Expo 2023

We are all pupils at the Matteo Ricci high school, which opened its door in 2019. It is one of three Jesuit schools in Brussels. In our expressive arts class, we express ourselves using our pencils. We wanted to redraw the BIFFF poster in our own way. Matteo Ricci was lucky to be able to count on the most creative pupils in the school to do this. And we all got good grades, so we would love to exhibit our magnificent posters!
We hope you will have as much fun looking at them as we had drawing them!
Matteo Ricci’s pupils, Expressive Arts: Maria Almeida Fagundes De Lima, David Bopwa Bopwa, Mamadou Diallo, Anaïs Lawson, Hasan Kadiroglu, Guyen Khandjav, Sammy Lumina Kamisy, Divine Maghoma Luvungu Mwange, Tomek-Olivier Mathieu-Daudé, Sebastian Orzepowski, Benedict Matamongosi Losambo, Thomas Ravet, Jihane Hafdi Loraich, Yasmine Khadira Ben Kaddour, Ilyas Sakouane Zaghdoud, Eloïse Tshitenge Katshima.

CAROLINE BRISSET – BIFFF 2023 EXHIBITION
Through sculpture, installation art and performance, I work with metal. The status is not important when talking about the material.
I tirelessly try to modify the invisible particles of steel. It is mainly to provoke a shift in the every-day shape of objects, I seek to move the atoms to the limits of their capacities. I am looking for the contradiction of the act and the form and try to feel through my sculptures that this material is discontinuous, fragile and full of emptiness and at the same time very dense, heavy and weighty.
To find a breath of air in the inert mass.
In doing so, I often unconsciously try to make the appearance of the material contradict its constitution. Through its form, its volume, its temperature, its balance emanates a kind of poetry.
Each form is a temporary balance, it is in movement. Every change is a catastrophe and every catastrophe a resurrection.
I manipulate the metal and try to reveal its intrinsic energy. I try to take into account all its properties. I explore its limits and its physical possibilities, heat it, hammer it, twist it. I try to make it say something about itself. It can be a feeling of exacerbated heaviness, or on the contrary a fineness and an unusual fragility, or an imbalance which troubles by its posture and its form.
It is an open dialogue with the material.
Formal capacities are then revealed in a material that becomes an object imbued with a singular identity, and which sometimes comes from the organic or the living.

EXHIBITION TROLLS & TINY CREATURES
This year the exhibition “Trolls & Tiny Creatures” is back for a 14th edition that will exceptionally take place at the BIFFF! Come and discover the fantastic works of numerous Belgian and international artists from April 11 to 21 and delve into a unique universe inhabited by extraordinary creatures. More information on www.fantastic-museum.be
Free entrance
Group exhibition Trolls & Tiny Creatures
At the BIFFF / Palais 10 at the Heysel / from April 11 to 23, 2023

In an apocalyptic setting, Raphaëlle Schotsmans invites us to a metamorphosis. A ballerina evolves. Sometimes seeming to bend under the weight of an imaginary hand. Sometimes rising towards the air. The artist forces us to be demanding, nothing is revealed at first glance, You have to embrace the series in its entirety to perceive its full symbolic scope. And it is there, in that suspended moment, that we realize what is played in front of our eyes and where we can perceive that what is hidden.
The ballerina summons up buried memories, childhood dreams. Both the myth of Swan Lake and the alluring figure of a music box. A character who seems to escape from a condition that keeps her in the immobility of a role, against her will. The dancer’s lightness is prevented by the rubble that litters the floor. She sheds everything that taints her purity, fighting against invisible forces. Are they outside or inside her? Does the debris on the ground precede her passage or does it follow her?
This duality between destruction and serenity is revealed in the very body of the model. She struggles to leave the dread that her environment inspires, dressed only in a ballet costume. This is what‘s at stake: fragility is a lure. It can hide under a delicate aspect, an unsuspected power. It is a process towards the light. In the midst of chaos, we witness a rebirth, and the flight of a woman who’s much stronger than we think.

Inspired by the imaginary worlds of horror and fantasy, Raphaëlle Schotsmans stages her fascination in this series for transgression and the mysteries of the human psyche.
Her images oscillate between fetishism and sadomasochism and question, through elaborate and extremely detailed stagings, the threshold of pain that humans can inflict on themselves for pleasure, and that sometimes even leads to death. In a way that is both aesthetic and wild, we’re plunged into the depths of human suffering.
That’s how her work incorporates the codes of horror, gore or fantasy cinema and photography, which can be found in films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005), Timber Falls (Tony Giglio, 2007), Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008), Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008) or in the work of the Japanese photographers Izima Kaoru and Nobuyoshi Araki.