Maëlle Dufour’s Capsule and Outre-Tombe bring an organic, introspective dimension tothe Botanique park. With kaleidoscopic reflective surfaces and dynamic light effects,these monumental works capture and transform their surroundings, creating a shiftingdialogue between nature and artifice. As night falls, they evolve—interacting with thefading daylight and the festival’s illuminations. This striking contrast invites visitors toslow down, pause, and immerse themselves in the flow of sound.
Maëlle Dufour creates monumental works that explore the evolution and memory of civilizations, balancing decadence and renewal. Using a combination of raw and recycled materials, she constructs immersive sculptural landscapes where past, present, and future converge. Straddling the line between archaeological remnants and dystopian visions, her work questions the traces left for future generations and theresilience of humanity.
Her art unfolds through a striking interplay of materials—clay, mud, bluestone, ceramics, waste, lead plates, rectangular mirrors, and vibrant red blown glass. It takes shape inmonumental ruins, lunar volcanic landscapes, and narrow watchtowers. The physicalencounter with her work is often unsettling; its sheer scale and weight, far exceeding human proportions, serve as a constant reminder of our own fragility and insignificance.
Through her sculptural installations, Dufour interrogates new technologies while drawing from the wealth of knowledge inherited from ancient societies. She challenges theorigins, memory, and history of our material world, situating her work at the thres hold of appearance and disappearance. Her art resonates with lived experiences—inevitablyfading with time. Beyond borders, stories, and cultures, she examines the impermanence of civilizations. Yet, within these cycles, she sketches a future wherehope and resilience endure.
The Hell'O collective takes over the glass roofs of the Rotonde, dressing the space witha vibrant graphic composition. By day, their colourful vinyls cast a brilliant light,transforming the interior of the room into a luminous fresco, while in the evening, thecolours projected onto the terraces of the Botanique extend this chromatic immersion.Their visual language, composed of dreamlike geometries, naturally complements themusical world, subtly weaving connections between sound and image.
Hell'O, the Brussels-based duo formed in 2008 by Jérôme Meynen and Antoine Detaille, creates works that blend painting, drawing, mural frescoes, and graphic design. Their art, where figuration and abstraction intertwine, plunges the viewer into a dreamlikeuniverse where humanity and nature meet, confront, and transform one another. Through anthropomorphic figures and surreal landscapes, they explore the relationshipbetween humans and their environment, creating works filled with symbolism and visual poetry.
Moving away from their graffiti origins, where they abandoned letters and spray paint tofocus on ink drawing, paper painting, and more recently sculpture and installations, Hell'O has developed a shared pictorial vocabulary that is both rich and complex. Their creative approach, marked by a unique freedom and a meticulous execution, brings tolife an imaginary and fertile world, sometimes grotesque but always imbued with poetry.Their works, depicting an odd bestiary populated by enigmatic animals and inhuman,asexual creatures, blend influences from the fantastic realm: from the iconography offairy tales and mythologies to esoteric symbols, vanities, and surrealism. These figuresare adorned with forms and symbols that evoke both cruelty and hope, death andfrivolity, failure and optimism.
Through short narrative sequences and a satirical touch, Hell'O tackles human weaknesses, combining metaphysical reflection and pure nonsense. Their compositions, oscillating between mystery and free interpretation, challenge certaintieswhile leaving ample space for the imagination. The very name of the duo, "Hell'O", 7embodies this duality: both joyful and macabre, amusing and frightening, sentimental and dreamy, morbid and alluring, absurd and meaningful – their work constantly plays with oxymorons and dichotomies. Between ambiguity and false pretences, it swings between attraction and repulsion, plunging the viewer into a paradoxically structured chaos.
A decade is not a page we turn, or a candle blown out in a breath of nostalgia. But it is a crossroads, a vibration, a way of being. Now.
La Vague Parallèle is an independent, creative and committed music media based in Brussels. Since it was created ten years ago, it has established itself as an essential platform for music lovers, with over 4,000 articles written by a group of passionate volunteers.
The exhibition space provided by the Botanique is an opportunity to celebrate all those years of running from one concert to the next, from one encounter to a happy memory. But it would be a mistake to assume that this memory is gone... Instead, it lies in the depths of the present, it's not an extension of reality like a shadow, but inhabits it and intertwines with it. This is how La Vague Parallèle exists, made up of moments that build up without ever becoming locked in, imprints left without becoming relics. It's already been ten years, and yet everything is still so vivid.
