Louiza is a curatorial-, research- and production structure active in the broad field of the arts, expanding into spatial practice, activism and research, founded by curator Els Silvrants-Barclay in 2009. Since 2020, Louiza also supports the practices of the artists Sarah Smolders, 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, 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 is 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.
As coordinator of Permanent Brussels and associate researcher at the Centre for Urban Studies (VUB University Brussels) she investigates 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). Since 2025, she is part of the educational team of RITCS School of Arts in Brussels.
Till 2019 she directed the contemporary arts center Netwerk Aalst in Belgium (now NW) leading the institution through an intensive transition. Previously she was in charge of a collaboration between four public contemporary art museums in Belgium. 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, a workspace for artists and architects, and worked as curator and director for different festivals and institutions.
Els Silvrants-Barclay is also vice-president of BOZAR, Belgium’s largest federal cultural institution.