Room Temperature

A film by Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley
(Duration: 1h33)

Screening followed by a discussion between the directors and Théo Casciani

As they do every year for Halloween, a family transforms their property into a haunted house. The father is determined to make the attraction as terrifying as possible, whatever the consequences.

In addition to his film collaborations with Zac Farley, Dennis Cooper (born 1953) is known for cult novels such as the five-part series The George Miles Cycle (1989–2000), The Sluts (2008), The Marbled Swarm (2014) and I Wished (2021). He has also written extensively on art, film, music and literature, and has been a Contributing Editor for Artforum since the late 1990s. After moving from Los Angeles to Paris in 2005, he wrote nine plays for the director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne.

Zac Farley (born 1988) is a Franco-American artist and filmmaker who studied at the California Institute of the Arts and Northwestern University. He co-directed Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015), Permanent Green Light (2018) and Room Temperature (2025), films that have been screened at numerous festivals. He has collaborated with Gisèle Vienne on the Kerstin Kraus project, as well as with Sabrina Tarasoff and Dennis Cooper on a virtual reality haunted house video game presented at the Collection Pinault in Paris in October 2022. He lives in Paris.

Théo Casciani (born in 1995) is a writer. He studied the humanities at Sciences Po and mathematics at the Sorbonne in Paris, before joining La Cambre in Brussels, where he now teaches. Rétine, his first novel, was published by Éditions P.O.L in 2019. His fiction, translated into several languages, has been presented in various forms in France and abroad, notably by the Centre Pompidou, Montez Press, the Fondation Beyeler, Sadie Coles, Spazio Maiocchi and the Louvre Museum. His second novel, Insula, published in January 2026, was awarded the Prix La Perle.

Presented by the Master’s programme in Texts and Literary Creation

INTERGENERATIONAL SPACE – DRAWING WORKSHOP

In the often hurried world of contemporary imagery, certain experiences take the time to make us pause and look – and, in doing so, shift the very boundaries of creation. At La Cambre’s Drawing Workshop, such a shift took place, not in the solitude of the artist facing their sheet of paper, but in the fragile and fertile space of encounter.

Indeed, nothing was premeditated. From the disappearance of an expected academic framework arose a hypothesis: that of a workshop where otherness would no longer be a subject, but a condition. By inviting senior citizens from the municipality of Ixelles to share the extended process of drawing with the students, the project established an almost archaic situation—in the noble sense: that of doing things together, of gestures passed on, shifted, and sometimes thwarted.

What unfolded there goes beyond simple collaboration. It is a learning of attention. First, towards the other person — their pace, their silences, their resistance. Then, towards the material — whether it takes the form of a fragment of bark, a memory recorded on a postcard, a textile pattern or an imaginary flow. Each pair invented their own grammar, often hesitant, sometimes discordant, but always imbued with life.

From these fifteen weeks of work emerge forms that are neither quite a work of art nor quite a testimony, but rather a rare in-between: a thought in the process of taking shape. Here, the bark becomes a metaphor for the intimate and the visible; there, a rogue wave condenses fascination and threat; elsewhere, a forgotten correspondence summons the spectres of a fragmented memory. Each proposal engages with a way of being in the world, woven into dialogue.

What strikes one, perhaps, is the way in which these heterogeneous practices compose a shared landscape without ever becoming uniform. Drawing here is less a discipline than a porous territory, open to cross-pollination—from writing, sound, the body, the living. Contrary to a logic of mastery, the participants have accepted uncertainty as a method, error as a resource, the other as a condition of possibility.

In a context where generations tend to coexist rather than meet, this experience reminds us with an almost political acuity that creation can be a place of hospitality. Not a refuge, but a threshold: one where we consent to no longer know alone.

The works presented today are not so much the culmination of a project as the tangible traces of a shared process. They bear witness to a slow development—made up of adjustments, renunciations, and sudden surges—through which individuals have ventured to become a relationship.

Perhaps this, ultimately, is the most valuable aspect of this workshop: the ability to foster, at the very heart of artistic practice, a form of temporary community — attentive, vulnerable, and deeply alive.

Exhibition at the Chapelle de Boondael from 7 to 10 April 2026
Opening on 7 April 2026 from 6pm to 9pm

With
The seniors of Ixelles
Christine Denoël, Francine D’Hulst, Monique Coos, Christine Gusek, Francine Marot, Lydia Martens, Anne Parent, Michèle Roose, Chantal Soumoy, Clémentine Sungu, Dominique Thomas, Camille Verschelden.
Marie Lemaire (graphic designer, supports the teaching team in supervising the groups and is responsible for the project’s graphic design)
Pascal Capelle (head of the Senior Unit, providing support for the project’s organisation).

