Opening Weekend Public Programme
The Eyes of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Opening weekend views at Contour Biennale 11, Mechelen (2026). Photos: Alhasan Yousef. Courtesy of Contour Biennale.
In-conversation
From plants and microorganisms to oceans, machines, extraction and climate transformation, the artists gathered here approach ecology not simply as a subject but as a condition of perception. What happens when the image is no longer understood as a representation of the world, but as a way of entering into relation with it? Can cinema and moving image make perceptible forms of agency, communication, interdependence, and intelligence that remain difficult to recognise through our habitual modes of attention?
Bringing together film scholar and researcher Teresa Castro with artists Laure Prouvost, Gabriel Abrantes, and Yuyan Wang, an in-conversation with Contour Biennale 11 artists explored how moving images can unsettle the boundaries between human and non-human, organic and technological, visible and unseen. Drawing on Castro’s research into cinema, vegetal life, and ecological forms of attention, the conversation asks how images might help us perceive relations that exceed the human scale—and how they might change the ways we understand our place within them.
The Vegetal Roots of Dreaming
What if dreaming does not belong to the human mind alone? In a recent book, philosopher Michael Marder revisits psychoanalysis through an ecological lens, asking how plants, animals, minerals, landscapes, and other-than-human forms of life participate in shaping psychic existence. Among its many provocations, the book turns to “green dreams” and to the possibility of understanding the unconscious as an ecological field rather than an exclusively human interior.
In this conversation with artist Rodrigo Hernández, Marder considers how these ideas resonate with Hernández’s exploration of myth, metamorphosis, childhood, desire, and the porous boundaries between human and more-than-human life. How might vegetal life offer another model for thinking about the unconscious? What can dreams reveal when we loosen the distinction between inner and outer worlds, psyche and environment, imagination and materiality? And what might it mean to cultivate forms of attention capable of sensing the life that surrounds, sustains, and exceeds us?
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