scripts and Protocols for Collective Spaces, Foreshadowing Amid Turbulent Futures, Manifest Everyday Urban Utopias. Three topics to be explored collectively by a multiform constellation of research-based practices.

The fourth day starts off on the right foot: Breakfast for Insatiable Researchers invites you to meet art workers in Brussels who have long supported artistic research, mostly without structural funding. Directly in the spaces where they usually work. Food for thought, for practices, and more! In the afternoon, the gathering documentation group will share traces from previous OpenField moments during a Memory-Making Session, and create space for contributions from everyone.

The fifth day is dedicated to a working session, Collabora(c)tion: Futuring Artistic Research, for organisations, educational institutions, and collectives who want to explore how to join forces and continue (or begin) creating shared spaces, time, and energy for artistic research. 

FIND OUT THE PROGRAM: 

(registration link at the end of the page)

*****

MONDAY MAY 4:  Scripts and Rituals for Collective Spaces – Antwerp

* 10h00-13h30, Monty: Open School by One Field Fallow with Back2SoilBasics

One Field Fallow invites Back2SoilBasics (B2SB) for an open school on scripts & rituals for collectives & spaces, moderated by Kopano Maroga. Together with B2SB and the participants of the open school, they will dive into rituals that make collective work more sustainable, and scripts that make spaces and processes more accessible to those visiting or joining. After having organised five open schools within their a.pass residency on topics such as fallowing, conflict and in- and exclusivity, OFF and everyone interested come together for a sixth open school as a closing of this research period.

One Field Fallow is a queer collective holding space for research and activities that are artistic, community-oriented and/or activist, in the centre of Brussels.

B2SB is a collective nurturing practices of growing and grounding through permaculture and radical rituals. Focus on POC, local communities and minorities people from the Global Majority. 

Kopano Maroga, performance artist, writer and cultural worker

–language: English, informal translation into and from Dutch provided–

* 13h30-14h30, Monty: lunch

* 15h00-16h30, deSingel, kleine zaal: sharing moment focused on the creation and maintenance of spaces for collectivity, with Sophie Sénécaut and Mouss Timiss

Sophie Sénécaut used to work as an actress in various contemporary theater companies, but in recent years, she has undertaken another, deeper path: that of progressive translation. Outside of stage assignments and in spaces that support the expression of a singular voice, she created an artistic research laboratory, Despoormakers, a friendly and temporary artistic research space deliberately positioned outside traditional circuits of artistic production. Together with Mouss Timiss.

–language: French and English, with informal collective translation from French into English and vice versa.– 

* 17h00-18h30, deSingel, kleine zaal: Unlimited Strip Club (USC) workshop

The workshop includes participatory elements and will engage in deconstructive discussions of sex work, gender, performance or entertainment in resonance with the topic of the day. USC asks participants to come with an open and curious mind.

Unlimited Strip Club (USC) is a creative research using practical tools and codes to build “bridges” between eroticism and art driven applications. It is led by AMARI, artist and founder of USC, in collaboration with Kajol Singh and supported by DARKMATTER (Amsterdam). Together, they explore and expand frameworks for how sensuality can be applied in digital spaces, art contexts, performance practices, and community agency.

– language: English – 

** invited participant for the day: [(ooooo) T_CYBERHOL] **

*****

TUESDAY MAY 5: Foreshadowing Amid Turbulent Futures – Brussels

 * 09h30-13h00, bodeek, hosted by a.pass: Mapa session by Topote de Acahual

Mapa is a framework for collective reflection created by Topote de Acahual starting from a few central questions: What is an acahual, how does it rest, and who inhabits it? Most importantly, how can they “bring” the acahual and the jungle from Los Tuxtlas forest to Brussels? To explore these complex relationships, they created an imagined territory to move through with the body, a space where the practices, metaphors, and sensations of the jungle take shape.

At the OpenField the Mapa session invites the audience to reactivate some of these “chronotopes” of the map. Shaded spaces that offer alternatives to deforestation, places to gather, share ideas, and imagine collectively. An opportunity to reflect together and experiment, interactively exploring the relationships between environment, community, and creativity.

Topote de Acahual is a collective project that pedagogically explores the multiple languages, ecological, creative, and spoken, of the Los Tuxtlas jungle, Veracruz, Mexico.

* 13h00-13h30, bodeek: lunch by Ashour Lafy (& Cinemaximiliaan)

* 13h30-15h00, bodeek: meeting point at entrance: Walk Paths To Make Sense by Diego Echegoyen

How can one share with others their own way of reading and making sense of their architectural, political, social, material, and immaterial surroundings? All the landscapes and territories they move through, especially when experience is shaped by migration, constant transformation, absence, and in-betweenness?
Diego Echegoyen proposes a set of perceptual tools and protocols, conceived as a path through public space that connects the day’s themes and these questions.

* 15h00-16h00, WIELS, project room: Portalling sharing moment with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest

We are at an impasse, a sort of transitional spacetime for resisting differently. While arguments are piling up to radically intervene in how computational infrastructures are governed, developed and financed, how to refuse killer-tech when it is in our pockets? Which practices and methods do we need to abolish what we call the regime of the cloud, it we can’t afford a binary refusal?
In this session, Jara and Femke will discuss portalling as a way to work with and through contradictions, without already knowing what to do. Portals are sociotechnical passages which need to stay thick, contradictory, probably mutually exclusive and interdependent in any case. 