Students from the Drawing department
Nizar Boukroun, Tifenn Capaldi, Tristan Diederich, Camille Gloux-Frenkiel, Augusta Herbiet, Mona Raharinosy, Armand Reynaud, Adèle Simonet, Jeanne Thiebaut, Irène Van Rompay, Noémi Vossenrich.

Pedagogical staff
Aleksandra Chaushova (artist, PhD in Art, lecturer in the Drawing workshop), Léonore Frenois (artist and PhD student, supporting the project), Manu Tête (artist, lecturer in the Drawing workshop), Catherine Warmoes (artist, lecturer, head of the Drawing workshop, organiser and coordinator of the project).


A project initiated by Romain de Reusme, Mayor; Jacques de Jonghe d’Ardoye, Councillor for Senior Citizens; Gautier Calomne, Deputy Mayor responsible for Education and Culture; and members of the College of the Mayor and Councillors of Ixelles.

In partnership with Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain / Casino Display, this European post-Master’s programme launched in the 2025–2026 academic year, in collaboration with the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre (La Cambre, Brussels, Belgium), the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR, Strasbourg/Mulhouse, France), the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (KABK, The Hague, Netherlands) and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Nancy (ENSAD Nancy, France).

For the 2026–2027 academic year, the programme is organised around the theme ‘On Notation’. To note is to attempt to retain what slips away, to record a trace before it vanishes. From de notatio — the act of marking — notation refers to the gesture, the form and its transmission. It invites reflection on the ways in which artistic research can be documented, shared and transmitted beyond academic or exhibition formats. Notation thus becomes a critical and operative tool, enabling the exploration of the epistemological potential of artistic research and its practices themselves.

The Casino Display artistic research laboratory is a para-academic and para-institutional space that fosters collective and transdisciplinary experimentation. Focused on process and the evolution of ideas, it encourages participants to engage in collaborative approaches and to challenge established frameworks of creation and knowledge production. The programme offers financial support, access to technical facilities and the opportunity to join an international network of researchers and artists.

What the programme covers

Travel and accommodation in Luxembourg
Daily allowance during research weeks
Production budget: €2,000 per participant
Access to Casino Display’s technical facilities

Eligibility criteria

Hold a Master’s degree (or equivalent)
Have obtained this degree within the six academic years preceding the 2026–2027 academic year
Be resident in the European Union

Research weeks
28 September – 2 October 2026
16 – 21 November 2026
25–29 January 2027
22–26 February 2027
29 March–2 April 2027
19–23 April 2027

Application procedure

Send an application to display@casino-luxembourg.lu including:
A short text (200–300 words) or a page of visual reflections on the theme “On Notation”
Portfolio
CV

Key dates
Application deadline: 8 May 2026 inclusive
Shortlist: 29 May 2026
Interview: date to be confirmed
Announcement of selection: 19 June 2026


The selection panel will consist of members of the Casino Display team, as well as one representative appointed by each of the partner institutions.

This post-master’s programme is developed in collaboration with:

Casino Display,
Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain,
École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Nancy (France),
École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre (Brussels, Belgium),
Haute École des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg / Mulhouse, France),
and Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (The Hague, Netherlands).

Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme

Ever since the earliest traces of human existence, writing has inhabited walls. From the walls of prehistoric caves to the political slogans on the Berlin Wall, from votive inscriptions to anonymous declarations of love, public spaces have always been a place for expression: memory, protest, projection.

The BIP ‘Called Messages, writing with matter’ proposes to reconnect with this original dimension by considering writing not as a graphic gesture, but as an embodied, spatial and sculptural act. It is no longer a matter of writing on a surface, but of writing into matter: engraving, incising, inscribing.

What does it mean today to inscribe a message into matter? How does the choice of medium (block, fragment, architecture) determine what can be said? And what voice emerges when words, stripped of the fluidity of the line, are confronted with the resistance of the material, with duration, with erosion?

Over the course of a week, around twenty students from European partner schools, trained in graphic design and typography, will work in groups to design and engrave a message intended to take its place in space. Using blocks of aerated concrete, they will compose a temporary landscape — a topography of signs — where each intervention will interact with the others, through elevation, fragmentation and tension.

