The Belly of the City is an exhibition unfolding across Brussels, embedded in the city’s polyphonic, ethnically diverse fabric and in the places that nourish it: markets, street stalls, migrant grocery stores, community gardens, compost heaps and herb gardens, canteens, bars, and delivery vans.

Through this exhibition, artists investigate the systems and infrastructures of food supply—its supply chains and waste streams—but above all approach food as a cultural and geopolitical issue. The exhibition explores these questions through the perspective of the Polish diaspora: its flavours, culinary traditions, and the choices that accompany them.

How does the everyday infrastructure of food—together with the largely invisible systems of food policy, production, trade, and distribution—influence our health, our identities, and the places we inhabit? Who decides what this system looks like? Who bears its hidden costs? And what might a more equitable food system look like?

Geopolitics unfolds on our plates before it ever reaches the corridors of power. Food is political long before it becomes a question of calories. Wars over territory are also wars over soil, water, and microorganisms. Cargo ships traversing the oceans are the floating arteries of the global food system. Who has the right to cultivate the land, and under what conditions? Where are the battles over natural resources, farmland, monocultures, and crop diversity being fought? How can we cultivate the soil without depleting or destroying it? Whose stomach will remain empty? These questions ultimately determine where borders are drawn, how people migrate, and what future awaits entire communities and species. Power over food is power over others.

The destruction of crops and the blockade of food transport have become instruments of political pressure in some parts of the world, while elsewhere hunger has given way to its structural counterpart: obesity and food waste. Whether full or empty, our stomachs continue to tell the same story—that of inequality.

As Maciej Jakubowiak observes in Historie ludowe: Brzuch (People’s History: The Belly), the history of humanity may be told as a history of exploitation, but equally as a history of social movements, colonialism, serfdom, and migration. “Ultimately, however, it is about hunger. Ultimately, it is about food. Ultimately, it is about the belly.”

The challenge of feeding ten billion people places cities at the centre of this struggle. They are becoming key arenas in the fight for food justice and equitable access to food. Food functions simultaneously as a weapon, a means of exchange, and an infrastructure of survival. It is also a marker of taste and social status, a mechanism for reinforcing class divisions, and a driver of the planetary crisis. For every calorie of food produced in the field, approximately two calories of fossil fuel are used, with a further eight to twelve calories required for processing, packaging, transport, and storage. A profound transformation of the food system towards agroecology and food justice is therefore essential: reducing food waste, lowering agricultural emissions, shortening supply chains, and improving access to fresh, minimally processed food.

The Belly of the City approaches food as infrastructure: a network of material, emotional, and political relationships that shape our bodies, our memories, and urban space. Its point of departure is the food landscape of the Polish diaspora in Brussels—a constellation of flavours, forms of hospitality, hybrid species, and culinary traditions that have migrated with people and continue to evolve within their new environment.

Every movement of a food ingredient is an act of translation—from one soil to another, from one language to another—and every translation produces something new: a hybrid economy, a hybrid ecosystem, and an identity that can no longer be traced back to a single place of origin.

Throughout October, works by the artists appear in Brussels’ public space: at a market, in Polish grocery shops and on the streets. Centrum Centrum (Łukasz Jastrubczak and Małgorzata Mazur) distribute posters, printed tote bags and the audio play “When the Cucumber Eats the Snail” at the Abattoir d’Anderlecht market and in Polish shops, as well as in the herbarium of the Polish Catholic Community in Binche. Karolina Jabłońska’s paintings can be seen on a van that transports food from Poland to Polish grocery shops in Brussels. At the Kubuś shop on Rue Malibran, Krzysztof Kaczmarek presents the video “Instant Cabbage” at the checkout, and in the window of the Kofiko shop on Chaussée d’Ixelles, Agnieszka Kurant presents the installation “Currency Converter”.

The exhibition is accompanied by the academic conference “New Foodscapes” (Nowe Krajobrazy Jedzenia), taking place on 30 October at the La Cambre-Horta Faculty of Architecture at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). It will bring together students, theorists, urban researchers, architects and landscape architects, and art and farming collectives. The conference is organised in partnership by the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIAiU), Shadow Architecture, the La Cambre-Horta Faculty of Architecture at ULB, and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW).

As part of the Belly of the City project, we will invite you to a home in Ixelles, where for two days food becomes a subject of art, architecture and shared experience. The programme includes an exhibition of works by Dawid Misiorny, Aleksandra Nowysz and Aleksandra Wasilkowska, as well as a model of the “The Belly of Warsaw”, a vision of an urban food hub. Pola Sutryk invites you to the performative “A Moldy Feast” in a home vegetable garden. Slavs and Tatars open a pop-up Pickle Bar with performances by Łukasz Jastrubczak and Filipka Rutkowska, and workshops for children led by Ala Savashevich. You can also see Janek Simon selling non-existent fruit at a Brussels market.

More details coming soon.

The project is also accompanied by a special issue of Autoportret magazine dedicated to the theme of Foodscapes,
bringing together critical perspectives on food, landscape, architecture and urbanism.

Organiser: National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning of Poland (NIAiU)
Curator: Aleksandra Wasilkowska – Shadow Architecture
Artists: Centrum Centrum, Karolina Jabłońska, Krzysztof Kaczmarek, Agnieszka Kurant, Dawid Misiorny, Aleksandra Nowysz, Janek Simon, Pola Sutryk, Slavs and Tatars, Ala Savashevich, Filipka Rutkowska, Aleksandra Wasilkowska
Project coordination and production: Magdalena Breńko, Weronika Dziedziczak
Project delivery: Magdalena Breńko, Weronika Dziedziczak, Mateusz Włodarek, Kacper Tomaszewski
Contribution to the initial project concept: Zuzanna Mielczarek
Subject-matter consultation: Aleksandra Nowysz
Research: Aleksandra Nowysz, Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak, Marta Karpińska
Photography: Dawid Misiorny
Visual identity: Katarzyna Nestorowicz
Exhibition graphic design: Katarzyna Nestorowicz, Weronika Nowak
Communication: Dominik Witaszczyk, Aleksandra Zaszewska
Editing: Urszula Drabińska
Translations: Frans van der Veer, Monika Szymaniak
Exhibition production: RigUp.pl
Partners: Polish Institute in Brussels, Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta, Shadow Architecture, Autoportret, Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW)
In cooperation with: Białuty, Kofiko, Kubuś, DPS – Dystrybucja Polskich Specjałów (Distribution of Polish Specialities), Kooperatywa Dobrze, Spółdzielcza Farma MOST (MOST Cooperative Farm), Municipality of Ixelles, Municipality of Anderlecht, Catholic Community in Binche
Media Patronage: Contemporary Lynx

The project was co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland under the programme Inspiring Culture 2025–2026.