25.02.26, 18:00, Lennart Soberon, Traversées: de onzichtbare grenzen van Fort Europa

British biologist Charles Elton is often regarded as the founder of research into animals and plants that colonise new areas. His 1958 book The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants is considered the official starting point for this field of study. However, naturalists had been observing life forms establishing themselves in unfamiliar environments long before that.

As early as the eighteenth century, the famous Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus observed that exotic plants sometimes spread on their own and take root in the wild. He was the first to map how these newcomers spread across the world. Humans in particular play a key role in this.

Unlike today, Linnaeus did not see these successful exotic species as a threat, but as an enrichment of the native nature. It was none other than Charles Darwin who was the first to label a successful exotic species as “invasive”.

During his voyage on the Beagle, he saw how a European garden plant was rapidly spreading across the pampas of South America, displacing typical pampas plants. Not long after, Europe was hit by its first real plant invasion: a seemingly innocent aquatic plant from North America captivated science, politics and the press.

In this lecture, botanical philosopher Norbert Peeters will talk more about this forgotten history of thinking about plants that establish themselves in new areas. He will base his talk on his recent doctoral research. After the lecture, Norbert Peeters will talk to Tim Adriaens, a landscape ecologist specialising in invasive species. Helen Weeres, Saïda Ragas and Malika Soudani will provide literary and cinematic interventions on the subject of being exotic.

• Norbert Peeters is a botanical philosopher, writer and university teacher in Philosophy at Wageningen University & Research. Peeters studied Archaeology and Philosophy. At Leiden University, he is writing a dissertation on the conceptual history of invasion ecology, in which he writes about the earliest developments in thinking about invasive plants. As a botanical philosopher, he is interested in the extraordinary world of plants. Following Darwin's vision of the plant kingdom, Peeters argues for a different way of looking at and describing plants. In 2016, he made his debut with Botanical Revolution: The Plant Theory of Charles Darwin. He subsequently wrote Rumphius' Herbarium: Stories from the Ambonese Flora (2020) and Wilderness Varnish: A Philosopher in the Vondelpark (2021), among other works. In 2023, he co-edited the reissue of Flora Batava: the wild plants of the Netherlands.
• Helen Weeres has a background in poetry, literary and cultural analysis, and gender studies, and works in the (research) arts alongside regenerative farmers, scientists, and other artists. Helen's practice is fuelled by poetry and a fascination with artefacts and instruments that inspire regenerative interactions between humans and a broader ecosystem. Themes such as human-inclusive ecosystems, lost (pagan) rituals and folklore, queer ecology, and human-soil relationships are often central to Helen's evocative poems, performances, installations, and (inter)active gatherings. Helen is co-organiser and coordinator of Queer miQ, an “open” stage that invites FLINTAQ* people to “queer” the microphone. In 2025-2026, Helen will develop new literary work outside the book in collaboration with TILT, made possible in part by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
• Saïda Ragas is an illustrator and comic strip artist. Her work is based on her idealistic, sex-positive and feminist ideas. Through playful and colourful images, she shares personal experiences, social footnotes and dream images. In 2024, Saïda was a finalist in the annual illustration competition De Stoute Stift (The Naughty Pencil) organised by deBuren. Together with Kato Kagenaar, Saïda is part of the sex-positive art collective HALFNAAKT.
• Malika Soudani is an author and teacher of creative writing in primary and secondary education in the Netherlands. In 2021, she graduated in Creative Writing at ArtEZ Arnhem with the poetry collection Waar ik een slaapkamer heb gehad (Where I had a bedroom). She did an internship at production house SLAA and worked as a PR assistant for Read My World. In the summer of 2019, Malika took part in deBuren's annual writing residency in Paris.

• Malika organises writing workshops and courses on themes such as spirituality, sexuality and (solo) intimacy. She recites her work at various venues and enjoys participating in panel discussions on social issues. In the summer, she is one of the writing workshop staff at Buitenkunst, where she also works as a cook.
• Tim Adriaens started as a landscape ecologist at the Institute for Nature Conservation in 2000, working on area visions and ecological networks. He then started a project on invasive species at the institute. He coordinates research on invasive species and is very active in international projects on sustainable control, setting up surveillance and warning systems, citizen science, horizon scanning and risk analysis, impact research and human dimensions research of biological invasions. He has many international projects in his portfolio, such as LIFE, Interreg and Horizon projects, as well as assignments for the European Commission and the IUCN. Tim has been part of the INBO management team since 2024. He is responsible for the Species Diversity, Open Science Lab for Biodiversity, Wildlife Management and Invasive Species teams. Tim is very active in the public debate on invasive species and their management. He often comments in the media on invasive species such as raccoons, Asian hornets, African clawed frogs and plant invasions, and their impact on nature conservation and management.

