Christophe Piette offers a carte blanche curated from the VideoDatabase, assembling archival moving-image works and screenings. The presentation foregrounds video and film, including found footage and experimental pieces, to examine preservation, access and the material–human relations within collections. It traces Belgian presences in the archive and embraces a poetic register — humour, folly and audacity — while interrogating how institutional contexts and site-specific research shape selection, display and reception.

VideoDatabase – Cartes blanches 2026 gathers four curatorial carte blanche projects that reframe a public video collection through screenings and artist-led playlists.
Conservator-restorer Eléonore Bernard, dancer-choreographer Lucy Nightingale, programmer Christophe Piette, and curators Marie Jeanson and Denis Schuler each present selections of video and moving-image works ranging from early video art to experimental contemporary pieces.
The series explores archival practices, performative temporality, and the shifting histories of moving-image mediums, prompting reflection on preservation, context and modes of display.

Curator Christophe Piette presents a carte blanche program assembled from a moving-image archive, juxtaposing video works, digitized files and archival ephemera. The selection spans historical and contemporary practices, using screenings and installation formats to probe preservation, circulation and public access to media collections. Through an exchange between institutions across cities, the presentation questions how curatorial gestures reveal institutional histories, the materiality of moving images and the tensions between conservation and renewed public visibility.

In French.

Marie Jeanson and Denis Schuler present a curated selection investigating magnetic tape as material and metaphor. The programme brings together experimental video and film— including Super8 restoration, archival fragments and audio-visual works— that foreground tape’s noise, distortion and tactile imperfections. Artists activate memory, absence and political trace, revealing marginalised feminist struggles and collective forms of resistance. Through sound-image interplay, restoration practices and material attunement, the selection evokes tenderness and loss while proposing noisy modes of remembrance and imagination.

Curated by Marie Jeanson and Denis Schuler, co-directors of Festival Archipel, Du bruit sur la bande presents a carte blanche selection from the VideoDatabase. The exhibition gathers video works that probe the materiality of the moving image, foregrounding signal noise, tape artifacts and experimental editing. Through single- and multi-channel screenings, archival fragments and contemporary practices, the programme examines how technical contingency shapes aesthetic meaning and historical memory.

In French.