We are very pleased to welcome Robin Vanbesien as the third short-term resident to join our team.
Robin Vanbesien is a Brussels-based artist, filmmaker, researcher, and educator. He explores how cinematic methods align with and contribute to situated struggles of place-making. How can cinema—with or without a lens or a screen—offer ways to acknowledge, reclaim, reassemble, rehearse, and redistribute the social collective body and the sensory imagination of such struggles? How do we create a cinema that arises from the reassembly and recreation with those who speak and act in close proximity to these situated struggles of place-making? And how can we contribute to the ongoing redistribution of this kind of cinema?
Vanbesien investigates cinematically embodied knowledge and collective imagination in social and political struggles. He collaborates with situated initiatives of collective self-organization, exploring cinema as a space for social gathering, militant engagement, speculative rehearsal, and communal assembly. In 2024, he completed a PhD in the arts on Ciné Place-Making. At Sint Lucas Antwerp, he co-coordinates and mentors in the Master’s program Socio-Political Context.
He was co-founder of The Post Film Collective (2020–2024), which explored cinema as a space for collective speculation. He (co-)convened the study circles Ciné Place-Making (2022) and Cinema as Assembly (2025). His edited book Solidarity Poiesis: I Will Come and Steal You was published by b_books (Berlin, 2017). Under These Words (Solidarity Athens 2016) (2017) premiered at transmediale, and the wasp and the weather (2019) at Cinéma du Réel.
His first feature film hold on to her (2024), which retraces a people’s tribunal on the police killing of Mawda Shawri in 2018, had its world premiere at Berlinale Forum Expanded (2024), its Belgian premiere at Film Fest Gent 2024 (official competition), followed by a theatrical release in Belgium in 2025.
Other exhibitions, screenings, and events from his multifaceted practice have taken place at, among others: Contour 9 Biennale (Mechelen), Athens Biennale, La Loge (Brussels), WIELS (Brussels), Lumiar Cité (Lisbon), Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin), What, How & for Whom (Zagreb), Sculpture International Rotterdam, Kunsternes Hus (Oslo), Videograms (Vilnius), Objectif Exhibitions (Antwerp), Extra City (Antwerp), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Netwerk (Aalst), FOMU (Antwerp), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), Vooruit/Viernulvier (Ghent), and BUDA (Kortrijk).
His work is included in the public collections of M HKA, MuZee, and Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts.
During her residency, Robin Vanbesien will deliver an in-person seminar on "Posthumous Struggle and Transmission", on April 15, 2026, at 15:00 WEST in room SD of NOVA FCSH (Campolide Campus).
Read the full abstract here.
