ENACT Festival: performing research

Organised by LUCA's Arts & Society expertise network, the festival explores artistic research and its embodied transmission.

Across four days LUCA researchers and their collaborators invite audiences into diverse worlds: from underwater silt intelligence and live-streamed forest ecologies, to inquisitorial testimonies, resistant folk traditions and media archaeologies. ENACT is a festival of artistic inquiry in process.

Artistic researchers develop alternative methodologies and explore performative ways to embody that research.
ENACT puts these forms of disclosure centre stage.

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Registrations & practical Info

You can register via this form

• The festival is free and open to everyone. 
• Registering for the festival activities is mandatory. 
• Questions? Email research@luca-arts.be

TRANSMIT - Radio Works

Hosted by LUCA School of Arts

TRANSMIT is a platform for creative audio works that disclose investigations, collaborations and methodologies of artistic research. Comprising experimental narrative works in the form of radio essays, sonic stories or audio dispatches, each work is created by a LUCA researcher in collaboration with radio makers, sound artists and writers. The series exemplifies artistic research as a distinct mode of knowledge production and one capable of engaging audiences beyond art and research domains.

The first volume, What Trixie could not tell the Inquisitor, by Wendy Morris is launched during the ENACT Festival, November 2025. 

Arts & Society

Arts & Society is one of three expertise networks at LUCA School of Arts, coordinated by senior researcher Wendy Morris. The network comprises researchers and practitioners exploring artistic methodologies in relational and situated approaches to environmental, political, and social issues. Collaborative and interdisciplinary, we work to include diverse knowledges and value systems in our projects.

Our fields of enquiry extend forward to speculate on future scenarios and sustainable design, to innovate practices of care, therapy and pedagogies, but we also turn back to review histories that have fundamentally shaped environmental, political and social landscapes of our present.

Short bios

DAY 1 | Opening

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist, and researcher. She was born in Cardiff (Wales) and now lives in London, where she is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London. She founded the department of Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication and previously directed and co-directed, with Professor Angus Carlyle, Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP). Her research deals with the ways in which sound relates to the past, our histories, our environment, and our collective and individual memories. Especially interested in ‘hidden histories’ and how these can be investigated from a feminist perspective through the medium of composed sound, her artistic practice includes composition and installation-based work with spoken word, field recordings, and archive material.

Esther Venrooij is an artist, composer, and educator. Interested in ‘audio topography’, her research and creative impulses explore how sound and movement inhabit space. Venrooij creates work in a variety of media, such as composed music, improvised combinations of electronica, video, and site-specific installations. In 2015, she obtained her doctoral degree in the Arts at KU Leuven, where she currently supervises research projects. As Lecturer at LUCA School of Arts (Ghent), she leads seminars on ‘Audio Topography’ and ‘Too Body to Fail’. Collaborating live and in studio with a variety of visual, sound, and dance artists, she has performed and presented her work in Europe, Asia, and the United States.

DAY 2 | Shifting Paradigms and Waterbodies

Hosted by Marjolijn Dijkman in collaboration with Maarten Vanden Eynde

Marjolijn Dijkman is a research-based, multidisciplinary artist who works with film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the intersection of culture and other fields of inquiry, strongly focusing on the rapidly changing environment and its human and nonhuman interdependencies. In 2005, she co-founded Enough Room for Space (ERforS), fostering collaborations across art, science, and activism. Currently a PhD researcher at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels) / KU Leuven, she is also an artist-in-residence with the EU Horizon project ‘WaterLANDS’ (2023-26) and section editor of Commodity Frontiers. Her current research project ‘Turbid Tides’ explores the parallel between rising siltation in the Ems-Dollard estuary and the expanding influence of computational thinking, with silt and data as its protagonists.

LUNÄ Talk contributors

Merve Bedir is an architect whose practice engages with infrastructures of hospitality and mobility. A second line of her work focuses on collective intelligences and imaginaries of landscape. She is a co-founder of Aformal Academy in the Pearl River Delta Region, Mutfak مطبخ Workshop in Gaziantep, and the Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul. She is the editor of the New Silk Roads series on e-flux Architecture and has contributed to publications such as Harvard Design Magazine and The Funambulist. Bedir holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology and a BArch from Middle East Technical University. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Columbia GSAPP.

Ifor Duncan is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the EcoViolence ERC project at Utrecht University. His interdisciplinary research and art-practice focus on political violence in the contexts of devastated river systems and dispossessed communities. He approaches the weaponisation of rivers as borders, in the installation of hydropower, and as the mediums and dynamic archives of genocide through cultural memory and an audio-visual practice that involves submerged methods. Duncan has a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, where he was also Lecturer, and he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at NICHE, Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice.

Shivant Jhagroe is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Public Administration. His research deals with marginalised and more-than-human actors in policy and politics (e.g., racialised/low-income groups, ecosystems, algorithms). Seeking to develop perspectives and strategies towards more sustainable, democratic, and just futures, he is particularly interested in the role of such actors in novel governance arrangements around sustainability and digital technology. With a focus on lived experiences, cultural narratives, and political agency, Jhagroe’s current research examines ‘eco-belonging’ in Global North regions through a decolonial lens.

Annelies Kuypers is an anthropologist studying human-environment relations through water and materiality. Her work engages with the anthropology of water, ecology, climate change, and posthumanist and multi-species perspectives. Kuypers’ doctoral research in southeast Turkey examined how dam construction along the Euphrates transformed local ecologies and relations with the river. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (LAMC), she currently leads the FNRS-funded project ‘Mud Matters!’ on the long-term aftermath of the 2021 floods in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands.

