The Centre de la Marionnette de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles has established itself as a driving force in the development of digital arts within puppetry. Each edition of LUMEN celebrates this unique alliance, exploring how technology can enrich and reinvent the art of puppetry. The event immerses visitors in hybrid forms where the puppeteer’s gestures interact with code, projected images and robotic devices.
This year, LUMEN#11 presents an exhibition featuring two kinetic and immersive installations, Windflow by Studio Lemercier and BreaRth by the duo Marshall & le Sherif.
The cross-border exhibition “Émergences numériques” showcases four emerging talents from our partner art schools.
LUMEN#11 continues in November as part of the Festival Découvertes Images et Marionnettes, with History of Love, a performance by Barcelona-based company Agrupación Señor Serrano, in which live camera work and manipulated objects bring the inanimate to life.
Windflow – Studio Lemercier : Joanie Lemercier & Juliette Bibasse
A responsive kinetic installation, the project features an array of 3D-printed weathervanes that transforms the wind into a hypnotic kinetic ballet. By combining algorithmic systems with natural elements, the work offers a sensitive artistic response to eco-anxiety, making the imperceptible visible.
Studio Lemercier (co-directed by Juliette Bibasse) is internationally renowned for its visual installations and places eco-design at the heart of its artistic practice.
BreaRth – Marshall & le Sherif - Claire Beunckens et Boris Wilmot (Be)
Interactive and sensory tableaux
A visual symphony in which your gaze and presence bring the inanimate back to life. Through motion sensors, this series of still lifes comes alive in real time, creating a poetic virtual cycle between life and death.
Claire Beunckens and Boris Wilmot form a Brussels-based multidisciplinary duo with a background in cinema, breaking down artistic boundaries to explore digital experimentation through a striking visual aesthetic.
This work has received support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.
Les Émergences numériques
A showcase for emerging talent across borders, this exhibition invites four young artists from our partner art schools to explore the close connections between physical materiality, computer programming and the dramaturgy of objects.
Cigaroulette – Kenneth Hantson
Cigaroulette is a stop-motion short film by Kenneth Hantson that addresses tobacco addiction with humour and irony. The film subverts the glamorous image of smoking and invites viewers to reflect on its impact, while maintaining a playful and offbeat tone.
À TABLE ! – Zélie Lefebvre
À TABLE ! explores society’s complex relationship with the body through the eyes of a young girl. Combining stop-motion with more unsettling imagery, the film evokes the transition from childhood to adolescence and offers an ironic critique of imposed beauty standards.
Mon frigo à souvenirs – Mado Guffens
Mon frigo à souvenirs is an art installation exploring memory and the ways in which we preserve our personal and family experiences. It takes the form of real, functioning refrigerators containing textile models depicting intimate scenes.
Zmagri – Ines Rachidi
The project explores the “zmagri”, figures caught between identities, perceived as not quite belonging either here or elsewhere. Through texts written in Arabic and translated into French — with certain words retained in their original language —, the artist disrupts the reading experience and questions this duality. These narratives are embedded in everyday objects, carriers of fragmented memories.
History of Love - Agrupación Señor Serrano (Es)
LUMEN#11 continues at the “Festival Découvertes Images et Marionnettes” on 20 November 2026 at 9pm, with this performance combining visual theatre, live cinema and objects at the Maison de la Culture de Tournai.
What is love, and why does it remain at the centre of our lives after centuries of history ? Alone on stage, surrounded by a laboratory of clay figurines, objects and debris, an actress attempts to dissect this emotion. Her live camera brings the inanimate to life and multiplies perspectives. She weaves together the great myths of romantic love, from Tristan and Isolde to Romeo and Juliet, with her own intimate experiences. Combining live cinema, analogue technology and irony, the performance presents love as an Eldorado : a promised treasure amid chaos, endlessly pursued at the risk of losing oneself along the way.
Founded in Barcelona in 2006 by Àlex Serrano, Agrupación Señor Serrano has established a distinctive artistic language on the international stage. The company combines scale models, real-time video, performance and incisive texts to question the narratives and myths of our time.
Festival Lumen - Puppetry & Digital Arts
LUMEN is an event dedicated to the intersections between puppetry, digital arts and new technologies, organised by the Centre de la Marionnette de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles in Tournai. Through interactive installations, immersive environments, audiovisual works and performances, the event explores the new possibilities that digital technologies bring to contemporary practices involving object manipulation, images and movement.
Each edition brings together emerging and established artists from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and beyond, presenting works that explore the relationships between the body, objects, space and technology. From artistic experimentation and generative systems to creative uses of technology, LUMEN invites audiences to discover distinctive artistic worlds where the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the living and the inanimate, are constantly shifting. Free and open to all, the event also offers a wider audience an opportunity to discover the diversity of contemporary digital art practices.
Information
- 08 > 25.10.2025
Opening on 8 October 2026 at 18:30 - Centre de la Marionnette de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
- Rue Saint-Martin 47 – 7500 Tournai – Belgium
- maisondelamarionnette.be
Production
- LUMEN#11 is an initiative of the Centre de la Marionnette de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, made possible with the support of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles – Digital Arts Department, and in partnership with Transcultures, ESA Académie des Beaux-Arts de Tournai, Arts2 (Mons) and La Fabrique de Théâtre.
