Swamp gathering
"Compared to other cities, Brussels has been “spared” from a centralized, large-scale neoliberal city development, partly because of the involuntary obstruction caused by its complex constitution and identity. (How) can Brussels hold on to and use its elusive locality? This brings us to the swamp, the concrete and geological base (etymological origin: Broekzele—broek = “marsh” + zele = “thatching, settlement”) the city is built on.
Can the swamp, both geographically and metaphorically, help us to analyze the political complexity and the ways this is being more and more repressed? Could we deploy our idea of the swamp as toxic and draining—an intensification of complexity, contingency, or liquidity—as a tool of resilience to obstruct centralized gentrification and neoliberal city developments? Can the swamp be used as a productive field of interpretation for imagining different heterotopic and symbiotic futures? Or are we, in fact, ourselves gentrifying and exploiting (the idea of) the swamp by appropriating and romanticizing it?" - Lietje Bouwens of The New Local
This event is an informal gathering with guests including Rozalinda Borcilă, Thomas Decreus, Guy Gypens, Kobe Matthys and Christophe Piette (collective garden Anderlecht), Jeroen Peeters, Kristupas Sabolius, Sofie Van Bruystegem, Michiel Vandevelde, Fabio Vanin and Marco Ranzato (Latitude), Ingrid Vranken (FoAM).