DAY 3 | Ecologies of Exchange

Christina Stuhlberger is an artist filmmaker. Her films approach documentary as exchange process, to create an open-ended dialogue and encounters at eye-level. Born into a German-Filipino family, she enjoys making films that incorporate multiple perspectives and blurred lines of conflict. Stuhlberger co-founded elephy, an artist-run film production collective. Since 2020, she has been a doctoral researcher at KU Leuven, serving as a research assistant within the Intermedia research unit at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels). Alongside her research, she teaches documentary filmmaking in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Program Doc Nomads.

Kersti Grunditz Brennan is a filmmaker, editor, and Professor of Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels) / KU Leuven. Her work spans a wide variety of film practices, and artistic and academic research. Grunditz Brennan’s research explores cognitive approaches to articulations of artistic practices and the relationship between how film is made and what it does. Exploring co-creation and collaborative structures, she is particularly interested in film editing as an intersection of entangled practices.

Guido Devadder is an artistic researcher based in Leuven and a faculty member at the Department of Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels). Currently pursuing a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven / LUCA School of Arts, bridging historical technologies with his contemporary artistic practice, he reimagines abandoned visual media, forgotten modes of creating, and moving images. Merging old and new media, he investigates the materiality of contemporary moving image art and offers a meta-critique on the elusive concepts of reality and illusion through expanded animation. His artistic work has been screened and exhibited internationally.

Martha Kicsiny is a British-Hungarian visual artist based in Ghent. She is a multimedia art fellow at the Moholy-Nagy Arts University’s Doctorate School (MOME, Budapest). Her research aims to unearth and incorporate 19th-century Media Archaeology findings into Contemporary Art and Immersive Media discourses. Her artworks fuse predigital and digital techniques to understand the deep cultural traits from which our modern technology stems. Ranging from video art, site-specific installations to 3D-printed lithophanes, her practice focuses on the human condition in society, the aftermaths of historical events, the expression of power in architecture, and the mythological origins of oppression and segregation.

Sarah Vanagt is a filmmaker and lecturer. She studied History at the universities of Antwerp, Sussex, and Groningen, and Film at the National Film and Television School (UK). Her documentaries and video installations combine her interest in history with her interest in the origins of cinema. Vanagt’s work has been shown at film festivals and in museums, including films such as After Years of Walking (2003), Little Figures (2003), Begin Began Begun (2005), Boulevard d’Ypres (2010), The Corridor (2010), Dust Breeding (2013); and video installations such as Les mouchoirs de Kabila (2005), Power Cut (2007), Ash Tree (2007).

Nele Möller is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in sound, performance, and writing. Her research-based practice focuses on forest conversations, historical nature inscriptions, critical field recording, and listening practices. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels) / KU Leuven. Her research project ‘The Forest Echoes Back’ is embedded in the artistic research cluster ‘deep histories fragile memories’ and oscillates around the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which is severely impacted by climate change and an adherent bark beetle infestation. Since 2023, she has been producing ‘Listening Fields’ at the free radio station Radio Panik in Brussels.

Grant Smith is a British artist and writer working on sound, transmission, text, and domestic and social projects in Loughborough Junction (South London). In 2013, Smith co-founded the Soundcamp cooperative with Kirsty Collander-Brown and Maria Papadomanolaki. They created Soundcamp’s Reveil (2014-22), a 24-hour broadcast of the sounds of daybreak on International Dawn Chorus Day each year presented in partnership with Wave Farm and broadcast on WGXC 90.7-FM.

Lia Mazzari’s practice as a sound artist and performer is often collaborative, engaging new audiences through encounters with art in non-conventional spaces, physical and virtual. She likes to explore the divisions of site and non-site, private and public, through live performance, sound installation, and urban intervention. Mazzari creates recorded and live events that embrace the broader sense of sound in space. This fluid relationship with her environment and towards sonic activism, as well as developing an extended technique with cello and whips, form the crux of her practice.

DAY 4 | Storytelling as Inquiry

Wendy Morris’ practice manifests in ephemeral gatherings, pageants and processions, sonic herballs and radioworks, stitch-epics and fieldguides. Her research is focused on anti-fertility plant histories as clandestine female archives. Her work embraces histories of travelling women that connect pockets of contraceptive knowledge from the Pyrenees to Cape Town. The research project ‘Nothing of Importance Occurred. Recuperating a Herball for a 17th century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape’ forms the framework. Morris is professor and expertise director of the network Art & Society at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels) / KU Leuven.

Annelies Monseré is a composer/musician and researcher with a focus on cultural, socio-economic, gender-related, and racialized exclusion within the domain of the arts. Her current artistic research centers on traditional art forms and the development of artistic methodologies to realize the emancipatory and political potential of these practices. She is a Lecturer in Philosophy & Ethics, Philosophy of Art, and Art History at LUCA School of Arts.

Mariske Broeckmeyer is a vocalist, sound artist, and researcher whose work drifts between song, installation, and theory. In 2022, she obtained her Doctorate in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts with ‘unVoicing Migraine – A Study of the Failing Voice’, an enquiry into how pain, fragility, and silence can undo and reimagine the figure of the singer and reshape our understanding of the voice in general. She shares her work in museums, journals, and concert halls alike, while her avant-pop project MARIS has yielded an EP, three albums, and performances across Europe and beyond. Broeckmeyer is currently coordinator of the Jazz Department at LUCA School of Arts and is working on a new album.