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Tom Viaene

@tom.viaene.31

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Bridger.
Making books @triggerfomu @fomuantwerp, philosophy lecturer @sintlucasantwerpen, artistic research communication @_slarg_
Brussels based. 🛼

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SLARG is back for a new academic year!

And... we’re kicking things off with Research Week 2026:

A week bringing together artistic research at Sint Lucas Antwerpen School of Arts through a research exhibition, a screening programme, presentations and a public lecture.

At the centre of the week is a research exhibition bringing together the work of SLARG’s PhD and other researchers. Rather than presenting finished artworks, the exhibition makes research itself visible: its questions, processes, materials, experiments and forms of knowledge. It offers a space to encounter artistic research as something in development, and to see how different practices generate and share knowledge.

On Wednesday 28 October, we open the exhibition with a tour, drinks and conversation. On Thursday, a screening programme with Danial Shah, Bianca Baldi and Sammy Baloji brings film into dialogue with artistic research, with space for discussion and exchange with the audience, researchers from other institutions and students across the arts.

Friday afternoon focuses on presentations of completed research projects, followed by a public lecture by Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, ‘Language as an Impasse’, exploring the breakdown of language, the disappearance of words and silence as a counterpoint to speaking.

The research exhibition remains open throughout the week, inviting students, researchers and visitors to spend time with the work and follow the different trajectories of research.

SLARG is welcoming you!

28 October – 1 November 2026
Sint Lucas Antwerpen / SLARG

Full programme and practical information at slarg.be

Many thanks to Loraine Furter & Imane Khoutoul Benyecif for visuals and website. @lorainefurter

@garine.gokceyan @robinvanbesien @ayoh.kre Brenda Bikoko @dimitri_van_den_wittenboer @irmafoldenyi @ra.sheen Joachim Ben Yakoub @kvermeren @sam__vanbelle @celiatortpujol Myrthe Bokelmann Lieven Menschaert @enigmeta @jeroen.bocken Jonathan Paepens & @sandervandevyvere @wesleymeuris @twentyninestudioproduction @danialshah_ @bianca_baldi @kim_gorus @joudtoamah @ruth.loos by @tom.viaene.31

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25 days ago

Every year I convince myself I know what I’m getting into with the next Trigger book. Every year, I’m wrong.
This time, submergence became the method. I spent a year learning from Nuria Bofarull and Irene Solé Quevedo / Oceanographies Collective, and from an extraordinary network of artists, photographers, divers, researchers, marine scientists, writers and thinkers.
People photographing underwater, working with seawater, letting water enter the image, thinking with currents, sediments, marine life and underwater light. Photography getting wet, murky, unstable. A little less land, a little more ocean.
The book itself became an ocean of sorts: in movement, full of unexpected currents, collisions and connections. Not because it represents the ocean — we’re not quite that ambitiously anti-representational 😉 — but because the ocean started messing with how we think about photography.
And I’ve learned a lot. About ocean literacy, climate change, and the limits and possibilities of the photographic image.
I’ve never really been a diver or sailor (more the runner’s type). But this submergence has changed something. As wildfires burn, floods rise and climate “disasters” become ever harder to ignore, perhaps we should listen more carefully to what the ocean — and there is only one — has been telling us for a very long time.
Trigger #7 — Ocean, initiated by FOMU – Museum of Photography Antwerp. Going to print. Out in November.

@irenesoleq @nuriabofarull @oceanographies_collective
@triggerfomu @fomuantwerp @fomu.library
@hans.gremmen by @tom.viaene.31

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a month ago

How does publishing shape collective gathering and exchange? Join us during Tashattot’s 𝙎𝙒𝘼𝙉𝘼 𝙇𝙞𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 & 𝘼𝙧𝙩 𝙁𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙡 for 𝗣𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘀, a conversation on publishing, traces, and collective practices with Joachim Ben Yakoub, Barrack Zailaa Rima and Charbel Alkhoury, moderated by Tom Viaene⁠
⁠
📅 06.06. 18h-20h at Kaaistudios⁠
🗣️ EN⁠
🩶 FREE (limited capacity, come early)⁠
⁠
This conversation departs from the book 𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙜𝙚𝙧 #6: 𝘼𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙢𝙗𝙡𝙞𝙚𝙨, approaching publishing as a form of gathering. Through the lens of “paper assemblies,” it explores how printed matter such as magazines, posters, and postcards can carry traces, circulate stories, and continue to bring people together across time and place. The panel considers how publishing connects dispersed geographies, and how traces, memories, and stories continue to circulate, gather, and shift meaning over time. ⁠
⁠
📸 cover of Trigger #6: Assemblies taken in Kaaistudio's by @tom.viaene.31