This lecture will take place in the Botanical Garden of the GUM. More information about the accessibility of the venue can be found on their website. A sign language interpreter will be provided for this lecture. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be. Questions can be asked at the reception desk on site.

This lecture is part of the Dag van de Filosofie, tickets will be available starting from February 10 via www.dagvandefilosofie.be

Monsters and the monstrous have always evoked the contradictory responses of fascination and fear. The boundaries between the human and the monstrous are dangerously porous and how these boundaries are drawn works to define who we are and how we define the normal (body). A sense of ontological, epistemological and ethical uncertainty and confusion that can resolve either in outright horror at the human inability to control a seemingly threatening materiality, or in a move towards alternative and more hopeful modes of becoming.

It’s little exaggeration to say that the representation of the monstrous/the anomalously embodied/the strange leaks and flows across material, political, philosophical, artistic and bioscientific imaginaries alike. The very excessiveness of corporeality that promises to productively transgress conventional expectations and boundaries can be both scholarly and fun, and under conditions of promise can revalue what has been figured as the excluded other.

Following the lecture, Margrit Shildrick will engage in a conversation with Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy Seppe Segers. This afternoon is a collaboration between the Dag van de Filosofie, Ghent University and Studium Generale Gent.

• Margrit Shildrick is Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University and works mainly in the field of biophilosophy. Her projects include an ongoing collaboration with Queer Death Studies; excursions into bioart and its posthumanist implications; and rethinking the concept of the gift as far more than exchange. Books include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997), Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002), Dangerous Discourses: Subjectivity, Sexuality and Disability (2009), and Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment (2023).
• Seppe Segers is a professor of ethics and moral science at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science at Ghent University. He teaches ethics, moral science and feminist criticism, exploring the open meaning of “morality”, the relationships between description and prescription, and between moral value and non-moral value (if such a thing exists). Most of his published work deals with applied ethics.

This lecture and aftertalk will be in English and will take place in the Zwarte Zaal at KASK & Conservatorium. The Zwarte Zaal is located on the ground floor and is accessible to wheelchair users, there’s also an accessible toilet in the hallway of KASKcafé. In case you use a wheelchair, go via the entrance of KASKcinema instead of the Louis Pasteurlaan entrance. There are works in the street of KASKcinema, but it’s possible to pass bu the entrance at Godshuizenlaan 4. A translation into Flemish sign language will be provided. If you have any further questions about accessibility facilities, please contact the organisation: anais.vanertvelde@hogent.be

Just before the Easter holidays, we would like to present you with another controversial Spanish classic from the oeuvre of Luis Buñuel. After a long period of exile in Mexico, the scandalous director returned to Spain to make Viridiana. Viridiana, played by the famous Mexican actress Silvia Pinal, is an unworldly nun who has to go and live with her uncle. While avoiding his advances, she tries to save the souls of the homeless people living nearby. Buñuel, always an opponent of religious self-righteousness, shows the naivety of the sister in her attempts to save the world through Christian morality.

Viridiana was banned by Franco's dictatorial government and by the powerful Vatican, labelled “blasphemous”. In one of the film's most notorious scenes, a drunken banquet freezes into a scene that cynically depicts Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Last Supper as a childish food fight. At its premiere, Viridiana was spat upon by petty bourgeois minds, but precisely for that reason it was also greedily savoured and awarded the Palme d'Or in 1961. Have a blissful Easter!

This film will be introduced by film history teacher Daniël Biltereyst.

Magic potions and spells, something is brewing in the witch's kitchen.

Cinema for the youngest cinema-goers! Parents and children aged 4 and above are welcome to this screening, where we present a varied and original series of films.

In Tokyo in the near future, the threat of a devastating earthquake hangs like a dark cloud over the daily lives of its inhabitants. Two best friends, on the verge of graduating from secondary school, play a prank on their headmaster. What starts innocently enough leads to the installation of an all-seeing surveillance system. Under the pressure of constant surveillance and an increasingly grim political climate, the friends are forced to confront their differences.

After Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023), a film he produced in memory of his father, director Neo Sora makes his fiction debut with this sultry blend of socially critical satire and moving coming-of-age drama. With tender techno beats and observational elegance, he immerses the viewer in a subtly dystopian world that is frighteningly familiar. Torn between conforming or fighting back, the group of friends is forced to question their beliefs, desires and identities.

