Offestival 2026 emerges within a context in which artist-run spaces occupy an essential yet fragile position within Brussels’ artistic ecosystem. These independent structures function simultaneously as sites of production, dissemination, and experimentation, developing collective modes of organisation that partially diverge from established institutional frameworks.

Initiated by Metarage and Becue, the project creates a shared platform for encounter, exchange, and visibility among artist-run initiatives. By bringing together diverse practices and organisational models, Offestival seeks to strengthen connections within the local artistic landscape while highlighting the role of self-organised structures in contemporary cultural production.

This edition also marks the participation of SB34, which joins the invited structures and enables its resident artists to inhabit and activate the Metarage space throughout the event. Through this collaboration, Offestival continues to foster dialogue, mutual support, and new forms of collective engagement between independent art spaces in Brussels.

The constellation presented here reflects a desire to work together, bringing into dialogue trajectories that are often separated by their distinct conditions of production and gathering them within a shared regime of visibility. The exhibition unfolds as an intermediate sequence—a moment of intense convergence in which practices encounter one another and articulate a common ground. Rather than dissolving their singularities, these exchanges create a space of resonance where diverse approaches coexist, intersect, and respond to one another. 

CLARA AGNUS is a French artist living and working in Brussels. They studied at EBABX and EESAB in Rennes. Their sculptural practice is built around research into materials sharing an organicity and potential for mutation—moulding, layering, collage—extending into drawing and installation. The artist develops projects around invisibilised existences, a penetrating gaze into the interior of bodies, earth, skin and sediment, to reveal what the more-than-human tells us beneath the surface. Opéra-savon stages soap sculptures with liquid identities—animal, vegetal, mythological—born from the mutation of the furniture and collections of the Aquarium-Muséum. Their bodies have incorporated chandeliers, shells, corals and marine invertebrates to form a new ecosystem made of anatomical waxes, glass models and harvested organic elements. This multi-episode project offers a sensual, inter-species narrative on the mutability and permeability of bodies, their hidden stories, and the uprooted presence of natural objects in Art Nouveau motifs and natural history museum collections.


YUNA MATHIEU-CHOVET is a visual artist and photographer who graduated from ÉCAL in Lausanne, where she studied under John M. Armleder and Sylvie Fleury, whose assistant she also became. Based in Belgium since 2011, she founded Plagiarama the following year, an artist-run space dedicated to artists. Through her practice, she questions the place of the artistic object, its nature and representation, in installations combining painting, photography and direct wall interventions. In Yuna Mathieu-Chovet’s work, everyday gestures—such as painting nails and working surfaces—are transposed into the exhibition space. This transfer transforms intimate or decorative practices into fully-fledged visual objects, without entirely detaching them from their bodily dimension. The work does not seek to oppose art’s hierarchies, but to make them fluid and joyful, celebrating artistic and creative practices on equal footing with art objects.


LOUIS EVERAERT & HADRIEN VERLINDEN
Excerpt from Eriek Dedonder’s travel journal in the Netherlands:

“Watching the traffic at Groningen station, at the end of the world, from the museum’s glass windows.
On the canal: ‘What does it mean today to be a painter and to be Dutch?’
I took the train from Groningen to Delfzijl in a blinding light, on the verge of nausea. The mist prevented any view of Germany and of the bases of the wind turbines, whose blades seemed to float above scraps of land carved up by thin currents of water, scarcely brighter than the wet sand.
From afar, the damp stones create mirages of seals. One feels at home, yet nothing resembles anything. A sea dog, something familiar—you need that too at the end of the world.”

ANNA LUZ PUEYO is a Franco-Irish maker whose practice focuses on the plants that surround us and their forgotten uses. Trained in several Paris art schools and graduated from ENSCI Les Ateliers in 2022, she experiments with producing materials, colours, and even food from local flora, revealing the hidden potential of territories and urban plants. As part of a commission from the commune of Saint-Gilles, she developed a series of works made from seasonal plant cuttings collected by municipal services. Each piece assembles unexpected natural colours—pinks from winter conifers, yellows from spring buddleias, blues from summer indigo, and greys from autumnal hornbeams. Together, these works invite a contemplation of the quiet chemistry of urban plants and the seasonal cycles that shape them.


FANNY PATARIN (Bordeaux, 1998) grew up in the countryside, began her art studies in Paris, and later attended the Haute École des Arts du Rhin before settling in Brussels. Her painting practice builds frameworks for improvisation through the material components of the canvas itself. She alters her works, turns them over, covers, cuts, and reworks them until the painting “finds itself.” Each piece exists in relation to its counterparts and opposites, developing a distinct identity, almost like a biography of the object.


