Abel Hartooni

Setting the Table
(Co-Curated with Natalija Gucheva and Sjoerd Beijers)
Pilar Brussels 2025
Participants:
an exhibition and a series of public events activated by Lou Cocody-Valentino, Pushing Hands,ar kieu bi, Tashattot and Shif–t*.

This project explores the table and its non-Western counterpart, 𝘚𝘶𝘧𝘳𝘢, as spaces where food and stories are shared and where collective meaning is shaped. Here, the table functions as a curatorial framework: defining who gathers, how encounters take place, and what connections emerge. It becomes a tool for rethinking access and participation.
The table has long been a place where decisions are made, where food is shared, and where stories unfold. However, access to this space has historically been unequal. Who gets to sit at the table? Who sets the table? Who clears it away? Setting the Table begins from this ambivalence, proposing the table not as a static piece of furniture but as an infrastructure for relation—an object that can include, exclude, or be reimagined as a tool for commoning.

Alongside the Western dining table and its histories of hierarchy and privilege, the exhibition turns to the Sufra—a cloth laid on the ground for communal meals, practiced from the Balkans to Bengal. Unlike the rigid formality of the dining table, the Sufra suggests horizontality, flexibility, and a sense of inclusion that is at once practical and symbolic. It embodies a different way of being together: collective without erasing difference, ritualistic yet open. The Sufra opens a way to think of the table as something that can shift, fold, and extend beyond its material form, becoming an infrastructure for care, exchange, and imagination.
The invited participants engage with this condition through their own practices of gathering, storytelling, and making. Charbel Alkhoury and Monica Basbous (invited by Tashattot) revisit a WhatsApp group first created by online gamers, which transformed during Lebanon’s compounded 2019-2020 crises into a revolutionary cell, a mutual aid hub, and an emotional lifeline. Their film POPG CLANC is both a collective archive and a mirror, asking how solidarity forms, sustains itself, and falters.

Pushing Hands gathers mapping archives, photography, textiles, video, and food into a collective installation that invites audiences to handle documents, leaf through memories, and share mantou buns. On their invitation, ar kiều bỉ brings together an archive of objects collected through time by the Vietnamese community in Belgium, animating them into new directions. Both move within ST1CKYR1CE, a collective by and for people of Asian descent founded in Brussels in 2023. In Setting the Table, their archives and objects are not finished works but gestures of relation, sustaining connections that reach across generations.

Shif—t* proposes a modular design that can be reconfigured and activated in different gatherings. Rooted in kinship and transformation, their practice envisions forms that stay open to change, echoing Ursula K. Le Guin’s gesture of “shif” as a space of flux and relation. Their contribution acts as a framework for communal presence that is flexible, responsive, and polyphonic.

Lou Cocody-Valentino draws on her upbringing in Martinique and life across multiple cultural geographies to assemble collected fabrics and yarns into poetic archipelagos: fragmented yet connected, echoing memory and identity. These fabrics, such as bed linens and curtains gathered from intimate domestic spaces, carry traces of everyday life and personal histories.

This openness is mirrored in the broader sensibility of the programme, where works are not fixed but unfold through participation. A rich public programme reshapes the exhibition as it unfolds. The modular scenography by Shift—t* is activated through a textile workshop by Mei-Lin Oomes. Gatherings with the Vietnamese community of Brussels, led by ar kiều bỉ explore community archiving, mapping, and language. Film screenings curated by Tashattot highlight how hip hop, cinema, and sport become ways to assert identity and forge solidarity under conditions of precarity.

Photography by Marit Galle, Clair Bravo and Johan Poezevara