Budafabriek welcomes open minds to Green Light District
Kortrijk creative space Budafabriek has invited artists from around the world to present varied takes on ecology
Breaking down barriers
Entering the quirky, eclectic exhibition, Franky Devos, director of the Arts Centre Buda, explains the “Love, Work, Share” ethos at Budafabriek, where the emphasis is less on the physical space and more on forging connections and nurturing new projects.
“Ecology has an influence on a very broad section of society, and the Green Light District seeks to reflect the concerns and creativity present in the work of artists from around the globe and of small business and researchers with a local base but an international outlook,” he explains over coffee in the NANO pop-up supermarket.
In the Green Light District, curator Christophe De Jaeger has blended an exhibition that defies easy definition, one that crosses and recrosses boundaries and breaks down the notional barriers separating the fields of art, science and entrepreneurship.
Counter-culture artistic creations and innovative research projects earnest about their real-world potential combine to form a nuanced insight into a complex green future.
Annemarie Maes, creator of Edible Forest Garden, a rooftop garden with a difference in Brussels, has taken on the challenge of indoor gardening. Partnering with VELT (Society for Ecological Living and Gardening) and the Provincial Institute for Agriculture, she has designed The Invisible Garden in a room devoid of natural light. The winter vegetable produce will be sold in the exhibition’s pop-up supermarket.
Dense concepts
In the adjoining room, Koen Vanmechelen of Cosmopolitan Chicken Project fame presents his plans for a new site called La Biomista in Ghent, which he describes as a “biocultural temple of active and living art, but in addition to being an intellectual breeding ground, it is also a breeding station”.
Confused? Turn up at the Green Light District with a clear head and an open mind; future ecology favours dense concepts.
Ecology has an influence on a very broad section of society
Controversial, offbeat, utopian, dystopian – the Green Light District is a sometimes dizzying look at the contradictions of a green future. Your brain will be stimulated, your curiosity piqued and your senses stimulated in an exhibition that offers opportunities to not only see and hear green revolutions, but to taste and smell them, too.
The NANO supermarket displays a range of fantastical products that might foreseeably be on our shelves in the near future: programmable wine, medicinal chocolate, yoghurt made from human enzymes... the last is already a reality, if not a commercially recognised one. Creator and self-styled bio-artist Maja Smrekar will be organising a workshop and Maya Yoghurt tastings during Green Light District.
Devos’ enthusiasm for the project is infectious, and I find myself gleefully pressing smell buttons on the interactive, Wonkaesque Cultural Odor Generator, which is sure to be a hit with children. It’s the brainchild of Peter De Cupere, whose other installations are equally zany, including bees with gas masks forced to make way for computer-controlled drones and a carpet of flowers that expels polluting odours.
Artist, biologist and activist Brandon Ballengée’s “Prelude to the Collapse of the North Atlantic” (pictured above), a pyramid of glass jars – some containing underwater life, others significantly empty – is a commentary on the crisis in fishing and the degradation of a marine ecosystem.
There is also a nod to the historical origins of the ecological movement in the late 1960s with a model of Mass Moving´s “Butterfly Project”. Mass Moving was an ephemeral collective of Belgian and Dutch artists who sought to take art out of museums and on to the streets, while at the same time highlight humanity’s interconnectivity with nature. Spectacularly disbanded in 1976, the collective’s material was consciously destroyed, and the model is a rare trace of that early artist activism.
Biological money, glow-in-the-dark rabbits, fluorescent water fleas, exploding seed-suitcases, fake-plastic flower classification and more await as imagination and innovation combine. Even the entrance process is appropriately novel – a biometric, paperless ticket where €6 and the imprint of your index finger guarantees unlimited entry until 8 February.
