Artistic installation insitu
Location: Smorbrod, Guldenspoorstraat 29 9000 GENT
Ongoing: 13.05.25 - 18.05.25, 8:30 AM - 5:30 PM (regular opening hours)

In the Smorbrod bakery, customers are welcomed by two enormous bread ovens: an electric steam oven and a stone wood oven staring ahead, one still operational, the other a reminder of a previous venture. Through a projection, these silent infrastructures come to life and engage in conversation with each other. They reflect on the art of baking from the past and present, on technology and craftsmanship, convenience and romance, in short, small infrastructural stories that are hidden in this bakery.

Visit to the bakery school with historian Peter Scholiers and the Atlas of Ovens
Location: Lange Violettestraat 12, 9000 Ghent
Date: May 15, 2025, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Together we will visit the Atlas of Ovens at the workshops of the Ghent bakery school, where numerous bakery students and machines learn to collaborate ingeniously to produce bread on a large scale. In addition to the head of training, we will also be accompanied by historian Peter Scholiers, who will provide us with insights through a surprising series of archival images into the pioneering role that the cooperative Vooruit played in the industrialization of the baking industry in Belgium.

Mahmut from Wetterse baker is a dedicated craftsman who takes the art of baking very seriously. One of his specialties is the surprise breads. Thanks to an exchange about bread rituals with the team of Atlas of Ovens, he is reworking his models for this city festival into super deluxe and extra-large editions with porcelain teeth made by Clémentine Vaultier. Crocodile and crab breads will spread throughout the events and brighten up communal picnic moments, while a chapter of the Atlas of Ovens will be on display in his bakery on Sint-Salvatorstraat.

If "parties always end in the kitchen", it's because we cook much more than just food there. Every Thursday of the festival, two artists or collectives engage in conversation around cooking in the KVS foyer. These meetings are an opportunity to reflect together on the role the kitchen plays in our imagination and in our daily lives: a space where several geographies and stories that we have inherited from the past converge; a space for collective experimentation, sometimes used as a place of meeting and political dissidence; a space for work, spontaneous encounters, transmission and reflection on the future. A programme developed in partnership between Kunstenfestivaldesarts, KANAL-Centre Pompidou and CIVA as part of the Free School and The World History of the Commons, curated with Silvia Franceschini and Grégory Castéra.

Ovens and miles can play a central role in activating communities and fostering regenerative processes of territorial transformation. In her life and practice, artist Mounira Al Solh has reflected on the idea of a bakery as a social project. In Atlas of Ovens, Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers and Clémentine Vaultier investigate oven infrastructures in Belgium as relational infrastructures. In the project Casa delle Agriculture in Puglia, Italy, Luigi Coppola seeks to revitalise abandoned land and repopulate the countryside by generating a sustainable economy and highlighting the importance of commoning dynamics within the community of migrants, farmers and activists. This conversation will present their projects while exploring the intersection of art with agro-ecological learning through participatory practices and community-oriented projects.

Prior to the event, we decided to meet and prepare bread to exchange around our practices with very practical tools, flour from Luigi's network of fields and mills from Italy, the bread oven of Hof Ten Musschen (with Aziz and Alain) and with the help and skills of artist and baker Marion Aeby.

Clémentine Vaultier, Maximiliaan Royakkers and Ciel Grommen invite you to join them on a smoking journey by bike, encountering old and new chimneys and heating devices around Ghent. Together with invited heat practitioners and thinkers, we will create unexepected relations. The artists’ Atlas of ovens, presented in “Radiator” functions as a starting point and guide into the city. At the same time, the Atlas welcomes new contributions and insights through the bike tour.

18.03.2023. Sat: 13.00—19.00. Start and end point at 019.
Dok-Noord 5L, 9000 Gent

“ Thank you to everyone who braved the rainy weather and joined us at Copenhill as part of Clémentine Vaultier’s Summiting the Oven. It was great to experience the heat and power waste-to-energy plant up close by hiking to the top and taking in the tourist attraction quality of the “summit” - the view, scale of the facility, and all of its complexity as a structure. The top of the massive trash oven turned ski slope provided a unique context to discuss Vaultier’s research on ovens, heat, and warmth as relational infrastructures through her collaborative Atlas of Ovens project in relation to a critical reflection of the localized context of CopenHill. Through a brief presentation and public discussion we were able to unpack a rich dialogue on the role ovens as containers of heat play in society from the domestic, to the convivial, to the industrial. Vaultier also related her work in Belgium and France to her recent work in Denmark across industrial spaces in Aalborg and salt ovens on Læsø as part of her mapping of ovens and their uses through a showing of different ephemera, images, and books at the top of “the mountain”. “