Kanal Culture Market
Proposal for the museum shop of Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels (BE)
The former Citroën garage, reimagined by the KANAL project, is a space that resembles the way markets themselves function. A place where numerous objects, activities, and people coexist under one roof, generating an environment charged with a multitude of possible interactions. Our proposal for the Culture Market aims to celebrate this urban character and sees it as a catalyst for these infinite possibilities.
Markets have traditionally been crucial social infrastructures: places to exchange goods, but also to interact with people, and share culture and know-how. Until the advent of the internet, they served as incubators for unpredictable exchanges that went beyond the logic of supply and demand. Today, markets are primarily digital. We scroll, buy, and sell without truly experiencing the products, only through the image we see on a screen for a few minutes. With fascination and a touch of nostalgia, we are drawn to informal retail practices, such as street markets or garage sales. These are places that blur the boundaries between creator, seller, and buyer, offering the opportunity for sincere interaction with the people involved and the excitement of an unexpected discovery.
By borrowing the best qualities of these practices, we envision the Culture Market as a familiar, convivial, and spontaneous space that challenges conventional hierarchies between seller and buyer, designer and user, object and space. Informality is a tool for building a truly open and inclusive space, where everyone feels welcome. The central idea of the proposal is therefore to treat the shop as a space open to curatorial practices, appropriation and reinterpretations, but above all as a device at the heart of Kanal's public space.
Team: Celeste Tellarini + Xander Wilhelm + Nicolas Jonard + Filippo Tognocchi with ︎︎︎Casablanco and ︎︎︎Bazart
Stage: Invited competition
Year: 2025