Jordi Colomer

For decades, Jordi Colomer has explored the city as a space that is both real and fictional. His practice involves sculpture, installation, video, and public interventions, with a marked performative sense that employs actions to test habitual uses of architecture and urban space. Colomer is interested in the system of representations of the city and our ability to subvert them by using imagination, humour, community, fiction, and utopia.

The workshop

Colomer will lead a working group focused on the transformation of the Bourse area over the past decade. What aspects of a city's immaterial life vanish as its physical landscape changes? Inspired by participatory architecture—design shaped by those who use it—such as the work of Belgian architects Lucien and Simone Kroll, a group of artists and citizens will explore the city as an ‘expanded theatre’. They will focus on the potential for creating new collaborative traditions in public space—alternatives to the commercial logic and homogenisation that dominate city centres today. Open to all citizens interested in transforming public space, this five-day class blends reflection and intervention to challenge contemporary urban narratives and foster the creation of future traditions.

Practical information

Workshop in English and French

5-day engagement

Free

On application via an online form → kfda.be

Deadline to apply is 30 April

The School of Fireflies

This workshop is taking place in the context of The School of Fireflies, this year's edition of the KFDA's Free School.

In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini published an article about the disappearance of fireflies, once abundant in the Italian countryside. He lamented that modernity, driven by consumerism and authoritarianism, had extinguished these delicate lights—the vulnerable elements of society. Fifty years later, the festival opens The School of Fireflies. What is at risk of disappearing today? What forces threaten life in cities or present landscapes? The Selvagem project makes us reflect on the extinction of knowledge and nature. Musicians Enrico Malatesta and Attila Faravelli, and researcher Juan José López Díez, together with a group of participants, record the inaudible vibrations of leaves that insects use to communicate. The collective Archivo de la Memoria Trans focuses on archiving as a form of protest against forgetting; Revive Gaza’s Farmland employs, among other things, film as resistance to the destruction and occupation of land; artist Jordi Colomer leads a working group, and we present a curated series of talks. Our Free School also inspired Cecilia Vicuña's poetry and drawings in this brochure. The School of Fireflies facilitates a collective study of active resistance to disappearance, echoing Pasolini's words: “They will teach you not to shine. And you will shine instead.

Credits

A project by Jordi Colomer in collaboration with Ignasi Duarte and Carolina Olivares

In collaboration with Kunstenfestivaldesarts

Workshops in Brussels with the support of the Spanish Embassy in Belgium