La Vague Parallèle is a movement that lives and breathes through the people who make it happen, voluntarily, passionately, stubbornly. Sharp pens, sensitive eyes, singular voices that meet, clash and sometimes blend. There is the immediacy of reporting, the patience of portraiture, the subjectivity of testimony. There's the in-depth analysis and the brilliance of poetry, the sharp criticism and the softness of a chronicle. A myriad of rhythms, energies and ways of inhabiting the world through words and images.
The webzine covers a wide range of musical genres, highlighting emerging artists as well as established names on the music scene. Its publications include in-depth interviews, reviews, live concert reports and dossiers on specific themes. This exhibition is an invitation to wander through the material gathered in the places where music is celebrated.
Why this exhibition, here and now? To be even more open and to share situated experiences. Not as a conclusion, but as a beginning. What you are about to see, what you are about to read, is not a look back over the past ten years, but a breach in the present: an invitation to look differently, to imagine the future and to join the movement.
It's a movement that artist Coline Cornelis is supporting through a special scenography and sound environment. Echoing the sensibilities and materials of the webzine, her work gives texture and a physical, sensory presence to the words and images that usually appear on our screens. Here, they take shape, resonate and weave in a new way.
As you will have understood, for us, ten years is not the end, nor is it a final assessment. These years are the proof that the impetus is there, intact, ready to reinvent itself yet again. So we're not closing the book. Let's open it a little wider...
6:00 PM: Doors open
Throughout the evening: free access to installations by Maëlle Dufour (Park), Hell’o (Rotunda), and the exhibition by La Vague Parallèle (Gallery).
Billy Bultheel lives and works between Berlin and Brussels. His experimental compositions merge contemporary music with Medieval and Renaissance polyphony, creating site-specific performances where musicians interact dynamically with architecture, sculpture, and custom-built instruments.
A Short History of Decay draws inspiration from Romanian existentialist Emil M. Cioran’s 1949 book of the same title, a collection of bleak yet poignant aphorisms on topics like fanaticism, religion, music, and the nature of progress. Written in the grim aftermath of WWII, Cioran’s work resonates as a critique of fascism, idolization, and the chaotic potentials of human nature.
A Short History of Decay divides the audience into two unequal groups, each with a different vantage point on the performance. A small group is invited to take a seat at the table close to the musicians, while the larger group is guided to seats surrounding a towering instrument that resonates and amplifies the organ tones of the performance. Throughout the performance, the musicians act as mediators, navigating the space between these two groups. By interacting with both the people at the privileged table and the instrument, which serves as a beacon amidst a sea of people, the musicians create a poetic interplay between sound, space, and audience.
The performance is punctuated by three monologues displayed on a screen on stage. Like speeches at demonstrations or sermons, these anonymous talking heads share found texts, anecdotes, and poetry reflecting on Berlin's current political climate. The texts are inspired by Emil Cioran, Henri Michaux, and Constantine P. Cavafy, writers who were active in the early 20th century, around the rise of fascism. Written in collaboration with Edwin Nasr, a Lebanese writer and curator recently disenfranchised by the German system for speaking out against the Israeli onslaught on Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, the texts will be rewritten and re-recorded for future performances to address the geo-political context of the venue.
Bultheel’s title also nods to his historic instrument-building practice, which examines resonators found in the walls of medieval Orthodox churches. These historical psycho-acoustical relics, originally used to regulate and harmonize church reverb in resonance with Gregorian church modes, are re-appropriated to create a unique auditory experience. Gaia Heichal assisted Bultheel in the instrument research and construction for AShort History of Decay. The scenography was developed in collaboration with Andrea Belosi.
Bultheel’s compositions feel like relics themselves—soothing and alarming at the same time. On one hand, they reinterpret ancient Gregorian melodies, re-adapted for strings to resonate in full brightness within the ancient resonators of the instrument. On the other hand, driving blast beats and screaming distortion introduce dissonance, as the complex isometric canons create palpable tension among the instrumentalists. This duality encapsulates Bultheel’s signature style. A Short History of Decay is performed by an ensemble of five musicians, combining strings, piano, flute, voice, and electronic elements. Collaborators include Caleb Salgado on bass, Adam Sinclaire on flute, soprano Hannah Endrulat, and cellist Chloe Lula. Andrea D’Arsie supports Bultheel with electronics.
Billy Bultheel’s previous works include The Thief’s Journal at Atonal Berlin (2023), Workers in Song at WIELS, Brussels (2023), and Mt. Analogue at the Pinault Collection in Paris (2023). His ongoing explorations have brought his music to diverse platforms, including collaborations with artists like Anne Imhof, for whom he composed for Faust (2017) and Sex (2019). Additionally, he has created music for choreographers and theatre productions across Europe. A compilation of pieces created between 2016 and 2023 was released on PAN Records under the album title Two Cycles in 2024.