Beyond the text, it is the spatial arrangement that becomes language: construction or collapse, horizontality or verticality, proximity or isolation – all parameters that shape the reading and produce meaning.

The title ‘Called Messages, writing with matter’ evokes both engraved messages and those that emerge from a specific context. Students are invited to situate their voices: from Europe, in 2026, as young designers. It is less a matter of sending a message than of taking a stand, and of accepting the significance of what is inscribed, perhaps, to last.

At a time when digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the contours of our psychological, social and symbolic lives, La Cambre continues its critical engagement with a new edition of CHAIRE A VIF, an open and vibrant space for thought at the heart of the institution.

For 2026, the chair is led by philosopher Anne Alombert and artist-researcher Judith Deschamps. Together, they propose to explore a crucial question: what becomes of the human mind in an environment saturated with technical devices capable of simulating, anticipating, or even directing our mental processes?

From Plato’s allegory of the cave to generative artificial intelligence, this series of lectures examines the contemporary transformations of our modes of attention, memory and imagination. Technologies are presented here in their inherent ambivalence: both pharmakon—remedy and poison—they open up unprecedented possibilities whilst exposing new vulnerabilities.

Bringing together philosophy, media history and artistic research-creation practices, CHAIRE À VIF 2026 invites us to consider these technologies not merely as extensions of the mind, but as sensitive environments, capable of revealing both our dependencies and the collective power of our imaginations.



Wednesday 8 April 2026 at 6.00 pm
AI at the end of life: technology, finitude, sublimation and melancholy

For this third instalment, Judith Deschamps will present her research-creation work, before engaging in a dialogue with Anne Alombert and the audience.

Contrary to the promises of infinite augmentation put forward by transhumanist discourse, this session proposes to consider artificial intelligence from the perspective of human finitude. It is no longer a question of competing with the machine, but of inventing, together with it, new forms of relationship, where our limitations become the very conditions for a new technological sensibility.

21 Abbaye de La Cambre
427 Avenue Louise
1000 Brussels

César 2026 – Best Set Design
For ‘L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche’

CATHERINE COSME
Catherine Cosme trained at the Scénographie workshop, graduating in 2005.

Find all La Cambre alumni at alumni.lacambre.be

Photography: @anais.mabl @andreasurrel @ENS_LouisLumiere
#LaCambre #WBE #LaCambreAlumni #SetDesign #LArtEnScène

‘Image Policies and Conditions of Visibility in Palestine’
Lecture by Stefanie Baumann as part of the ARES Mobilisation project*

Stefanie Baumann is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the New University of Lisbon (IFILNOVA), where she coordinates CineLab. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Paris 8 and has taught aesthetics and contemporary art theories at the University of Paris 8 (2007-2010), the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts/Beirut (2012-2015), Ashkal Alwan/Beirut (2013), the Maumaus Study Programme in Lisbon (since 2016) and the HfBK in Dresden (2023). A member of the Suspended Spaces collective, she has been collaborating for several years with artists and filmmakers (Esther Shalev-Gerz, Marie Voignier, Mounira al Solh). She recently published Voir la Palestine. Contre-champs artistiques (Lorelei, 2025). Since February 2025, she has co-directed the documentary film seminar Doc's Kingdom.

*The lecture will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

Amor 404 — emotional wandering, glitch, lost not found, bug.

Currently completing their Master's degrees at ENSAV La Cambre, six young artists from Printmaking department present their recent and ongoing work. Each artist has a unique practice that the exhibition brings into dialogue, in a space where the printed image becomes a field for sensitive and critical experimentation.

How can materiality convey affect and emotional resonance?
How can artistic practice build community and lead to action?
How can we shout out what everyone already knows?

Between love from near and far, “Amor 404” explores flaws, bugs, and impulses, inviting visitors to discover these encounters and experiments at the Zsenne Art Lab in the heart of Brussels.

With
Nathan Bédon-Rouanet
David Cohenca
Josepha Kinsella
Sibylle Marchon
Onvs
Kenza Saleh Veschetti

Opening
February 19 / 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Exhibition
February 20 / 3:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
February 21 & 22 / 2:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.

La Cambre will be present at the SIEP (Study and Career Information Service) fair in Charleroi on 6 and 7 March 2026. Come and meet us to find out all about our courses and admission requirements.

This event is a prelude to the Open Day on 21 March, offering a first glimpse of the school and its departments.

