Doriane Timmermans and Marie Verdeil will guide us on a walk from Brussels to the industrial zoning of Zaventem (Flanders).

This walk is inspired by a growing practice of walking to digital infrastructures within and bordering European cities. This practice allows walkers to investigate and be confronted with the issues theses infrastructures raise. 

Today, digital infrastructures such as Data centers, are situated at the intersection of a multitude of concerns: local ecosystem disruption and urban planing policy changes; global mineral extractivism and the colonial violences it implies; data-driven surveillance; AI’s economical operations and mass de-skilling; or the tentacular and vicious dependencies we face in our daily use of technology, imposed on us by techno-fascist companies.

This walk will bring together story-tellers from various locations, functioning like a collage of oral interventions, in situ exercices, and partipatory documentation.

Interventions will be in English and French, with rapid translation available.

The guides

Doriane Timmermans (BE)

Doriane Timmermans practices as an artist, developer, designer, teacher and activist. She tries to question digital systems by looking at what they make us do as much as what they do. Her political practice includes fighting against Big Tech and AI and working on mutual support structures for precarious/trans people. She loves how we can collaboratively design through language, through declarative programming and socio-cultural practices. She believes in resilient gossip-networks and situated and intimate tech pedagogy as radical skills to help us empower each other.

Marie Verdeil (FR/BE)

Marie Verdeil is a French designer and artist based in Brussels. Her multidisciplinary projects—websites, workshops, installations, publications, and tools—advocate for an autonomous, transparent, environmentally aware and critical approach to technology. Since graduating from the Design Academy Eindhoven (2022), she uses her creative toolset to open up the technological black boxes surrounding us but also imagines desirable futures that are aligned with planetary limits.

The story-tellers

Marloes de Valk (NL)

Marloes de Valk is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others and astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socialising with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why.

Anti Devillet (FR)

Anti Devillet is an independent researcher specialising in the environmental and social issues surrounding technical infrastructure, with a particular focus on digital technology, water and oil. She is also a member of various community and activist groups at the intersection of collective action, local investigations and social struggles, such as Le Nuage était sous nos pieds, the Gammares collective, and the bureau des guides du GR2013.

Equinox (BE)

Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice is a queer, feminist racial justice organisation working toward a vision for societies of care, protection and social provision. With the Tech Infrastructure Coalition, Equinox researches the increasing merger between tech infrastructures and militarism in Europe, and how communities can build coalitions and contest.

Technopolice (BE)

Technopolice highlights the threats to civil liberties posed by surveillance tools in the Brussels region by centralising information about them on a single platform accessible to everyone. Through this informative work, they aim to give the general public the opportunity to understand these issues and develop tools and strategies to resist surveillance, so that the roll-out of these policing tools is halted, the militarisation of public space is thwarted and, ultimately, technopolice is brought to an end!

Atelier Cartographique (BE)

Atelier Cartographique is a Brussels-based co-operative that focuses on the cultural aspects of cartography and the social dimensions of spatial representations and technologies related to information systems. Its team has a range of interdisciplinary skills, spanning from graphic design to open-source software development and urban research. They collaborate with regional, academic and cultural institutions on projects exploring modes of representation and the use of data relating to urban issues such as walking, migration, housing challenges, and water or energy communities.

Access

• It is not possible to follow the walk by bike.
• The walk is around 6km with stops alongside parc benches.
• The walk is not accessible by wheelchair.
• The first part of the route is a beaten earth path.
• The second part of the route is on flat tarmac.

There will be a meeting point halfway along the route, from then on the walk will be on flat tarmac. For more information about this, please get in touch with us: cifas@cifas.be For any other questions about accessibility, don’t hesistate to contact us.