In 1938, with fascism consolidating its power across Europe, Jean-Paul Sartre published Nausea. In this existentialist novel, the protagonist experiences a world that begins to lose solidity. When he looks at a bench, a tree, a garden, they soften and melt, becoming monstrous, ungraspable matter. How should we look at a dissolving world? And what forces are undoing it?

This image might guide the festival this year, with the world in a state of chaos. Yet, rather than respond to disorientation with retreat into hardened borders, identities, disciplines, and certainties, the festival amplifies the possibility of another path. It moves through mud, fog, dreams, and unstable terrains, not as an escape but as a method: to perceive differently, not only to sense the pressure of transformation, but to imagine ways of holding together.

This year, several artistic works hypnotically draw us into altered perceptual states, where reality loosens its contours. Germaine Kruip's new creation unfolds as an immersive visual and acoustic journey, a love letter to theatre as a space where time can suddenly shift and open onto other possibilities of perception. In A Flower of Forgetfulness, Apichatpong Weerasethakul immerses the audience in an experience that has the consistency of a dream, flowing like a shapeless cloud above our heads. Dance is another field for metamorphosis before our eyes: Maria Hassabi’s anticipated new group choreography presents a mesmerising experience of micro-movements and intensity, while Marlene Monteiro Freitas plunges us into the morphing energy of the night with a choreography that exhibits the logic of a nightmare.

In a world shaken by renewed imperialism, these fictions are not mere poetic devices; they can also be political strategies. This is where we encounter fiction as a means to bypass oppressive forces—the ones at work in different geographies as we write these lines. Ali Asghar Dashti and Nasim Ahmadpour create a theatrical performance in which an Iranian actor, currently imprisoned, is made present precisely through his absence. In Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s Centroamérica, fiction moves beyond the theatre, becoming a tool to disguise oneself and cross a border in real life. Laura Huertas Millán uses speculative fiction and live cinema to tell the story of the coca plant in Colombia, caught between the geopolitical “war on drugs” and colonial regimes of knowledge. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme weave together poems and songs written by Palestinian prisoners, where language surpasses the walls of the cell, reflecting on the possibility of melting the architecture of occupation.

In theatre, language is a tool to create worlds, the magic of its malleability bringing forth realities with each new sentence. Michael Disanka references kasàlà, a poetic form originating in Kasai culture from the DRC, in which the tongue must turn 77 times before reaching the truth. Alberto Cortés brings the strength and delicacy of his poetic language back to the festival with a text that vibrates within his body. Filmmaker Alice Diop opens the festival with her first theatrical work, delivering an incisive monologue performed in front of the audience. Salim Djaferi approaches storytelling as an analysis of the political history of architecture and the forces that structure our being-in-the-world. What if the structures that usually appear solid—buildings, identities, monuments—are approached not as inert forms, but as forces that organise bodies, memory, and power?

This question might resonate with Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, who come to Brussels for the first time with the impressively sharp Repertório N.1, in which their bodies shift between secret codes and ephemeral monuments. In Thanapol Virulhakul’s work, the idea of power—symbolised by the Thai royal crown—melts into a choreography where the relationship with the object is continuously renegotiated by other possible desires, emptying its political symbolism.

Desire runs through the festival as another shaping force at the core of the investigation by today’s artists. How is sexual desire constructed in our society? Pornography, intimacy, and representation are explored in a project by Janaina Leite that will make a mark on this edition. In their unmissable film, Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani reflect on family and kinship beyond normative frames. The idea of family—and the plurality of its forms—is present in a reflection that crosses MEXA’s new show on cohabitation, the real-life investigation of the Taiwanese trio in Family Triangle, and the new creation by Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere that interrogates the desire to have children and our relationship with the future. In looking toward what lies ahead, Jozef Wouters turns to the ground beneath our feet—the soil we share and transform—asking what kinds of worlds we want to leave behind.

The Free School this year turns to a collective reflection on malleability and how softness—often associated with care and comfort—can obscure the labour, violence, and history folded into materials that yield and please. Within this frame, Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen trace rubber as a colonial commodity saturated with fantasy and intimacy. McKenzie Wark wrote a text, On Being Plastic (which can be found in the festival booklet), and will have a conversation on clay, desire, and the malleability of language. Faye Driscoll opens a workshop through choreographic practice and material encounter, and Ali Cherri creates a hands-on school to investigate the politics and mythology embedded in mud and clay.

Mud, this unstable mixture of earth and water, might guide the spectators through different textures. It resonates with the choreographic research of Leu Wijee and Mio Ishida, who work with the memory of liquefaction in Indonesia and seismic rupture in Japan, tracing how land and bodies deform one another. The relationship between land and history also runs through Cedric Mizero’s UMUNYANA, an incredibly strong landscape of images and choreographic gestures. Water, in its literal form, becomes a central medium for Dana Michel, who guides us through a performance in a real swimming pool. In Ewa Dziarnowska’s project, the water is metaphorical, a blue carpet inviting us to lie down and listen to a loop of Dionne Warwick singing about what the world needs now. A question that will silently echo throughout the festival.

This edition answers with undefined language that does not serve authoritarian fantasies of chaos and order; it opens a space for attention to what exists within. A grammar of mud, a language beyond the solidity of categories and big moments, in which everyday life appears as something fragile yet precious. In Bouchra Ouizguen’s new choreography, small gestures, shared silences, and moments of attention become acts of resistance, ways of preserving the most unfathomable aspects of life. For her, to inhabit the everyday becomes a political and poetic act. Angélica Liddell makes her debut at the festival, pushing theatre to its emotional extremes and offering an ode to the unproductive, refusing to reduce life to dry productivity. This year, the festival also experiments with formats that resist fixity: karaoke sessions, late-night conversations with Carolina Bianchi, and hybrid parties that blur the boundaries between performance, discourse, and gathering. 

The festival is entering a new phase of life, still malleable, resisting capture by a single form. And it will remain porous, open to what is happening, to what is emerging, to what is not yet named.

Daniel Blanga Gubbay & Dries Douibi