• A short scenographic intervention that opens up and challenges the space of the Cirque, the 19th-century anatomical theatre where the bulk of the festival takes place.
  

Carolin Gieszner is an artist and teacher. She develops installations and scenographic situations as temporary test sites for perception, embodied experience, and forms of togetherness. Her practice explores space-making as a relational and perceptual field shaped through material, sound, light, movement, and atmosphere. 

• A lecture-performance on the researcher’s gaze, on dissecting and connecting bodies of knowledge, trying to unknow known knowns, and losing one’s mind in the process.
  

Sébastien Hendrickx is a theatre maker and art critic. He is affiliated as a lecturer and an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Words worlding worlds was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

• A lecture analyzing the absurd anthropomorphisms in Disney’s Finding Nemo (2003) and their impact on evolution, predation and ecosystems. What happens to fish that tell human stories?
  

Anne Dekeyser is a visual artist, writer, film enthusiast, fossil hunter and naturalist. As a child, she watched Finding Nemo every afternoon so that, as an adult, she could give this talk. 

• A short story and a dance that take us to the depths of the ocean, full of drifting organisms and fragments too small to name.

Nitzan Shafran (she/they) is currently pursuing an MA in Autonomous Design at KASK & Conservatorium. Having a background in dance and visual theatre, she explores how a performance or an environment can redistribute attention, allowing bodies, materials, objects and space to influence one another without a fixed hierarchy.

• A short story plus film titled Symposium; an iceberg north-east of the VDAB in Trichterheide.
  “…actually, I was on my way to the VDAB in Trichterheide, but to the north-east of there, at the Godsheide lock complex, people were busy trying to resolve – or perhaps not – major questions concerning the reality of, for example, an iceberg or the blue landscapes that can unfold in one’s mind; I simply had to…”
  

Lars Bernakiewicz is an artist and writer who still occasionally makes spelling mistakes, etc. He graduated in June 2026 with a degree in fine arts from KASK & Conservatorium. He is currently unemployed full-time (he is trying to change this and is open to help).

A performance of recitations or reiterations, in which we unlearn language and discover new musical and poetical formations. Comprising poetry from Sostituzione (Giulia Niccolai, 1975) and Galgenlieder (Christian Morgenstern, 1905), set alongside new vocal and sound pieces by Marcus Bergner and Myriam Van Imschoot.

Marcus Bergner and Myriam Van Imschoot are MM, a duo formation concerned with sound poetry. Their work consists of live performance, concerts, publications and broadcasts. Regularly MM teaches and creates in workshops with local participants.

• A short participative performance titlednames: meridians. Four people make a journey around the world, starting and ending at the north pole. 

Toine Horvers is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a sculptor, printmaker, installation artist, performance artist, draughtsman, video artist and collagist. Time, movement, energy, sound, ritual and language play an important role in his performances and two-dimensional work.

• A short lecture exploring stories that connect human and nonhuman scales, from the viral to the planetary. How does contemporary fiction make use of old rhetorical tools, such as synecdoche or irony, to help us perceive ecological entanglements?

Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Liliane directs the BioCriticismwebinar and recently published Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Multi-Scalar Poetics (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

• A short lecture exploring the uneasy connections between the environmental crisis, narrative forms, and embodied experience. Climate change reveals vast scales and spatiotemporally distributed phenomena that seem removed from bodily experience. How can metaphors and multistrand narration help to bridge the gap?

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University. He is the author of several books, including most recently Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).

• A conversation between Liliane Campos, Marco Caracciolo and the audience, moderated by Frederik Le Roy. 

Frederik Le Roy is a lecturer at KASK & Conservatorium. He coordinates the Drama master, teaches theory classes and chairs the Department of Film, Photography and Drama.

• A new theatre solo by Amsterdam Poet’s Theatre, featuring Gudrun Moreau, commemorating the summer of 2026, the hottest on record. How does the sun express itself? How can the neighbor’s dog make clear it urgently needs a haircut?

