Cinema Session #2 — Ruderalia
26.06.2025

As part of the Forest Encounters exhibition, Out of Sight and MORPHO invite you to Cinema Session #2, a collaboration between the two organisations. Join us on Thursday, 26 June for Ruderalia — a film screening and guided walk through the neighbourhood with artist and filmmaker Joris De Rycke.

In Ruderalia, Joris subverts the familiar language of nature documentaries. He rejects the spectacular — no high-definition close-ups, dramatic soundtracks, or authoritative voice-overs. Instead, with quiet attentiveness and without embellishment, he turns his gaze toward, what he calls ‘banal’ nature found on the margins of highways, industrial zones, quarries, and slag heaps, places we rarely consider worthy of our attention.

Ruderalia becomes a compelling guided walk through the overlooked wilderness of Belgium, far from marked trails, information boards, or curated landscapes. It leads us across disturbed grounds and post-industrial sites, what the Latin root ruder (meaning ‘rubble’ or ‘waste’) alludes to, where nature emerges not as untouched or pure, but as an artefact shaped by past events and recent human activities. Here, plants become storytellers, revealing the chemical composition of the soil and the work of pollinators fostering hybrid species. Joris demonstrates that another kind of nature documentary is possible, one that is slow, grounded, and deeply reflective.

Following the screening, Joris De Rycke invites the audience to join him on a walk through the immediate surroundings of our organisations. This shared walk extends the film experience into real life, moving further away from spectacle and deeper into the layered, entangled nature that we are part of today. Sign up here.