🗓️ July 1 – September 3, 2023
Various indoor and outdoor locations throughout the village
📍Watou, Poperinge, West Flanders, Belgium
◆Kunstenfestival Watou 2023◆
Kunstenfestival Watou is an annual summer arts festival that transforms the small Belgian border village of Watou into a vibrant meeting place for contemporary art and poetry. Over the course of two months, visitors wander between historic buildings, barns, private homes, former breweries, and open-air sites, encountering artworks and literary installations carefully placed in dialogue with their surroundings.
The 2023 edition brought together Belgian and international artists, writers, and poets, inviting them to respond to the village’s unique rural atmosphere and cultural history. The festival is known for blurring the boundaries between disciplines, encouraging crossovers between visual arts, literature, sound, and performance. Each location offers a different sensory and emotional experience, often combining site-specific artworks with poetic texts in multiple languages.
By weaving contemporary creativity into the architectural fabric of Watou, the festival offers a reflective yet immersive journey for visitors, connecting art with themes such as identity, human relationships, and the changing rural landscape. Its intimate scale, slow pace, and emphasis on discovery have made Kunstenfestival Watou a distinctive cultural event in Flanders, attracting both local audiences and international guests each year.
CYLAND’s artist, curator, and artistic advisor Alexandra Dementieva will participate in the Watou Arts Festival 2023, Poperinge, Belgium.
The festival will take place from 1 July to 3 September 2023 and is given /kom.po’zi.ci.o:/ as its baseline. Thirty artists and twenty poets will ‘compose’ new in situ work. This year, the arts festival surprises with several new venues, a podcast with Jelle Van Riet, and a poetry cycle route with war poems.
Alexandra Dementieva will show a combination of works (Twin Dephts, 2018; Source of Energy, 2021; Their Portraits, 2023) in which she comments on environmental and other problems resulting from human actions. In doing so, she urges the need to find other, more sustainable ways of living, in harmony with nature.
Curators: Edith Doove and Michaël Vandebril
🎨Artists: Beatrijs Albers & Reggy Timmermans* (BE) – Niels Albers (NL) – Funda Zeynep Ayguler & Anton Filatov (DE) – Iwert Bernakiewicz (BE) – Sven Boel (BE) – Cloé Decroix* (FR) – Alexandra Dementieva* (BE) – Niel de Vries (NL) – Berlinde De Bruyckere (BE) – Griet Dobbels (BE) – Philippe Druez (BE) – Juls Gabs (UK) – Benoît Géhanne* (FR) – Marilyne Grimmer (FR) – Marc Hamandjian* (FR) – Nathalie Hunter* (BE) – Maarten Inghels (BE) – Pierre Mertens* (BE) – Charlotte Eta Mumm (DE) – Öznur Özturk (BE) – Alain Platel & Mirjam Devriendt (BE) – Jiajia Qi (CN) – Henk Schut (NL) – Robert Ssempijja (UG) – Koen Vanmechelen* (BE) – Louisiana Van Onna (NL) – Wouter Vanderstede & Peter Simon (BE) – Various Artists & Tijdelijk Informatie Centrum, afdeling Watou (BE) – Esther Venrooij* (NL) – Joris Vermassen (BE).