BORDER BUDA

Border Buda has called it a day. Right before the switch into 2026, we closed three years of artistic actions with a speculative proposal to transform the ground floor of the former factory of the Fonderies Bruxelloises, one of the very last empty buildings in public property at the heart of historic Buda, into a porous public space. With Doubled Double Door, Laura Muyldermans @lauramuyldermans.info , Bert Gellynck @bertgellynck , Inge Vinck @vinckinge , Pieterjan Ginckels @pieterjanginckels , Verena Lenna @verenalenna , Fabienne Girsberger @fabryayo & Els Silvrants-Barclay @elsvis drew their proposal on Fobrux’ actual walls, doors & floors in a 1:1 installation. We gathered for a magical evening to inhabit it & test it out. Nick Von Kleist @nk_vk cooked, Jean-Loup Cools @coolsjeanloup served propertea, Sarah Smolders @smolders_sarah printed with the upstairs press, Cie Radix & local youngsters made a film, Lucile Desamory @luciledesamory gave us light & fiction & with Radio Fantome @radio_fantome we made live radio with local policymakers & the involved architects and artists. It was the perfect closure for a fantastic three years that would not have been possible without the support of the involved municipalities, partners, the funding of the Flemish Community and all the invited artists, architects, radiomakers, curators and the other ghosts. Doubled Double Door is also our entry for the current open call for interest to develop Fobrux issued by its public owner POM @vlaamsbrabant . We could not leave the premise before concretely engaging with what might come next. Lets hope that the ghosts of Buda and the beautiful cracks that they have made their own, will have a say. We are already in it. 🔥 Beautiful images by @ritamariahabib except image 10 by @miguel_steel_lebre Border Buda was initiated & coordinated by Sarah Demoen.

Upcoming Doubled Double Door Fri Dec 5, 4-10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) To close the three-year Border Buda trajectory, we set up Radio Fantôme’s live radio platform for two exciting round table discussions. Who do we design our cities and buildings for, and why? What can areas such as Buda teach and learn us, beyond the stereotypes of ‘empty’ and ‘ugly’? Together we discuss and speculate on expected, and less expected futures for Buda. We are very excited that both Alderman Didier Cortois and Alderman Frederik Ceulemans, in charge of Urban Renewal for the City of Vilvoorde and the City of Brussels respectively, will join the opening conversation at 5:30 pm, together with architects and experts. Join us live on Fobrux or tune in on Radio Fantome’s live player on radio-fantome.be or via link in bio. 5:30-6:30 pm: Doubled Double Front Door: ‘Developing’ Buda – on development, optimisation and the ghosts behind the factory walls. With Frederik Ceulemans, Didier Cortois, Andreas de Boer, Bert Gellynck, Pieterjan Ginckels, Els Silvrants-Barclay & Jan Zaman (In Dutch) 7-8 pm: Doubled Double Back Door: ‘Developing’ Fobrux – on opacity, normativity and the building speaking back. With Roeland Dudal, Bert Gellynck, Pieterjan Ginckels, Laura Muyldermans & Inge Vinck. (In English) @visitvilvoorde @radio_fantome Image 3-5 & 9-10 credit @1010au for Buda+

Upcoming Doubled Double Door Fri Dec 5, 4-10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) Our 1:1 spatial intervention inviting to ‘rehearse’ our proposal to transform Fobrux’s ground floor as a porous public space is well under way. This intervention is also the in-situ contribution of Border Buda to the ongoing open call by POM, the investment company of the province of Vlaams Brabant that owns the building, currently seeking partners for reconversion. Join us this upcoming Friday from 4 to 10 pm! Doubled double door is a collaboration between Laura Muyldermans @lauramuyldermans.info , Bert Gellynck @bertgellynck @1010au , Pieterjan Ginckels @pieterjanginckels , Verena Lenna & Inge Vinck @vinckinge @architectenjdviv , with Fabienne Girsberger @fabryayo & Els Silvrants-Barclay @elsvis More info on the rest of the Doubled Double Door programme of performances, interventions, live radio broadcasts and the free winter dinner at @borderbuda

Upcoming Doubled Double Door Fri Dec 5, 4-10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) As part of Doubled Double Door, Jean-Loup Cools @coolsjeanloup will serve us a taste of Fobrux with a cup of ProperTea. If we experience architecture through all our senses, why only use visual renders and representations of it? Architecture is already in our heads, what happens when it enters our bodies? More info on the rest of the Doubled Double Door programme of performances, interventions, live radio broadcasts and the free winter dinner online via link in bio. @visitvilvoorde