Artist, curator, text designer and teacher, RAPHAËLLE SERRES develops a practice that explores the many dimensions of language. Typography is approached as a tool in the service of subjects, objects, poetic experiments and systems of identity. She collaborates with a range of cultural institutions, non-profit organisations and art schools. Her artistic practice includes a§s, a self-initiated experimental curatorial research project within which she is developing the Moeder House Musée, a museum at a 1:12 scale of which she is the director. Through this multifaceted practice, Serres investigates the narrative potentials that emerge between impressions and expressions, and between ethics and aesthetics.


JUSTIN SANCHEZ lives and works in Brussels. His practice draws on literature, cinema and personal narratives, producing works with a strong narrative potential. Behind every form lies a story, an adventure, an experience. When he assembles hundreds of interlocking staircases, for instance, he invokes Sarah Winchester, the gunmaker’s widow who, in an attempt to escape the ghosts that haunted her, never ceased expanding her house until it became a labyrinth. Thoreau, The Big Lebowski, and designer Enzo Mari inhabit the same subjective pantheon, each carrying a repertoire of forms and actions. Drawing from what surrounds and moves him, Justin Sanchez develops a body of work through experimentation that is personal, sometimes intimate, and always open.


Sophie Martin and Lionel Maes form the duo MARTIN MAES, a collaborative practice developed through research into 1980s Brother KH electronic knitting machines. Sophie Martin works through knitting and drawing, while Lionel Maes develops installations. Together, they explore the relationships between humans and machines, as well as questions of protocol and modes of production. The duo presents the first episode of Tricot Machine, a project inspired by the repetitive movement of the Brother KH270 carriage. Moving rhythmically from right to left and left to right, the machine traces a pattern perceived as much through the eyes as through the ears, transforming mechanical operation into a sensory experience.


MIKY KRAY works both with and against technological processes, at the point where their ability to model the world begins to break down. His works emerge from a laborious manipulation of digital fragments and often appear to have grown rather than been constructed, embracing error and displacement. Proliferation explores a botanical horror inspired by the “New Weird”, where uncontrolled organic growth and mysterious mutations gradually invade their environment. Its pseudo-scientific aesthetic and weathered textures evoke the remnants of an abandoned research project, in a world where this autonomous life form has outlived its observers. Station Maintenance turns to the imagery of rotating space stations designed for orbital living. Rather than presenting a stable, well-maintained system, the work depicts a structure in decay, eroded by entropy, transforming a symbol of human progress into an obsolete relic.


JULES BOUCAUD, also known as Boginette, graduated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin in 2022 and is now based in Brussels. He constructs artificial spaces starting from an observation, a sentence, or a play on words. These worlds are populated by unknown life forms, strange animals and mysterious plants. While they echo everyday reality, they follow odd, absurd and sometimes impossible rules.


ROKKO MIYOSHI is a Belgian-Italian-Japanese artist based in Brussels. His work examines structures of power and symbolic systems that shape our perceptions of reality. His installations—assemblages of found objects, images and documents—follow conceptual protocols rooted in socio-historical transmissions and geopolitical contexts. Through displacement and narrative recontextualisation, they generate new discursive frameworks. In recent years, his practice has focused on mechanisms of media disinformation and propaganda, collapsology, and the long-term effects of “slow violence”—the dispersed and often invisible mechanisms of domination. He holds an MFA from LUCA School of Arts (BE), a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (US), and a BA from Sophia University (JP). He is a founding member of SB34.


NICOLAS GUTIÉRREZ MUÑOZ (Brussels, 1987) projects his practice into a future shaped by the consequences of contemporary ways of living, acting as a keeper of traces from a disappearing civilisation through its materials. Working mainly with concrete—both construction material and pollutant—he transforms it into sculptural and painterly forms with a poetic dimension. Doors, windows and abandoned objects collected in the street are incorporated into his work, blurring the boundary between art and everyday life while questioning our lost relationship to matter.


︎ LIST OF WORKS
Download the list as PDF here.

︎ Opening on Saturday 16.05.2026, 19:00—22:00
︎ Performances with Amina Abouelghar, Linora Dinga & Mehdi Mojahid starting at 20:00, curated by Metarage

at Metarage
Rue du Métal, 32, 1060 Saint-Gilles