PROTOCOLS & DIPLOMACY for undisciplined practitioners

Filip Van Dingenen’s monograph Protocols & Diplomacy for undisciplined practitioners published by Hopper & Fuchs, 2025  

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

Credits

Artist: Filip Van Dingenen
Book curator: Bruno Devos
Publisher: HOPPER&FUCHS, November 2025

A co-production of Wouters Gallery Brussels, Jubilee Platform for Artistic Research, Fantaman Productions & Matelisto Contemporary Movements

With the support of the Flemish Community, Wiels, CC Strombeek, Kiosk, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Gluon and S.M.A.K.

Creative and editorial concept: Filip Van Dingenen, Ils Huygens, Hélène Meyer, Bruno Devos
Texts: Heidi Ballet, Manuel Cirauqui, Ils Huygens, Sue Spaid, Filip Van Dingenen, Joanna Warsza
Letters: Fred Dewey, Mark Dion, Pélagie Gbaguidi, Hunne Majesteiten de Koning en de Koningin van België, Sean Lynch, Nationale Bank van België, Els Samyn, Philippe Van Cauteren, Jean Katambayi Mukendi
Text and book editing: Ils Huygens, Filip Van Dingenen, Bruno Devos
Translation: Ils Huygens
Graphic concept and design: Elena Bollette in conversation with Filip Van Dingenen, in collaboration with Rita Ferreira
Typographic and executive design: Elena Bollette

ISBN: 9789464002843

244 pages, illustrations in color & b/w, 32,5 x 24,5 cm, hardcover, English

To order PROTOCOLS & DIPLOMACY, visit the website of publisher Hopper & Fuchs