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5 months ago

Island thinking on a Saturday…
You no longer remember what came first: the book or the island.
Or rather, the book became an island, or was it the other way around?
Islands have been haunting fantasias, whether utopias or distopias. This book seduces to think differently.
A collaboration between a film director, Gabriele Chiapparini, and a graphic designer, Camilla Marrese, … and collaboration is not method but necessity, the only way to begin unravelling this object. A book as island, an island as labyrinth, because the sea is everywhere, really. And the sea assembles it all: Quotes, thoughts, objects, remnants, fish, relics, more fish, …
You start to play. Upside down. Reading fragments, shifting between voices from a barely inhabited island somewhere off the coast of Italy (maybe). Choosing different paths each time. Flipping smaller rectangular books within the book, as if trying to understand what it means to hold everything dear (cf. John Berger).
And then, suddenly, at the end: the simple pleasure of a child discovering the multi-paged sea for the first time.
Who knew the simplest puzzle in the world, “islands within islands”, could be so much fun.
Thinking Like an Island is published by Overlapse.
@overlapse
@camillamarrese
@gabrielechiapparini by @tom.viaene.31

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6 months ago

Through Revue Faire N.55 @revuefaire the Italian critic and curator Rica Cerbarano got to publish this longer essay turned into a papered stretch of a book on the relation between billboards and photography, basically it deals with how we civilians or/and artists could re-imagine our public places and how we could reclaim our streets, you know.
Rica’s The billboard image brings together practices from For Freedoms, Steven Shearer, Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, Steve McQueen, Maurizio Montagna and many more. The essay is very rich, both historical and critical, and is “reviving” the idea - notwithstanding the growing “publicness” of AI generated images - that photography still has the potential to deal with “the public and its problems” (cf. John Dewey, my reference). Agree or not, how about the courage of some of these artists mounting all these surprising and critical billboards. Rica takes you to all these places and interventions.
@ricacerbarano

Small collab with @triggerfomu also.
Thank you. by @tom.viaene.31

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7 months ago

Last night I finally heard a live rendering of the 1988 album Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk. @haconcerts First time experiencing it live. I was too young to see them back then.
But every year I return to it at least once. Headphones on. And every time it crawls under my skin. I kind of disappear in it.
Spirit moves me. Spirit can mean anything really, but I often think of María Lugones and her idea of “world-travelling”. The music ridicules the ego, who starts to travel. In between worlds.
The story behind the album is already fascinating in itself. A strange episode in British music history. But what interests me even more is how Mark Hollis was searching for meaning through silence inside song structures. Hollis seems to build up refusals to comply with many things at the same time. His un-locatable singing voice adds stuff for ghosts.
Many composers pushed things further technically. Still, there is something very particular in what he did here.
And later something even more striking. Hollis more or less silenced himself by leaving the whole music industry behind. Just stopped. (“Enough, ain’t it enough, crippled world” from I believe in you)
I always found something beautiful in that. Not only the way he pushed musical boundaries (the later album Laughing Stock is incredible too), but also the way he pulled out and simply had enough.
It doesn’t feel pessimistic to me. Even if it created a small cult around him. The spirit moves beyond that.
For me, Spirit of Eden resonates with the fading ghost of a certain Western humanism - even if the album sometimes verges on predictable spirit-matter dualism. But yes, all those false authenticities that led to eco injustices and more. You can tell. Yet the notes sometimes flash like small lights of hope. Like the fireflies in Pier Paolo Pasolini.
#spiritofeden #markhollis by @tom.viaene.31

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7 months ago

Here’s a “hand” crawling, trying to move beyond its static image.

Photography as a relational process
‘The photographer left, they told the truth’

BOX, HAND, AND PRINT

Charlotte Bouckaert, left,
and a bunch of performers, present.

