Three artists engage with public space and its surroundings, creating a site-specific exhibition throughout the neighbourhood’s streets, squares, facades, and inside its bars, shops and institutes. Their work will be shown from the 16th of May up until the 1st of June. We are proud to present an exciting activation program in the neighbourhood. Joining us this year are:

Amber Meulenijzer, Joost Elschot and Veerle Melis.

Join us during one of our activities, or come around just to see the exhibition. The works of Joost and Veerle are visible at all times, Amber her installation will be turned on during the following hours:

Monday 17h-20h
Tuesday 17h-20h
Wednesday 12h-20h
Thursday 17h-20h
Friday 17h-20h
Saturday 12h-20h
Sunday 12h-20h

Amber Meulenijzer (b. 1994, Belgium) makes sound art and installations. Looking for the composition in each landscape, she is inherently an in situ improvisor. Curiosity has led her to work with different materials, using them as sounding and sculptural elements. She researches the tension between these fields. Where does sound meet material? When does the ear guide the eye? Who sings? Who listens? Her work always seeks to connect with the context in which it is developed or displayed, interacting with architectural elements and environmental sounds or dynamics.

With a background in sound and visual arts (RITCS, 2016 | KASK, 2019), she navigates the border between listening and making, activating the acoustics of environments and questioning the boundaries between hearing and seeing. Her work has been shown at Struer Tracks Biennale (DK), Monheim Triennale (DE), Festival Echos (FR), Open Oscillator Festival Amsterdam, Belluard Bollwerk (CH), Kopfhoerer (CH), STUK, iMAL, Oscillation Festival/Q-O2, Meakusma Festival, Gr’Ambacht, Kunst & Zwalm, Konvooi Festival, BRDCST Festival/AB, Listen Festival x In Vitro, Botanique. She also hosts a monthly radio show on Radio Panik in Brussels.

Website
Instagram
SoundCloud
Radioprogramma

changingchannels

Meulenijzer presents changingchannels, a site-specific sound installation on the façade of a soon-to-be-vacated residential block on Grootsermentstraat 4. The five blocks are quietly emptying, what remains is the shell. The people have been moved, the buildings are on hold. Questions about housing in Brussels are being raised, what about sustainable social housing, how do we make sure everyone has a place?

Drawing from the remaining satellite dishes attached to the building, instruments to bring the outside world into the blocks. The work transforms these relics of communication into sensitive receivers of the present. Using a microphone that picks up vibrations in the metal of the dishes, this system amplifies the sound of the surrounding neighbourhood, creating a feedback composition tailored to the place and co-shaped by the surrounding architecture and the streets. The result is a delicate soundscape that emerges and dissolves into the ambient city noise, inviting passersby to pause and listen. The work functions as a reminder and an ode to the many lives once lived within these walls, in stark contrast to the silence that prevails there today.

Joost Elschot (b. 1985, Netherlands) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. After a failed study and a period working as a car mechanic in Ghana, West Africa, he studied visual arts in Utrecht. In his artistic practice he works with drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, performance and interventions. Elschot’s work departs from daydreaming and existential reflections, blending personal memories with imagined settings.

Website
Instagram

Pigeon rock (Lay all your love on me)

Pigeon rock (Lay all your love on me) is an installation developed for the Bloemenhof neighbourhood in Brussels. Prompted by being a desirable neighbourhood to live in, Elschot responds from a personal place of uncertainty: the end of a love life, an upcoming move, and the temporary chaos moving his art studio. While renovating a new workspace with a collective, they discovered the building had long housed pigeons.

Inspired by French pigeonniers Elschot constructs a pigeon house to move the pigeons to the Bloemenhof neighbourhood. Attached to the pigeons’ legs are excerpts of ABBA’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’, a record he found on the street during one of his visits to the square. If the pigeons don’t find their way to future love and housing, they may simply return to the studio, in which case he might have to accept the pigeons as his life companions instead.

Veerle Melis (b. 1990, Netherlands) is a self-taught artist based in Brussels. Drawing from this autodidactic background, her work can be seen as an ongoing meditation on what it means to create. Melis’ approach is process led, performing countless repetitive gestures through which she learns from her materials. This material engagement facilitates a reconsidering and a rearranging of the substances that shape daily life. Themes such as architecture, domesticity, decoration and handicraft emerge as the building blocks for imagining different realities and exploring the entanglement of matter and meaning. 

Alongside her individual practice Melis is part of Syzygy collective. Recent exhibitions include Oval Window, with Syzygy collective at Vleeshal, Middelburg, NL (2024); Hall of Mirrors, Plop, London, UK (2023); Haberdashery, 10N, Brussels (2023); Prospects, Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL (2023); Exercises for Sabotage, duo show with Liza Prins, Van Gogh House London, UK (2022).

Website
Instagram

BBF, Baum Besties Forever

BBF, Baum Besties Forever explores the idea of interspecies friendship. Inspired by the presence of primary schools in the Bloemenhof neighbourhood and the rituals of childhood — like crafting friendship bracelets — Melis imagines what it would mean for trees to form bonds with one another. What names would they choose? How would they communicate? Could different species or generations of trees understand each other?

Melis selected three trees — located at Bloemenhofplein, Grootsermentstraat, and Zennestraat — as the recipients of handmade friendship bracelets. Wrapped gently around the trees, the pieces act as festive decorations and suggest a sense of kinship between the trees. In doing so, Melis creates subtle markers of connection in public space between people, places, and natural elements woven into the city.