[Graphic Design: Bureau Wolewinski]
#LaCambre #ENSAV #VisualArts #ArtSchool #ArtAndDesign

The transdisciplinary module ‘The Invention of Morel Revisited’ offers an adaptation exercise, where the story moves and is translated from one medium to another. The starting point is the science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

This novel tells the story of a person who has taken refuge on a desert island and is confronted with strange phenomena that they cannot understand or control. Between science fiction and philosophical meditation, Bioy Casares questions images, ghosts and memories, imagining, almost a century ahead of its time, a machine capable of recording and replaying memories.

The exhibition ‘The Invention of Morel’ showcases the work of students who explored these notions of space and the virtual, recording and repetition, by transposing the novel into various forms and media. This exhibition illustrates the richness of the transdisciplinary approach and the creativity used to create a dialogue between literature and contemporary practices.

"We made our voices heard, weaving together individual stories and collective narratives. We explored the female voice as an instrument of storytelling, resistance and memory, between meaningful songs and wordless sounds, creating bridges between politics, sensitivity and imagination.

Guided by artists and researchers, we listened to and recorded the sounds of our bodies and memories, learned to capture space, shape sound textures and edit our stories through collective tracks. We wrote, deconstructed, experimented with vocal improvisation and non-semantic singing, giving voice to stories of apnoea and aquatic narratives.

We drew inspiration from women of the past and present: from the feminist songs of the 1970s to the collective practices of Japanese fisherwomen and the songs associated with pearl fishing in Bahrain. We collectively invented words, rhythms and soundscapes, giving shape to a multitude of minor narratives that resonate within the greater narrative of history."


Sound works by: Julie Correia Gomes – Juliette Demaret – Salomé Dufour – Juliette Escudé – Auriane Leclercq – Amelie Pentecôte – Julie Vanhoenacker

As part of a transdisciplinary module, “Nous, Shéhérazade” is a proposal by Raffaella Crispino (FRArt – FNRS 2024 research grant), in collaboration with Maria Teresa Betancor, Barbara Demaret, Liévine Hubert, Mathilde Maillard, Stéphanie Mangez, Ioana Mandrescu and Marine Simonis.

L'homme le plus heureux du monde
Screening of the film by Teona Strugar Mitevska, 2022
(In the presence of the director)

Sarajevo, present day. Asja, 40, single, has signed up for a speed-dating event to meet new people. She is introduced to Zoran, a banker her age. However, Zoran is not looking for love, he is looking for forgiveness.

This fifth film in the Territoires subjectifs cycle, a work of fiction, explores how our relationship with territory is constructed and deconstructed, by combining representations and imaginaries. Travelling through these territories — whether geographical or bodily, and always marked by political issues — opens up a space for recognition of voices and narratives that are often invisible.

The ecology of the mind in the age of artificial intelligence

CHAIRE À VIF is an open chair at La Cambre, consisting of a series of lectures throughout the academic year. Each edition is entrusted to a European personality who stands out in the artistic, academic, societal or scientific fields, thus offering a space for critical and creative reflection at the heart of the institution.

Led by Anne Alombert and artist-researcher Judith Deschamps, the next series of lectures analyses the metamorphoses of our minds in the age of digital technologies, from Plato's allegory of the cave to generative artificial intelligence. These devices reorganise our memories, our attention and our symbolic environments, proving to be both remedy and poison, instruments of emancipation and vectors of fragility. Philosophy, media history and artistic research and creation come together to rethink these technologies, not as mere prostheses of the mind, but as sensitive partners revealing our vulnerabilities and the richness of our collective imaginations.

We are cyborgs.
We invite you to our cyborg tale.
With sound, let’s invent a cyborgian language.

With works by Salomé Abbou, Marie Ardilouze, Diana Bulai Paun, Nestor Dauchez, Félice Decleire, Tom Deplagne, Sacha Giot, Dominic Hughes, Quentin Kobia, Clotilde Martins Dias, Hava Ollitrault, Laëtitia Sigogne, Clémence Thomas. 

All works were composed in the frame of the Création Sonore et Musique Expérimentale course at the ENSAV La Cambre, in collaboration with Q-O2. The course offers students a privileged framework for listening, experimentation and reflection on sound-related issues, observed through the prism of body / machine relations. 

Tutors : Julia Eckhardt, Céline Gillain, Caroline Profanter, Myriam Pruvot.

From 16 to 18 January 2026, the Sculpture Department will take over the Museum and Gallery at Botanique to present ‘19 works, 19 incidents’.