Welcome to The Stimming Pool, a space where neurodivergence can move freely and your body is gently shaken out of its assumptions. The Neurocultures Collective, brought together by artist and filmmaker Steven Eastwood, places neurodivergent creators not as subjects, but as authors at the centre. In this enchanting docufiction, their conversations and creative processes are interwoven into a quasi-fictional structure in which experience and imagination constantly intersect.

Filmed on clear 16mm by Aftersun (2022) cameraman Gregory Oke, a world unfolds that rubs against neurotypical logic. The viewer is immersed in a disorienting experience that makes it possible to feel what it is like to move in an environment that is not designed for you. The film explores how autism shapes creativity and how cinema, like neurodivergent perception, works through heightened sensitivity.

The title refers to “stimming”, the performance of repetitive movements that aid self-regulation. In the film, this is given a physical location: an empty swimming pool where the makers come together to move, dance and unmask themselves. The Stimming Pool thus becomes an invitation to make space for forms of being that too often remain invisible.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with various members of the Neurocultures Collective.

Tara is a young widow who returns to her village after the death of her grandfather. With a mysterious sabre as her only inheritance, she travels across the country with her two children. During this journey, she meets a mysterious knight from the distant past, who turns out to be searching for the sabre. However, his quest is complicated by his growing feelings for Tara. A melancholic ghost story derived from Iranian folklore, Ballad of Tara is above all a story about patriarchal village life, in which Tara, played by Susan Taslimi, leads a freer and more exciting life than the colourless men who surround her.

Beyzai, one of the founders of the Iranian New Wave of the 1960s, is best known for his work after the Iranian Revolution, such as Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989). Yet his little-seen work from before 1979 is actually even more remarkable for its outspoken feminism and daring aesthetics, with the anachronistic love story of Ballad of Tara as the finest example.

The film will be introduced by translator-interpreter and film curator Mahdieh Fahimi.

Some loves do not disappear. They hide. Under a bed, for example, where they breathe softly between dust and memory. In this colourful collage film, Olivia gives flowers to the spirit of an old lover in exchange for comforting rain clouds.

Other stories swirl around her. Barbara invents fantastic lies to make rejection bearable. Mauricio literally sinks into guilt. Ramón falls in love with a talking houseplant that looks suspiciously like Olivia. The film skilfully plays with the so-called Rashomon effect: one event has multiple versions, all of which are contradictory and yet equally credible. In this way, the film circles around itself and shifts perspective as if the characters' feelings themselves were speaking.

The images also refuse to remain still. This experimental debut by Tomás Pichardo Espaillant interweaves stop-motion animation, graphic sketches and claymation into a single whole. Various animators contributed to the film, visualising the collision, merging and disappearance of memories. The end result is a dreamlike collage about longing, loss and the stubborn beauty of lost love.

Once again, we are joining forces with cult film festival Offscreen for a film screening that will leave no stone unturned. This time, we accompany them to the altar of Spanish exploitation cinema with La Novia Ensangrentada, a silken nightmare that sinks its teeth into the patriarchal Spain of the 1970s. Susan has just got married and is already deeply unhappy. Strange visions put a damper on her honeymoon, while her husband displays increasingly strange behaviour. When they encounter a mysterious lady on the beach one day, their relationship becomes even more complex. The woman in question turns out to be a vampire who wants to recruit Susan into her order of eternally living lovers. It doesn't take long before the honeymoon turns bloody.

Partly seventies schlock, partly social criticism, The Blood Spattered Bride remains a scandalous film that packs a punch. Made during the rigor mortis of the Franco regime, the film drives a stake through the fascist ideals and normative gender relations of its time. As is customary in vampire mythology, the monstrous here is not merely a threat, but also the promise of transgressive liberation. More conventional monsters are thus shunned in order to explore the horror of the institution of marriage.

This screening will be preceded by the short film The Masque of the Red Death (2024) by Rune Callewaert.

Director Adela Sequeyro wrote this bold melodrama and also plays the role of Ana María, who flees her oppressive hacienda for a bohemian life full of romance and intrigue. With wit, style and daring, she reclaims her freedom. La Mujer de Nadie was and remains a groundbreaking story about female autonomy on the silver screen. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s, a period in which the Mexican film industry was still defining itself, Sequeyro's film positioned women not as moral symbols, but as active subjects.

This melodrama is the first sound film directed by a woman in Mexico. Through expressive close-ups, minimal dialogue and camera angles that were provocative at the time, Sequeyro explores a specific female erotic universe in which, as the title proudly declares, a woman can belong to no one. A radical statement in a culture where women always belonged to someone, whether as a mother, daughter, wife or sex worker.

This film will be introduced by Camilla Baier (Invisible Women) and Bart Versteirt (Cinea).