Constructing an alternative world is a much talked-about objective, but ideas on how to get there are widely divergent. Art offers other ways to achieve this aim, through imagination and fiction, which open up productive fissures in reality. Continuing the ecological reflection begun with the series “Matters of concern | Matières à panser”, Guillaume Désanges wanted to enlarge the field to science fiction, the better, perhaps, to reappropriate the future. The exhibition “Tactics of Augmented Dreams”, which brings together fifteen artists, offers, in the curator’s words, an “archipelago of uncertain forms that act as doors opening onto parallel universes, affirming the imagination’s power to function as a tool for political and social transformation”. At La Verrière, established artists rub shoulders with a younger generation, all driven by the same dream-infused perspective: in a hybridisation of different media and concepts, each of them offers stimulating and unexpected paths into an alternative reality.

Following this group exhibition, science fiction gives way to a more sensory approach. French-Gabonese artist Myriam Mihindou transforms the space of La Verrière into a site for shared experiences, inciting the public to become one with her floor-based works amidst a vast fresco that unfolds around them like a mental landscape. As its title suggests, “ÉPIDERME” is an exhibition to be experienced physically, or even intimately: an invitation to feel and to celebrate life in all its sensorial and organic dimensions through a practice defined by sobriety and economy of means. With this show that places the living at the heart of artistic practice, Guillaume Désanges closes a decade as curator of La Verrière, in which he has overseen a rich and intensive programme of exhibitions by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès at its Brussels art space.