ACT workshop
At the Faculty of Architecture at ULB La Cambre–Horta, Super Imaginaire participated at the invitation of the ACT workshop (Artistic, Corporeal, and Transdisciplinary)—led by Ines Camacho and Maud De Rijck—a transversal studio between architecture and ethnology. ACT examines future rituals as operators of thresholds, social reconnection, and the reconfiguration of collective imaginaries. The workshop explores architecture’s potential to activate forms of resilience—both human and non-human—capable of responding to contemporary ecological, social, and symbolic crises. Research is grounded in a study area located between the former Audi factories in Forest and the southern outskirts of the Brussels region (Drogenbos–Ruisbroek), conceived as a field of historical, ecological, and political forces.
In this context, Super Imaginaire proposed a research-creation protocol, employing sensitive wandering, shamanic practices, visualization, and clair-sensing as tools for expanded perception applied to architecture and territory. These practices enabled the exploration of non-ordinary realities, integrating dimensions of the world usually rendered invisible and omitted from conventional project methodologies.
Trees, the Senne River, and landscape elements were approached as subjects in their own right. Students were invited to engage in dialogue with the site’s elements, exploring their ecological memories, their roles in the Senne’s hydrological cycles, and their part in the territory’s transition dynamics—breaking away from extractivist logics and dominant planning approaches.
This work led to the development of gestures of care, both material and symbolic.
The Senne River—a waterway historically vaulted and instrumentalized by Brussels’ urban policies—was envisioned as a living body, bearer of ecological and social memory. The question “What does the Senne need today?” served as a scenario during a workshop, opening a critical space to explore the interdependencies between infrastructures, narratives, environmental violence, and imaginaries of repair.
The intervention incorporated a practice of sensitive cartography, designed as an embodied research method. This approach does not aim for objective spatial representation, but rather for the production of situated narratives arising from participants’ bodily, sensory, and emotional experiences. It engages both body and imagination, enabling the mapping of spaces through an expanded lens.
Cartography thus becomes a threshold between ordinary and non-ordinary realities, between academic knowledge and situated knowledges. Artistic creation is framed as an act that is simultaneously poetic, political, and ritualistic: a practice of regeneration and re-enchantment of the territory, embedded in a collective inquiry into the contemporary conditions of inhabiting the world.
