Art Rotterdam 2026

Lucile Desamory (Brussels, 1977) lives and works in Brussels. Her work creates shared spaces, places to inhabit built from the discarded and the off-frame. They emerge where the world does not present itself as a finished form but as a set of possibilities.

Desamory grew up within Emmaüs, a community built around solidarity as an alternative to consumer society. They lived in an old factory surrounded by wastelands: rubbish, piles of junk, objects waiting to be repaired or abandoned. Her artistic training took place outside academic frameworks, through experimental practices, mostly in collective contexts. From this background emerged a way of engaging with the world from its edges, where categories loosen and the extraordinary surfaces in everyday life. 

Her work often begins with gestures of encounter. Each situation leads the work somewhere unforeseen, unfolding in overlooked social landscapes where culture circulates informally, without naming itself as such. Desamory mobilises genre as a tool to explore these shifts, bending recognizable codes while leaving the cracks visible: painted sets, obvious special effects and artifices. Film becomes a communal space built on trust: trust in the initial intuition, in the people involved in its making, and in the audience. Her singing stems from a similar commitment to popular songs, carriers of collective emotions, which she reconfigures through her own lines of machinery.

Painting plays a foundational role in this process: she uses gouache on paper and wood to paint the posters of my own (sometimes imaginary) films as well as to depict piles and unstable accumulations where the figurative contains the abstract. These images function from small formats to billboard-scale interventions, operating as a form of contemporary folk imagery.

Over time, moving image, painting, and singing have come to function as different states of the same movement. She combines them into larger networks—installations, features films and performances—that invite viewers to linger in uncertainty. My practice does not aim to resolve forms, but to hold them open long enough for something common to emerge. 

Her feature films are De Werwelende Wirrwar (2024), TÉLÉ RÉALITÉ, in cooperation with Gustave Fundi and Goldie Mubikay (2020), and ABRACADABRA (2013). Short films include Dark Matter (2011), Haut les Coeur (2007), Countdown to Nothing (2005), and La Série (1999-2001). She is currently working on a new documentary film titled Enlèvements Gratuits. 

Recent solo presentations include De Werwelende Wirrwar–The Billboard Series, Ghent (2024); Retrospective / Carte Blanche, CINEMATEK, Brussels (2023); Some Matters Have Layers, Fächer, Berlin (2022); My People (Heaps and Piles), Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam (2021); TÉLÉ RÉALITÉ, World Première at Berlinale Forum Expanded (2020); ABRACADABRA, Kirche Zwingli, Berlin (2019); Pasigrafia, Super Deals, Brussels (2018); Communication with the beyond, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin (2018); Communication avec l’au-delà, BOZAR, Brussels (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2023); Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2023); Listening to the Stones, Kunsthaus Dresden (2021); Part of the Problem, Forum Expanded Ausstellung, Silent Green, Berlin (2020); die Antwort commit, Kunstverein Leipzig (2020); Hubert Fichte: Liebe und Ethnologie, Kanon Fragen, HKW, Berlin (2019); Alias, Netwerk Aalst (2019). Recent performances include Funkenschrill, with Werner Hirschk (aka Antonia Baehr, Carola Caggiano, Arantxa Martínex, Lola Rubio, Ghyslaine Gau, and Stefan Schneider (aka Schne), (2026); Entre les Lignes: Projections en Cours (2024); Feuer und Flamme, with Antonia Baehr, Wolfgang Müller, Teta Lyrica and guests (2021); Die besondere Perücke, with Antonia Bauer, Residenz Leipzig, HAU (Berlin), and BUDA (Belgium); and Asteroseismology,  collaboration with Sabine Erklenz and Margareth Kammerer, Ausland, Berlin Acker Stadt Palast, Berlin Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2017-2019).