Nourrir les débris @ Brasseries Atlas, Bruxelles, Belgique: Assoukrou Aké

Feeding the Debris

We are living through a time in which fear has become both our horizon and our method.

The disappearance of songs and soils, of memories and freedoms, constrained by political systems growing ever more extreme, compels us to position ourselves within the world through forms that make loss visible and open up gestures of resistance.

Feeding the Debris is a refusal of the fatalism of the catastrophes closing in around us. It is a search for the place of the living within what is yet to come. It is a dialogue between a place and oneself. It is the observation of slow processes, where sustained attention becomes an indispensable mode of being. Deceleration, degrowth, and resurgence become tools against the dismantling of hope for future beings.

What kind of porosity emerges between the disappearance of what exists now and the invention of what is to come?

For a humanity in crisis, what forms can arise from these survivals and transformations?

To seek refuge in archives and in memory.

To embrace perpetual renewal.

To collect suppositions—

For what comes after.

Our interventions compose sensitive landscapes, oscillating between fascination and tenderness for debris. Without fetishizing ruins, they document disappearances, mourning, resurgences, and joy. They gather sensorial evidence. These works create points of contact, thresholds and landmarks, liminal spaces and temporalities. Bonds intensify; sight alone is no longer enough. Bodies, silent at first, begin to resonate. This is not an accumulation of formats, but the pursuit of a single breath—a continuous breath flowing throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Doubt and wonder become intertwined.

Observed and imagined refuges.

Hypotheses in the face of dispossession.

An anchor for those destined to disappear.

A testimony, so as not to forget.

From constraint, our metamorphoses emerge.

To live with it.

The invited artists cultivate singular perspectives at the intersection of impassivity and reinvention. The exhibition is grounded in a critical lineage attentive to the political and ecological conditions of the present. From Hannah Arendt, we retain the idea that action and appearance remain possible beginnings. Within a shared world that is threatened and transformed, these appearances require a steadfast refusal of anesthesia.

We work with constraints, doubts, and contexts. The aim is to make visible the costs and the blind spots of our present, while imagining margins of action. Our research is open and multidisciplinary. It does not claim to offer an ending, but rather an attempt to unlearn ingrained automatisms. Different forms converge to propose meaning—a translation of the movements of the world and of the weakening of structures of care. In the face of collapse, modes of unfolding are multiple.

This exhibition is about breathing—

With those who remain,

With those who are missing.

It is about making space for traces,

Choosing relation over distance, presence over absence.

Here, we encounter what we have to defend, and what we are willing to transform. We seek beginnings rather than endings, from and for places inhabited by the invisible.

Ways of holding together.

Invited artists: Eve Champion, Victoria Kennett, Anatole Mélot, Assoukrou Aké, Shirley Nirina, Cécilia Goodman, Milena Desse, Emile Barret, and Juan José Lopez.

Curators: Maxime Delalande and Bastien Courdavault / SURGIR asbl