RendezVous Brussels Art Week

For Whom Alienated Figures Sing

Artists: Chris-Armel Iradukunda, Davide Paolillo, Gregor Petrikovič, Mélanie Ganino, Maria Stuut, Martina Petrović, Jeremias Pérez Salerno, Ychaï Gassenbauer

Alienated figures sing melancholic birthday songs for childhood dreams. Happy birthday, everyone! Inside the marble cathedral of Hectolitre, the collective unconscious becomes a mantra of remembrance, refracted through a Fresnel lens. Rivers of ghostly matter dissolve past the edge of human knowledge. We wish we could transmit the weight of time to you, mind to mind, before the trickling sand turns memory into a silica desert.

Featured Artists

Chris-Armel Iradukunda

• Bio: Born in Burundi (1992) and educated as a computer engineer in China. For 8 years, he documented daily walks with digital photography—an art form that led to exile in Europe. Operating as a dramaturg, actor, performer, coder, and hacker, he explores alienhood and smarter-than-human entities. His guest works are exhibited at the 61st Venice Biennale within the Bosnia and Herzegovina pavilion, presented in the name of the nation he fled while remaining undocumented by Belgian laws.

• Work: Simulation #2 | exhibition.awalkaday.art (2025–2026) — Photographic installation with participatory performance and custom 3D web application software. The photographs were captured on a single evening after RendezVous Brussels Art Week 2025 at the close of Simulation #1, documenting chalk and spray marks left by visitors across two rooms at Hectolitre over three days. For Simulation #2, Iradukunda constructed software reconstructing both rooms digitally, allowing the photographs to inhabit physical walls and browser walls simultaneously, accessible on-site or anywhere. The anonymous marks made by strangers are named live during the exhibition—a shared task between the artist and visitors.

Davide Paolillo

• Bio: A Brussels-based Italian composer and sound artist (born 1992) whose practice focuses on direct experimentation with instrument deformations, noisy machines, and creative coding.

• Work: No Sticks, No-input, Still Drumming (Performance duration: 20’/30’ | Reactor 3rd floor / Sun 13th Sept 14h and 16h). Can a mixer play the drums, or is it the ghost of the drummer? A no-input mixer is a mixer plugged into itself, screaming, while a drum kit without a drummer is an expensive loudspeaker. Connecting the two and stepping back, the drum answers, the mixer takes it personally, and the artist mostly turns knobs and takes the blame.

Gregor Petrikovič

• Bio: A Slovak-British artist and filmmaker (born 1995) based in Brussels. Working across lens-based media and installation, his practice investigates subconscious experiences, human connection, and spatial distances. He holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art (Burberry Design Scholar) and has exhibited at New Contemporaries 2026, Tate Late, IDFA DocLab, and Sónar+D Barcelona. He is an alumnus of the ISCP Residency New York and a 2025 FLAMIN Fellow at Film London.

• Work: Big-Little (2026). A sphere expands without limit; the dreamer's task is to pierce it with a needle, though the effort only accelerates its growth. Inspired by an Instagram post where 17,000 strangers confirmed sharing the exact same dream, the work recreates it as a film viewed through a Fresnel lens where viewer perspective alters perception. The soundscape is built around a Shepard tone—an auditory illusion of continuous, unresolved ascent. On view at Hectolitre, RendezVous Brussels Art Week 2026.

Jeremias Perez Salerno

• Bio: An Argentinian musician and sound artist based in Brussels, exploring the intersection and combination of musical and non-musical sound impressions.

• Work: Soundscape (Live performance inspired by the physical presence of the Reactor venue, the city of Brussels, and the everyday soundscape proposed to our ears by urban life).

Maria Stuut

• Bio: A biologist turned artist with a fondness for cabbage, working across film, performance, music, and writing. She explores her environment through a personal, lyrical, and tragicomic lens, letting her body wander into spontaneous encounters.

• Work: Birthday ritual performance on Saturday 12 September, 10h–20h, singing 10 hours of Dido in the empty pool. Visitors are welcome to sing along:

My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I

Got out of bed at all

The morning rain clouds up my window

And I can't see at all

And even if I could, it'd all be grey

But your picture on my wall

It reminds me that it's not so bad, it's not so bad

Martina Petrović

• Bio: A Serbian artist and adventurer investigating complex emotional states—such as joy, grief, love, and displacement—at the intersection of social and ecological crises. Grounded in visual arts and performance, her practice centers on rituals, the decomposition of inherited forms, and the design of new ones. Involved in collectives like School of love and Borderdi3order, she has served as the art coordinator of Hectolitre for the past 4 years.

• Work: Sea legs — A video installation constructed from old pieces and new fragments playing in a loop, echoing the recurring question: What is a mermaid without a sea?

Mélanie Ganino

• Bio: Her worldbuilding practice weaves photography, performance, and community arts to bridge knowledge, disciplines, and forms of life, imagining alternative ways of sensing, relating to otherness, and inhabiting environments.

• Work: Photographic and installation work gathering traces of an uncertain elsewhere where past and future blur, depicting water carrying life and matter between arid and humid worlds toward unknown possibilities of adaptation.

Ychaï Gassenbauer

• Bio: A Brussels-based audiovisual artist working across animation, video, and performance. Originally from Jerusalem, his multidisciplinary practice explores identity, intimacy, and belief while questioning the cultural structures shaping them.

• Work: Polybiota — Video installation.