CONTOUR SERIES #3: First Floor

From June 3 to 7, kunstencentrum nona presents the fifth edition of BROEK, an open-air festival unfolding across Vrijbroekpark in Mechelen and bringing together site-specific theatre and dance performances alongside the first exhibition to be presented at the iconic Hotel Ruin. The festival opens with the premiere of Middenstip by nona’s social-artistic project Stamppot, and continues throughout the weekend with works by Femke & Lander Gyselinck, Jan Martens, Thomas Vantuycom, Lisa Vereertbrugghen, and Alexander Vantournhout, alongside the family performance BOS (8+) by BRONKS. Opening on June 5 and continuing throughout the summer, CONTOUR SERIES #3: First Floor. Contemporary art between walls and moss brings together works by contemporary artists in a setting where architecture, nature, and history converge.

Conceived in the early 1970s as an ambitious eighteen-storey hotel and congress complex, the building was never completed. After only two floors were realised, construction was halted and the investors withdrew. What remained was a raw concrete skeleton, standing in the marshy landscape shaped centuries ago by the river Zenne. Over time, the structure was gradually reclaimed by its surroundings. Birch and willow took root in the sandy soil, a pond formed in a former extraction pit, and bats, beavers and countless other species made the site their habitat. Later, generations of street artists—among them Dzia, Manonina, Tuch and Gijs Vanhee—left their marks on the vast concrete surfaces, adding yet another layer to its evolving identity

Far from being a nostalgic relic, the Hotel Ruin is a living platform in constant transformation. First Floor embraces this state of incompleteness, in which human intervention and ecological succession actively coexist. The participating artists—Claude Cattelain, Jana Coorevits, Sien Custers, Lola Daels, Maëlle Dufour, Sina Hensel, Hannah Lyssens, Kato Six, Luca Vanello, Erien Withouck—present works that interact directly with the architecture and draw inspiration from the surrounding environment. Their practices are research-driven and process-based, sensitive to materials and aware of space. Through sculptures, installations and site-specific interventions, they question our environmental and spatial perceptions. 

The open concrete spaces, once intended for hotel rooms and conference halls, house works that echo, infiltrate, or subtly disturb the architecture. First Floor privileges fragility over monumentality and process over permanence. Many of the works inhabit in-between states, while others trace the often invisible presence of animals and natural processes. Some interventions accentuate the tension between fragility and mass, introducing textiles, organic matter, or recycled materials into the rigid grid of columns and beams. In the Hotel Ruin, interruption has become a terrain of coexistence and adaptation. With First Floor, the site opens once more as a framework for artistic dialogue. Here, art, nature and architecture meet in their unfinished state, inviting visitors to move slowly, look closely and reconsider what it means to build, to inhabit and to leave space for what might emerge.

CONTOUR SERIES #3: First Floor. Contemporary art between walls and moss
With works by Claude Cattelain, Jana Coorevits, Sien Custers, Lola Daels, Maëlle Dufour, Sina Hensel, Hannah Lyssens, Kato Six, Luca Vanello, Erien Withouck.

Curator: Andrea Cinel

First Floor. Contemporary art between walls and moss is part of Contour Series, a series of visual and audiovisual exhibitions and projects produced and presented by kunstencentrum nona, this time in the context of the outdoor festival BROEK.

In collaboration with the Vrijbroek Park. With the kind support of the National Lottery, Van Dievel Transport and Kunsthal Mechelen. kunstencentrum nona thanks the players of the National Lottery and the National Lottery for their support to the BROEK festival.