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists. They convene communities to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. https://titipi.org represented by Femke Snelting & Jara Rocha 

* 16h30-18, WIELS, screening room: Mahmoud Alhaj interviewed by Topote de Acahual 

Mahmoud Alhaj in conversation with Topote de Acahual, exploring his artistic research in response to the day’s theme, including key practices, tools, and examples.

*****

WEDNESDAY MAY 6: Manifest Everyday Urban Utopias – Brussels

* 09h30-15h00, Beursschouwburg, Zilveren Zaal: Everyday Urban Utopias session by Arquitectura Expandida with Soumaya Phéline

“What do we need to come together in public space as a collective body?” This is the question that Arquitectura Expandida invites anyone interested to explore with them. The Bogotá-based collective, in dialogue with Soumaya Pheline and with facilitation and translation support from Marian van Bodegraven, invites you to participate in an assembly, a process of negotiation to imagine, and potentially bring to life, a manifestation of collective bodies in public spaces.

Arquitectura Expandida (CO/ES/BE) is a micro-laboratory of cultural speculations.

City, architecture, art, culture, community, collective, transdisciplinarity, nomadic, “going out there,” connections, meeting points, complicities, critique, documentation, event, encounter, sum, network, microlaboratories, detecting, documenting, comparing, relativizing, praxis, multidirectionality, forum, assembly, self-construction, aesthetic-ethics, terrains vagues, incubator, cultural speculation… 

Soumaya Phéline, founder of “Justice Pour Sorour”, dj, artist, sound curator.

 Marian Rosa van Bodegraven is a Brazilian-Dutch cultural worker, researcher, and translator. She currently works as coordinator of  the Architectural Design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, as well as editor-at-large of Failed Architecture, and member of the housing cooperative In Eigen Handen.

* 13h00-14h00, Beursschouwburg: lunch by Rares Craiut

* 15h00-16h00, Beursschouwburg, Gouden Zaal:  Urban Utopias, a film selection screening in resonance with theme of the day, curated by argos in dialogue with a.pass and Beursschouwburg 

* 16h30-18h00, Beursschouwburg : meeting point at the entrance: Operational Surfaces. Guided walk with Gary Farrelly 

In this intervention, artist Gary Farrelly leads a guided walk departing from Beursschouwburg, structured around a sequence of found scenographic points where short, spoken transmissions are delivered. Each transmission proposes an intensified interpretation of urban materials and operative conditions, treating surfaces, thresholds, and pressure points as sensorial hardware within an expanded system of directives and latent operations.

* 16h30-18h00, Beursschouwburg : meeting point at the entrance: Callisto’s Walk by Lucia Palladino with Matilda Çobanli

In the author’s own words: “callisto’s walk is a walk with sound and text where the audience is gathered and a storyteller introduce them to callisto’s postindustrial myth and her power of hybridising inner spaces into outside spaces and viceversa. the audience is then invited for a walk while listening to an audio file. The audio is made of sounds and words that question the notion of architecture as separation from the world. it suggests metaphysics as practice and metaphor as language. the last anticapitalist barricade of language.” 

* from 14h30 to 18h30, Beursschouwburg, public and semi-public spaces: Bags & Barbaras (public test) by radical_hope 

During this span of time, there will be three performative interventions in the public space (in the centre of Brussels around Beursschouwburg) of a new work by radical_hope in its research-phase test, with Heike Langsdorf, Paula Almirón, Juan Duque, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Miriam Rohde, and others. 

* from 10h00 to 18h00, Beursschouwburg, black box: screenings of film materials from Arquitectura Expandida archive.

*****

THURSDAY MAY 7: Breakfast sessions + Memory Making – Brussels

* 09h30-12h30 Brussels different locations: Breakfast for Insatiable Researchers

Six groups, platforms, and collectives that support artistic research in Brussels, mostly without structural funding invite you to breakfast. This will be a time and space for informal exchange: to discover how they make their work and practices sustainable, to share thoughts, questions, and advice, and perhaps even imagine new alliances. Reserve your seat for breakfast at one of the following: Agency, The Green Corridor, BARN @a.pass, radical_house, au JUS, One Field Fallow.

* 14h00-17h00, Danscentrumjette: Memory Making Session

During OpenField, a documentation group will be at work, capturing through various practices and media what is felt, seen, spoken, imagined, smelled, and discussed. The memory-making session is the perfect moment for anyone interested to join them, reflecting on the previous days as well as related questions, desires, and thoughts that may have remained implicit until then. So far, the documentation group is composed of: Adrijana Gvozdenović, Kopano Maroga, Anna Lugmeier, Raquel Santana de Morais, Davide Tidoni, Ruby Bernabeu-Plous, Phyllis Dierick, and Teresa Gentile, with theoretical and through-practice contributions from Lucia Farinati.

*****

FRIDAY 8 MAY: Collabora(c)tion: Futuring Artistic Research – Brussels

*09h30-14h30 Constant Studio, Jette: Collabora(c)tion: Futuring Artistic Research

This is a working session for organisations, groups and collectives, focusing on possible ways to collaborate for supporting artistic research. The aim of this session is to allow desires, needs, and urgencies to surface, and to reflect together on how we might move forward. Which alliances, agreements, and dialogues could we realistically explore to support work that has already begun, or to initiate it in the coming months, especially in these difficult political times?

With lunch by Artem.