Louiza is a curatorial-, research- and production structure active in the broad field of the arts, expanding into spatial practice, writing and research, founded by curator Els Silvrants-Barclay in 2009. Louiza also supports the artists Sarah Smolders, Laure Prouvost, Omar A. Chowdhury and Danai Anesiadou.
Louiza BV / Finstraat 15B 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Brussels, Belgium
Say hello@louiza.org / VAT BE 0810.461.031
In her curatorial practice Recreational Matters, Els Silvrants-Barclay focuses on what art can be and do when activated outside of its own institutions, and brought in relation to cities, landscapes, spaces, and their politics. She often curates artistic commissions in public space, understood in its widest sense, and has extensively lectured and written on this. In 2025, she was the lead curator for The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, a series of artistic actions in the post-industrial landscape of Buda, on the outskirts of Brussels. In 2026 she oversees commissions with Elen Braga, Bik Van der Pol and Sarah Smolders, among others.
As associate researcher at the Centre for Urban Studies (VUB University Brussels) and former coordinator of Permanent Brussels she has been investigating anti-speculative understandings of ownership and community-based financial models from the cooperative- and commons economy, to develop a model for a cultural infrastructure in which culture does not act as a driver for profit-driven real estate development and gentrification but pushes for more just and solidary cities.
Till the end of 2024, she was lecturer at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich, where she founded the Dept. of the Ongoing as a ghostly institutional figure to engage with bodies, uses and subjectivities often overlooked by mainstream architectural production. She taught a seminar Architectural Wor(l)ds in the Undercommons collectively thinking texts from critical race and affect studies in spatial terms, including Fred Moten & Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons (2013).
Till 2019 she directed the contemporary arts center Netwerk Aalst in Belgium (now NW) leading the institution through an intensive transition, and curating exhibitions and projects by Pedro Barateiro, Tamas Kaszas (with De Appel), Sarah Smolders, Andros Zins-Browne and Karthik Pandian, Tea Tupajic, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Imogen Stidworthy, Bram De Jonghe, Mira Sanders and Jozef Wouters, among others. Previously she was in charge of a collaboration on contemporary collecting between four public contemporary art museums in Belgium (S.M.A.K Ghent, M HKA Antwerp, Mu.ZEE Ostend and Middelheimmuseum Antwerp). Between 2010 and 2012 she coordinated the Advanced Master in Theatre Studies, lectured dance theory and was part of the Research Centre for Visual Poetics at the University of Antwerp. Before she lived in Beijing (China) where she co-founded the Institute for Provocation, an independent residency and project space, and worked as curator and director for different festivals and institutions.
Recent publications include The Fifth Estate: On Museums, Public Imagination, and the Vanishing Space for Collectivity (2026) with Philippe Pirotte (L’Internationale Online/e-flux notes), Hush, Hush – She Said (2026) on Whispering Walls Rêve by Laure Prouvost and Now is The Time for Monsters (2025), on new drawings by Pedro Barateiro.