Insects, birds, nests, leaves and flowers. In this new project, Walid Raad compiles a catalogue of natural elements, in which paintings, installations and his storytelling disclose a series of strange events in the Middle East’s recent past. We might find a reference to a woman who was passionate about botany and who worked for Lebanese intelligence during the Lebanese Civil War, creating codenames for foreign heads of state – Saddam Hussein or Ronald Reagan – using the names of flowers. Or again, a series of drawings of locusts that appear on the back wall of a bookshelf in Brussels, a remnant of the great invasion of locusts in 1915 in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria that decimated local agriculture and contributed to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Walid Raad conceived this new work starting from the spaces of the Maison des Arts, its floral details in the wallpaper and its magnificent garden, and from Schaerbeek as one of Brussels’ ancient agricultural areas. The exhibition can be visited throughout the month and is accompanied by a walkthrough and an audio guide in which Walid Raad takes spectators on this imaginative journey into nature: a space that exists between the fictions of the past and those of the future.

• Every Thursday at lunchtime, the guides from the Maison des Arts take you on a journey into the world of the artist!
• See also: Bring your kids