Upcoming Doubled Double Door Fri Dec 5, 4-10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) Join us for a homemade vegetarian dinner prepared by artist, performer and cook nvk @nk_vk from 6 pm on, set in the 1:1 installation rehearsing Fobrux’ ground floor as a ghostly public space. After preparing a legendary swamp soup for The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet last June, nvk now attunes to the winter and Fobrux’s firey legacy, with smoky sweet potato, pumpkin & potato gnocchi with a charred broccoli rabe sauce and a salsa macha. Likely some extra smoky vegetables on the BBQ. Pay what you can & bring your friends and families! We will warm up the tile shop, but not the rest of Fobrux, so make sure to dress warm. There will be stools available to sit wherever and with whomever you want to share the meal, or eat on the go, as you dwell around. Enrolling via the link in bio helps us anticipate, but you’re also welcome to just show up! nvk (nick von kleist) creates multidisciplinary work exploring themes and formats that combine poetry and drag with gaming subcultures. Their work rejects the singularity and fixedness of identity, showing its mutability, porousness and dialogic need for an other. Through performance and video, nvk examines how the interface manifests both physically and virtually, questioning what its design, codes and filters are producing both within and between us. More info on the rest of the Doubled Double Door programme of performances, interventions and live radio broadcasts online via link in bio. @visitvilvoorde @nk_vk

Upcoming Doubled Double Door Fri Dec 5, 4-10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) As part of Doubled Double Door, the fantastic installation Moving Image of Lucile Desamory, originally commissioned for The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, will be on view for the last time. Set in a former tile shop that temporarily moved into Fobrux’s ground floor, Moving Image casts doubt on what we see and where we find ourselves. Where does the artwork begin, and where does the surrounding space end? The tension between set and reality makes us reflect on the status of images — whether they are found or staged — and on how this shapes our experience of them. Lucile Desamory @luciledesamory is interested in the frontiers of perception, in the ‘too much’, the falsified – in the spurned narratives. This interest in marginal phenomena always requires changing the medium. We will inhabit Lucile’s installation with @radio_fantome organising two live radio broadcasts. Full programme with info on other interventions and performances, including a warm winter dinner, on our website via the link in bio. Image credits 1 & 2 Kristien Daem 3 Els Silvrants-Barclay

Doubled Double Door Fri 5/12 2025, from 4 to 10 pm Fobrux, Schaarbeeklei 700, Vilvoorde (Buda) Closing Border Buda, we invite you to gather, eat and talk one last time in Fobrux, rehearsing Buda’s “right to opacity” as winter settles in. In an outskirt like Buda, many prefer to remain unseen. Yet even ghosts need places to meet. Could Fobrux — a silent former foundry behind a lonely bus stop — become a new point of arrival, where old and new Buda ghosts can mingle on their own terms? Architects Laura Muyldermans, Bert Gellynck, Pieterjan Ginckels, Verena Lenna and Inge Vinck present a 1:1 spatial intervention tied to their proposal to transform Fobrux’ ground floor into a porous public space, where the pavement, the bus stop, the backyard, a set of doors and some mud and chickens make up the plot. With this proposition, they also test whether a collective, non-hierarchical design method can produce more layered and manifold architectures. Within this setting, Nick Von Kleist cooks a warm winter meal, local teenagers screen a film made in Fobrux, Jean-Loup Cools harvests and serves ProperTea and artist Sarah Smolders puts an abandoned silkscreen press to the test. Lucile Desamory’s installation Moving Image hosts two live Radio Fantôme broadcasts, inviting architects, artists, planners, policy makers, politicians and developers to return to the question: who do we develop our cities and buildings for, and why? What can brownfields like Buda teach and tell us? More info and programme on our website via link in bio.

👀 Final throwback The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet 🌱 Closing The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet last June, as well our series of throwbacks, was the magical performance by the Japanese artist, composer and performer Tomoko Hojo. Invisible presences and forgotten memories lingering in a liminal field were evoked through the ephemeral mediums of breath and wind, transmitted through live radio. Subtle sounds—voices, insect calls, bells, chanting and instruments made from the site’s soil and wind — unfolded as a ritual to summon what once was, or may soon vanish. Tomoko Hojo listens to the hidden voices in history and makes them audible in different ways, at the intersection between sound, music and performance. Credits: Composition: Tomoko Hojo Performers: Fabian Schoog @schoogfabian , Charles Monnier @bambi_stp & Tomoko Hojo Musical instrument: Kosi Hidama @kosihidama Costume Design: Fabian Schoog Aeolian Harp Recording: Yamato Sekiguchi (une) Technical help: Kota Hori Special Thanks to Tomoko’s father (buddhist monk), James Umansky, Kyushu University Acoustic Design Course Photo’s: @ritamariahabib & image of the instruments @remigi0s