#beyondtheblackbox
@brakkegrond
@charlotte_bouckaert by @tom.viaene.31

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8 months ago

Brussels surprises you in the strangest ways.
Take Rosa Luxemburg Drive.
How it stubbornly cuts through Stalingrad Avenue.
Head first. I love that.
A metaphor?
A dream?
A confabulation?
On this January night in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was tortured to death and thrown into the river.
The night of January 15 into 16.
In Confabulations (2016), John Berger’s last book of essays, he writes to her.
At that border between life and death.
The letter begins sharply: “Rosa!”
He wonders how to deliver a box he kept for her.
A collection of matchboxes.
Each one printed with a songbird.
In prison, Rosa was often visited by a particular bird.
It carried the aura of a public speaker.
Addressing the whole garden.
(drawing by John Berger) by @tom.viaene.31

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9 months ago

@tuminasdaria @sputnikphotos @maria.matiashova

‘Because FOTODOK and Sputnik Photos actively support Ukraine, it was decided to join forces once again. This time, we take a close look at the history of various regions affected by Russian imperial violence, examining the context that has shaped today’s reality.’ taken in FOTODOK by @tom.viaene.31

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9 months ago

a bit late to share, but here is a proud book contribution from 2025. A brilliant selection edited by Taous Dahmani.
With thanks also to Tom Viaene as @triggerfomu s series editor. @fomuantwerp .
My contribution is a text and a stills selection based on my video installation ‘at night, on faultlines’ discussing the artistic research process we created with Mihran Tomasyan.

with thanks to the editors 📕♥️ by @tom.viaene.31

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9 months ago

Some books stayed after Paris Photo. Their covers are faces, turning their gaze. Books as footsteps, traces of good days in Paris. A quiet nod to all photobook makers, editors, printers, and everyone shaping this demanding, beautiful world.

In this order:
Abdo Shanan – Dry (@abdo.shanan, @aka_tawla): moving in every sense.
Meriem Bennani – Sole Crushing (@meriembennani): a flip-flop pageturner, a world in itself.
Frank Dupuy – Cruising Diaries (@franco.dupuy, @setmargins): still exploring.
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa – INDEX 2025 (@roma.publications): analytical, poetic, against Barthes somehow, toying with the indexical, rich in references.
Justine Kurland – Scumb Manifesto (@justine4good, @mack_publishing): revolting in the best way.
Max Pinckers & Victoria Gonzalez-Figueras – Colour Theory (@maxpinckers): Kodachrome red in photography’s history.
Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein – American Glitch (@orejarena_stein_studio, @gnomicbook): a rediscovered gem.
Chiara Indelicato – Pelle di Lava (@chiarinai, @palaisbooks): climate emergency and coffee in one.
Assemblies shoulders Scumb Manifesto at Le Bal (@triggerfomu @fw.books , @fomuantwerp, @taous_r_dahmani): our recent launch.
Leila Orth – we as water (@archive.souq): giving water a voice, exploring new waves.
Alexis Vasilikos – Oceanic (@alexis.vasilikos, @zoetrope.athens): sensoric, oceanic feeling.
Editions B2: small, punchy books with big ideas across architecture, geopolitics, anthropology, and visual culture. Works by Raquel Paiva, Carlo Bramanti, J. Lorusso spark dialogue across disciplines, blending critical writing, investigative curiosity, and creative exploration.

All available @lebalbooks, @polycopies, @offprint_projects. by @tom.viaene.31

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a year ago

Running 11am Friday 14 November 2025
At Centre Culturel Irlandais, 5, rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris.

Critical Beans is a get-together organised by @photoireland where visitors can enjoy strong coffee and urgent conversations around contemporary art. Each international speaker shares their current work and preoccupations, driving the focus of the morning session in rapid-fire propositions that are opened to the audience.

The session will commence with a presentation of the latest double release of @overjournal issue 4 and a special @futuresphotography edition.

Speakers
-Bettina Freimann, Project Director, The Triennial of Photography Hamburg @bettina.freimann @phototriennale
-Imane Djamil, Artist @idjamil
-Raphaëlle Stopin, Curator & Art Director Director, Centre photographique Rouen Normandie @raphaellestopin @centrephotographique
- Tom Viaene, editor, Trigger, Fotomuseum Antwerp @tom.viaene.31 @triggerfomu @fomuantwerp

FRI 14 NOVEMBER
SCHEDULE
- 11am PhotoIreland introduces OVER Journal issues 4 and 5
- 11:15am Speakers, followed by Q&A and participation from the audience
- 12.30pm Tour of the exhibition Ladies and Gentlemen by artist @daraghsoden
-1pm A tour of the Centre Culturel Irlandais premises#

This is a free event open to everyone; no booking is required. The event is made possible thank to the wonderful staff at the Centre Culturel Irlandais. taken in Centre Culturel Irlandais by @tom.viaene.31

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a year ago