During Antwerp Art Weekend, Out of Sight opens Forest Encounters, a multidisciplinary group exhibition exploring diverse imaginaries, concepts, and practices related to the forest. Central to the exhibition are the questions: What can we learn from and through the forest? What are the actual and potential human encounters with it? How can we coexist more harmoniously with forest ecologies?

Bringing together perspectives from contemporary art, forestry, and the humanities, Forest Encounters approaches the forest as more than a site of ecological inquiry. It is framed as a complex socio-political terrain, shaped by conflicting policies, cultural narratives, and economic interests, while also remaining a vital, living biodiverse space.

Amid escalating climate, environmental, and political crises, the exhibition invites a critical rethinking of our relationship with forests. Acknowledging more than human perspective, Forest Encounters unfolds through artistic research projects, workshops, storytelling, and film screenings. Moving between real and imagined forests, it situates the forest as both a natural entity and a contested cultural landscape.

Participating Artists: Nayari Castillo & Reni Hofmüller, Marjolijn Dijkman, Polonca Lovšin, It Rains Differently with contributions by: Dušica Dražić, Monika Lang, Siniša Ilić, Ibis Ćerimagić, Jelena Vukićević

Program during Antwerp Art Weekend:

Thursday 29.05
• 20:00-20:30, Performance by Jelena Vukićević: Where dreams bloom in silence: Future Forests and Tasks of Reverie.

Friday 30.05
• 12:00-15:00, Workshop: Light, Language and Botanical Imagination — 2 days workshop (Day 1) Reserve your spot here.
• 16:00-17:00, Publication Launch: TOOLKIT and MOBILISING WORDS.
• 18:30-19:00, Performance by Nayarí Castillo and Reni Hofmüller: Stratifying.

Saturday 31.05
• 12:00-15:00, Workshop: Light, Language and Botanical Imagination — 2 days workshop (Day 2) Reserve your spot here.
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The Forest Encounters exhibition and parallel programme are part of the Forest Encounters project (2023–2025), co-funded by the European Union (Creative Europe), Flanders – State of the Art, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Brussels.
Partner organisations: Association Igor Zabel for Culture and Theory (Slovenia), Graz University of Technology – Faculty of Architecture, Institute of Spatial Design (Austria), Out of Sight (Belgium).

On the first day of Antwerp Art Weekend, for the opening of the Forest Encounters exhibition OUT OF SIGHT
welcomes you for Where dreams bloom in silence: Future Forests and Tasks of Reverie, a performative
poetry reading by Jelena Vukićević.

Within me, forests grow
that will one day sing
in tongues not yet born.
Silent forests,
cradled in the breath of wind.
The dream of a greenness still to come.
(Where dreams bloom in silence: Future Forests and Tasks of Reverie, Jelena Vukićević)

A writer, poet, and literary theorist, Jelena Vukićević moves through the quiet confluence of inner stillness, reflective thought, and an imagination attuned to the subtle resistance of language – its quiet refusal to be merely useful. In her writing and workshops, language is not approached as a tool, but as a living, textured medium – an inner terrain where thought and emotion meet, gently woven together in forms that remain open, porous, and quietly unfolding.

Join the performance on 29.05, 20:00-20:30.

OUT OF SIGHT invites you to a two-day workshop during Antwerp Art Weekend, held as part of the Forest
Encounters exhibition – an artistic gathering where the poetics of language meet the luminous matter of the image. The workshop is led by poet and literary theorist Jelena Vukićević and visual artist Ibis Ćerimagić, who works with cyanotypes. Participants are invited into a shared exploration of the boundaries of language, light, shadow, organic rhythm, and plant imagination.

This meeting of two artistic practices gently opens a space for inner landscapes, contemplation, playful creative silence, and imaginative exploration. In a silence that signifies not absence, but presence – we listen to the spaces from which images, words, colors, and light impressions emerge. Cyanotype as a trace of sun and water, poetry as a tender rebellion and a seed before speech – together they offer a space for a unique creative experience.

Learning slowness. Writing with light. Silence as method. Dreaming as an act.

...Through us fly
Birds in silence. Oh, I, who long to grow,
I look outward, and the tree within me grows.
(August 1914, Rainer Maria Rilke)

For all who wish to deepen their artistic processes, discover new forms of expression, and strengthen their imagination in dialogue with nature, the body, and language.

Friday 30.05, Saturday 31.05 12:00-15:00. Please make a reservation via this link before 26.05.

• FREE participation, no previous experience needed 
• Limited number of participants: 5 people
• Language: English
• Vegan lunch is provided
• Wheelchair accessible event

The ON MOBILISATION project emerged from a bottom-up collaboration between wpZimmer (Antwerp), Baltic Art Center (Gotland), Studio ALTA (Prague), and Lavanderia a Vapore (Turin), organisations actively engaged in international solidarity and emancipatory movements within the cultural field. To effectively address and mobilise micro-communities, the project embraced the local specificities of each partner, engaging individuals committed to social justice and equality.

In collaboration with six artists—Kalle Brolin, Elisabetta Consonni, Daniele Ninarello, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Marika Smreková, and Danae Theodoridou—and through their artistic research and practices, radical forms of civic participation were developed.

TOOLKIT brings together personal testimonies and reflections written by artists, participants, and organisations. Each contribution highlights, in its own voice, the significance of collaborative ways of working as a path toward a stronger cultural sector, but also as a means to transgress its boundaries into social spheres that were previously inaccessible or simply unconnected.

This publication, like the project itself, proposes a softly guided framework for participation grounded in peer-to-peer dynamics, enabling the circulation of knowledge and contributing to the ongoing demand for fundamental equality and social fairness.

MOBILISING WORDS and Toolkit are two publications developed as part of the ON MOBILISATION project (2023-2025). Mobilising Words is a card game that uses the “On Mobilisation Vocabulary”, a collection of words gathered as testimonies from the process of researching, facilitating, mobilising and learning from local communities in Antwerp, Gotland, Prague and Turin.

Join the afternoon game on 30.05, 16:00-17:00!

This event is co-funded by the European Union and Flanders – State of the Art.

This immersive sound composition draws from recordings captured in forests across Austria, interwoven with poetic texts and spoken word. Sounds and words merge to bring the audience to the forest floor, an invitation to close your eyes, breathe in the scent of damp soil and humus, and listen to the hidden life of the underground.

Stratifying is an acoustic intervention reflecting on the fragility, resistance, and fluidity of living beings. It invites listeners to navigate the subtle realms and dimensions of the earth. The words offer poetic cues, echoes of rhythms of wakefulness, latency, and pause. The forest speaks, and through this collective listening experience, we begin to transform—together becoming a new landscape of forests.

Join OUT OF SIGHT on Friday, 30.05, 18:30 for Stratifying, a live improvisation performance co-created by Nayarí Castillo and Reni Hofmüller.

OUT OF SIGHT was founded in 2018 by artists Dušica Dražić and Wim Janssen, imagined to be a shared kitchen table where a meal is served, and conversations emerge. The concerns of the day are discussed, and guests invited to the kitchen table are introduced to the internal world of the house. The dynamism and encounter created around the kitchen table is what they look for.

The program is build around international cooperations among artists, curators, researchers and the public at large. They strive for a critical and flexible approach, with the objective to support a development and experimentation in arts that is outside the logic of consumption and markets.

OUT OF SIGHT aims to find a potential hidden within what is often perceived as different, marginal or even unwanted. They make room for the ephemeral and the ambiguous. It is a space where the poetic and the political meet.