Amsterdam Poet’s Theatre was founded in 2024 by Artun Alaska Arasli and Joachim Robbrecht to produce theatre in a free and unconventional way, with minimal resources and without being bound by or hindered by the theatre establishment. All attention is focused on the chemistry between the text, the performer and the audience. One question remains central: Who speaks, and who passes the word on to someone else? 

Gudrun Moreau (she/they) is a physical actor, maker, dramaturg and writer. She graduated in 2026 as a drama artist at KASK & Conservatorium with the work Lost Springs (co-created with Milan Mitera).

• A short participative performance titledpanorama north east south west. Four people are positioned in the four wind directions, scanning their direct surroundings. 

Toine Horvers is a multidisciplinary artist, working as a sculptor, printmaker, installation artist, performance artist, draughtsman, video artist and collagist. Time, movement, energy, sound, ritual and language play an important role in his performances and two-dimensional work.

• A lecture on territories in transformation, such as the Port of Antwerp. How to tell their complex and more-than-human stories? Followed by a conversation with the audience, moderated by Sébastien Hendrickx. 

Benedikte Zitouni is a professor of sociology at UCLouvain and Saint-Louis Brussels. Her work is rooted in urban ecology and the environmental humanities. Her latest book Résister dans des milieux ravagés: Une fabrication d’héritages collects texts written over the past fifteen years. (Éditions Météores, 2026). 

• Closing remarks and an announcement of tomorrow’s program, where the ideas harvested on this first day will be digested, situated and put into practice. 

Sébastien Hendrickx is a theatre maker and art critic. He is affiliated as a lecturer and an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Words worlding worlds was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Decentering Design (Jo Boonen, Pippa Dekinder, Glenn Deliège, Bert De Roo, Giliam Ganzevles) is an interdisciplinary collective exploring more-than-human perspectives in design and artistic research. Its work examines how practices, technologies and imaginaries participate in shaping relationships between humans and the wider living world.

• A short scenographic intervention closing the space of the Cirque, and the first day of the festival.
  

Carolin Gieszner is an artist and teacher. She develops installations and scenographic situations as temporary test sites for perception, embodied experience, and forms of togetherness. Her practice explores space-making as a relational and perceptual field shaped through material, sound, light, movement, and atmosphere.

• A lecture on apocalyptic stories. How exactly does their temporality work? We usually regard the apocalypse as a brief and intense event: everything and everyone perishes instantly. Isn’t the experience of the end of the world actually much slower and more unevenly distributed amongst different groups of humans and non-humans?

Lisa Doeland is a philosopher and a postdoctoral researcher at VU University Amsterdam. Her works include the book Apocalypsofie (2023). She regularly contributes essays to publications such as De Groene Amsterdammer and Wijsgerig Perspectief.

Kristof Van Baarle is chair of the Drama Programme Committee and a lecturer at KASK & Conservatorium. He combines this role with his work as a dramaturg and art critic. He has conducted research at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp into performance and posthumanism, and theatre and the end times.

• A workshop exploring and mapping the entangled trajectories of human and nonhuman entities in the campus garden of KASK & Conservatorium.

Decentering Design (Jo Boonen, Pippa Dekinder, Glenn Deliège, Bert De Roo, Giliam Ganzevles) is an interdisciplinary collective exploring more-than-human perspectives in design and artistic research. Its work examines how practices, technologies and imaginaries participate in shaping relationships between humans and the wider living world.

• A workshop exploring and mapping the entangled trajectories of human and nonhuman entities in the campus garden of KASK & Conservatorium.

Decentering Design (Jo Boonen, Pippa Dekinder, Glenn Deliège, Bert De Roo, Giliam Ganzevles) is an interdisciplinary collective exploring more-than-human perspectives in design and artistic research. Its work examines how practices, technologies and imaginaries participate in shaping relationships between humans and the wider living world.

• A writing workshop in which participants devise a portrait of the campus garden of KASK & Conservatorium, full of intersecting human and nonhuman storylines.

Sébastien Hendrickx is a theatre maker and art critic. He is affiliated as a lecturer and an artistic researcher to KASK & Conservatorium, the school of arts of HOGENT and howest. The research project Words worlding worlds was financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.