PROTOCOLS & DIPLOMACY for undisciplined practitioners

Book launch of Filip Van Dingenen’s monograph Protocols & Diplomacy for undisciplined practitioners at WIELS, Brussels
16/12/2025, 18-20:30h

This publication brings together and interweaves several projects from Filip Van Dingenen’s artistic practice. It illuminates the participatory, ecological, and critical collective research dimensions embedded in each of his projects. Protocols & Diplomacy attempts to present the underlying protocols as well as the lived experiences and stories that have emerged from them, providing insight into Van Dingenen’s own diplomacy as an artist. To this end, he identifies, explores, and observes the critical zones within his practice. This exploration is guided by a series of contradictory concepts that continue to fascinate him. Particular attention is given to the research practices Ecole Mondiale, Nfumu-Ngui (The Botanical Archive of the Albino Gorilla Snowflake), Suskewiet Visions, and Platform for Algae Diplomacy.

 

Letter: To Filip Van Dingenen

Filip Van Dingenen is an alchemist. An alchemist is someone who transforms one substance into another and who engages in speculative research. Alchemists in the past tried to turn metals into gold and cure diseases. In other words, alchemists tried to make connections aimed at what can be described as knowledge and truth. Filip Van Dingenen’s raw materials are other types of extractions, accumulated extractions that cluster together in projects carried out over time, such as ‘Nfumu-Ngui’, ‘Ecole Mondiale’, ‘Algae Diplomacy’, ‘Suskewiet Visions’. As can be experienced in this book, each project is a generous conglomeration of events in which the artist prioritises the notion of collaboration and co-creation, but in which Filip Van Dingenen orchestrates the ceremony of exchange and interaction. The artist’s focus lies in knotting together small and large histories, anthropology and pedagogy, discourse and intuition, locality and globality. Filip Van Dingenen tries to find a way out by thinking and acting in a co-existent way. Through art, he tries to come up with questions and possible answers. Or, as Timothy Morton puts it somewhere in his book ‘Dark Ecology’ : ‘If we want thinking that deviates from the current, then thinking must turn to art’.

Excerpt of the introduction text by Philippe Van Cauteren

 

Practical
WIELS
Av. Van Volxem 354
1190 Brussels

Free entrance