Incidents that appear insignificant but are capable of causing disorder and shaking up the established order.

Each work is both poetic and political, conveying instability and transformation, a receptacle for emotions and stories. Each piece asserts itself as a deliberate accident, emerging in a hybrid and complex universe, conducive to movement, action, construction and doubt.

The exhibition ‘19 works 19 incidents’ unfolds as a field of experimentation and questioning, where art acts through disruption, displacement and revelation.

Flore Ascencio – Charlotte Barreyre – Louison De Wit – Alexandra Duliere – Christophe-André Garrec – Suzon Garcia – Eve Julia Gonzalez – Stefano Gringeri – Louis Lemaire – Leo Marybrasse – Monica Piloni – Quentin Plazar – Shanti Rey Fayet – Louis-Lamine Sadio – Elliott Schott – Maciej Strupczewski – Klara Tham – Raymond Vandenbos – Joseph Vincent

Pedagogical staff
Claude Cattelain & Nancy Casielles (curators) – Nine Perris – Geoffroy De Volder – Philippe Le Docte

#Visualartsindanger

Following the announcement of the closure of several major cultural institutions, most of which are dedicated to contemporary visual arts, and in anticipation of the sectoral demonstration on 15 December 2025, the professional federations of the Belgian visual arts are sounding a new alarm in response to a series of announcements at all levels of federal, community and municipal government — the scale, simultaneity and social consequences of which suggest a structural challenge to the very existence of the sector.

Press release #Visualartsindanger (in french)

The exhibition ‘Faire feu’ (Fire Away) is the result of a cross-disciplinary module taught at La Cambre, bringing together fourteen students from the ceramics, urban space, interior design, engraving and printmaking, text and literary creation, painting, drawing, scenography, and visual and graphic communication workshops. Entitled ‘Les Troisième geste’ (The Third Gesture), this transdisciplinary educational module was initiated and coordinated by Darren Roshier and Mélanie Peduzzi. Milady Renoir, Crecha Gomes Da Silva, Sabine Sil, Antoine Fallon and Tiphanie Blanc were the educational contributors.

The ecology of the mind in the age of artificial intelligence: machines, memories and powers

Anne Alombert
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Paris 8

From the emergence of computer science and cybernetics in the late 1950s to the ‘generative artificial intelligences’ and chatbots that have now invaded our societies, via the Internet, the web, search engines and social networks, digital technologies are now omnipresent in all spheres of our existence, transforming our psychic lives and mental capacities as well as our political lives and collective institutions.

While transhumanist ideologies swear by the exponential progress of ‘digital minds’ and the myth of ‘technological singularity’, we should instead be questioning what these industrial devices are doing to our individual and collective minds and to our idiomatic and cultural singularities. To do so, we need to adopt an ecological and pharmacological perspective, which considers the mind through its relationship with techno-symbolic environments, which serve as a support for memory and knowledge, but which can also short-circuit and threaten them – like pharmakon, a Greek term meaning both remedy and poison.

During the first two lectures, we propose to draw on this ecological and pharmacological perspective to analyse the challenges posed by two digital technologies that are widely used today: commercial social networks and their recommendation algorithms on the one hand, and so-called ‘generative artificial intelligence’ and chatbots on the other. These two technologies, used extensively and daily by millions of individuals, serve as cognitive prostheses and reconfigure our public spaces and symbolic environments: they raise unprecedented questions for the future of our mental health and our democratic systems. In order to understand these issues from a historical perspective, we will revisit the pharmacological dimension of media technologies: from alphabetic writing to algorithmic writing machines, via printing, photography, phonography, radio, cinema, television, digital data and computer calculations, we will see how technological developments have influenced the evolution of our minds and societies – for better or for worse.

The final lecture will provide an opportunity to examine these questions in relation to the research and creative work of artist Judith Deschamps, who explores the positive potential of digital pharmaka by integrating them into artistic and collective projects that involve embodied and sensory practices of artificial intelligence. Contrary to transhumanist and techno-solutionist imaginaries, Judith Deschamps' work shows that algorithmic machines can also give rise to experiences of sublimation, which question the vulnerability and finitude of our living bodies and open up new symbolic environments.

Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo and a rapidly expanding cultural hub, is seeing a new phase in the structuring of creative professions. In collaboration with La Cambre and the Faculty of Architecture of the ULB, the University of Lubumbashi (UNILU) is implementing a Design programme designed to link local realities with international standards.