October 1–November 15, 2026
La Cambre-Horta Faculty of Architecture at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
Brussels
The exhibition Le Ventre de la Ville (The Belly of the City), curated by architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska, treats food as an active political and spatial infrastructure.
The project abandons the neutral space of the gallery, splintering directly into the fabric of Brussels, from the migrant market halls of Foodmet in Anderlecht to the private apartments of the diaspora in Ixelles. These dispersed locations make it possible to map informal economies, logistical systems, and the nomadic trajectories of flavours that circulate between Eastern and Western Europe.
The works of the invited artists operate as tools for mapping the foodscape of the Polish diaspora. They delve into Brussels herbaria, Polish grocery stores, street stalls, and delivery vans, revealing the existence of a “shadow architecture”: grassroots survival strategies, practices of hospitality, and food micropolitics that help shape a multicultural reality.
One hundred and fifty years after Émile Zola defined Paris’s Les Halles as a soulless machine of consumption in the novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), contemporary cities are grappling with new forms of food-related and spatial discrimination. In the creators’ view, the struggle for food sovereignty and the building of local community resilience cease to be theoretical postulates and become a necessary exercise in radical imagination and a daily practice. The exhibition asks how to reconfigure the systems of distribution and nourishment in the contemporary territory of a city inhabited by multicultural communities.
In October and November across Brussels
Throughout October, works by the artists appear in Brussels’ public space: at a market, in Polish grocery shops and on the streets. Centrum Centrum (Łukasz Jastrubczak and Małgorzata Mazur) distribute posters, printed tote bags and the audio play “When the Cucumber Eats the Snail” at the Abattoir d’Anderlecht market and in Polish shops, as well as in the herbarium of the Polish Catholic Community in Binche. Karolina Jabłońska’s paintings can be seen on a van that transports food from Poland to Polish grocery shops in Brussels. At the Kubuś shop on Rue Malibran, Krzysztof Kaczmarek presents the video “Instant Cabbage” at the checkout, and in the window of the Kofiko shop on Chaussée d’Ixelles, Agnieszka Kurant presents the installation “Currency Converter”.
Conference, October 30
The exhibition is accompanied by the academic conference “New Foodscapes” (Nowe Krajobrazy Jedzenia), taking place on 30 October at the La Cambre-Horta Faculty of Architecture at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). It will bring together students, theorists, urban researchers, architects and landscape architects, and art and farming collectives. The conference is organised in partnership by the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIAiU), Shadow Architecture, the La Cambre-Horta Faculty of Architecture at ULB, and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW).
Accompanying events, October 30–31
As part of the Belly of the City project, we will invite you to a home in Ixelles, where for two days food becomes a subject of art, architecture and shared experience. The programme includes an exhibition of works by Dawid Misiorny, Aleksandra Nowysz and Aleksandra Wasilkowska, as well as a model of the “The Belly of Warsaw”, a vision of an urban food hub. Pola Sutryk invites you to the performative “A Moldy Feast” in a home vegetable garden. Slavs and Tatars open a pop-up Pickle Bar with performances by Łukasz Jastrubczak and Filipka Rutkowska, and workshops for children led by Ala Savashevich. You can also see Janek Simon selling non-existent fruit at a Brussels market.
Artists: Centrum Centrum, Karolina Jabłońska, Krzysztof Kaczmarek, Agnieszka Kurant, Dawid Misiorny, Aleksandra Nowysz, Janek Simon, Pola Sutryk, Slavs and Tatars, Ala Savashevich, Filipka Rutkowska, Aleksandra Wasilkowska.
The project was co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland under the programme Inspiring Culture 2025–26.