👀 Throwback The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet Sarah Smolders @smolders_sarah handles the conditions in which space is created, viewed and experienced — through time, movement, and memory. Site-specific gestures and painterly actions invite different ways of looking and moving. They form a spatial vocabulary to read and touch upon new places, as a practice in which ‘work’ appears both as labour and as artistic form. For The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, we re-installed the waterwheel of Time, Set in Stone, a work that Smolders originally made as a commission for the hydraulic laboratory of Borgerhout. A monumental waterwheel polishes a local stone for a longer period of time, but is eventually dismantled with only the polished stone remaining as an imprint of time. With this work, Smolders not only refers to the history of the mills and stonecutters in Buda, but also questions the tension between sculpture and sculptor, artistic and mechanical labor, and their relationship to time. A new work called Veldwerk (field work) consisted of a series of hand-made casts of spatial elements of the nearby former factory of Fobrux, placed in the soil of the field, and made with locally recycled aluminium. By relating the industrial production of Fobrux with the ways land and landscapes are appropriated, Smolders also pointed at the soil pollution that imprints itself again and again through the waters of the swampy field. The casts were placed as a sentence in the field to also invite to look at the environment beyond the work itself. Time, Set in Stone was made possible with the support of @buda_bxl , PSR / Jan De Nul & the Balegro stone quarry in Oosterzele, and was developed and built up in close collaboration with @thwrkshp Image credits: Kristien Daem, Rita Maria Habib & Remi Verstraete

👀 Throwback The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet 🌱 On the afternoon of Sunday June 22, @ezraveldhuis and @bosseprovoost presented HIKER (map) as the first outdoor iteration of a new project in which the whole world of the performance (scenography, light, sound, fictions, unsuspected images, shapes and volumes) emerges from a figure packed with hiking gear, due to premiere in 2026. In HIKER (map) taking place in a field in Buda, the boundaries between body, landscape and hiking gear blur through negotiation with an 18m² map. Inspired by writer Robert Macfarlanes’ notion of “deep time”, the map shows the landscape as we know it, but also glances at the folds of the past and the belches of the future. Concept and creation: Bosse Provoost, Ezra Veldhuis Creation and performance: Bavo Buys @holysaintbavo Design map: Mathieu Serruys, Joris Verdoodt Sound design: Benjamin Cools Thanks to: Els Silvrants-Barclay, Sabine Cmelniski @hiros.be * 💥 Through com­po­si­ti­ons of light shifts, sound pat­ches, and silen­ces, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost cre­a­te ever-chan­ging spa­ces popu­la­ted by semi-human-loo­king figu­res, ener­gi­zing theatre spaces into ‘envi­ron­ments’. Poetry not only lies at the basis of most of their work (Paul Celan, Inger Christensen, Richard Brautigan), they also construct their per­for­man­ces fol­lo­wing poe­tic prin­ci­ples, as sce­nic poems. Image credits @ritamariahabib

👀 Throwback The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet Throughout the entire weekend, @radio_fantome organised live radio broadcasts in various places in Buda: in a bar, on a field, at @buda_bxl and in a special radio studio set up in the former Fobrux factory. These live broadcasts included spoken word, interviews and discussions, live DJ-sets and concerts, as well as collective listening sessions and assemblies, uniting artists, researchers, musicians, radio makers, activists, lawyers, inmates, youngsters, historians, urbanists, architects, biologists, politicians, policy makers and many other ghosts in and around Buda. Next to the live sessions, Radio Fantôme compiled and commissioned various recorded contributions, making up a full-day online radio programme running the entire festival, with people tuning in from all over the world. 🎧 Find all info and listen again on the @radio_fantome website. With the wonderful support by @ccollective.cc and @ritcs.school.of.arts All images by Rita Maria Habib @ritamariahabib

👀 Throwback The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet On Saturday June 21, @olahassanain performed The Watcher, a lecture in which she highlighted how a state of uninhabitability has been propped and maintained as a continuous cycle of catastrophes across Sudan and The Netherlands. A sonic and visual score, embodied by the character of The Watcher, proposed ‘watching’ as a possible space to inhabit, to circumvent the foreclosure on our relationships to material environment, compromised under conditions of ecological erasure and eviction. It was a vital and moving contribution that remains incredibly relevant in the current moment. 💥 Ola Hassanain’s artistic practice moves through architecture, film, performance and installation to reflect on how power becomes visible—and felt—through built environments. She engages with places shaped by climate instability, postcolonial legacies, and displacement, and reflects on how spatial technologies and infrastructures—retaining walls, thresholds, irrigation networks—are implicated in broader politics of control and erasure. Ola points out that they do not merely manage movement and resources, but also bodies and histories. Watching the debris and the cracks of these systems, cycles and histories becomes a form of responsibility — of bearing witness to both environmental and political catastrophe, and of resistance — of staying with the trouble of what it means to live within unstable ground. All images by Rita Maria Habib @ritamariahabib