Super Animated Thursday / Super Jeudi Animé

The neighbourhood organisation Fort Ensemble in Sint-Gillis (Brussels, BE), a local socio-cultural association that gathers inhabitants, shopkeepers, social and cultural organisations, solicited the Urban Species team for a small collaboration. Fort Ensemble periodically organizes a Jeudi Animé (“Animated Thursday”), during which the participating shops and organisations propose a programme of visits and activities to make themselves better known to the neighbourhood. For their special edition just before the Christmas Holidays, with the Super Jeudi Animé (“Super Animated Thursday”) they wanted to put their initiative even more in the spotlight. To this end, we decided together to deploy a set of Urban Species Lightboxes to highlight the event locally, throughout the street.

The general setup was made up of an individual lightbox on a scaffold pole to be placed in front of each participating shop and organisation, and a bigger installation with multiple lightboxes and the event’s programme was placed at the corner of the street. Being a relatively small shopping street adjacent to a larger, crowded pedestrian area, Rue du Fort may easily be overlooked. A small media architecture installation near the busy pedestrian area attracted the attention of those not knowing the street, and spark the curiosity of potential visitors. The individual lightbox units placed in front of the shop windows would give an overview of participating shops and organisations, whilst the designs featured on the lightboxes gave the necessary clues about the business and identity of the shop or organisation in question.

Hence, each participating shop or organisation was invited to come up with a design for their own lightbox and ideas for colourful animations to be played on them. The participating venues were pretty diverse: a vinyl shop, a pop-up store with independent designer’s items; civil organisations defending women’s rights, supporting neighbourhood children’s homework, organising women and crafts workshops; a creative up- and recycling venue, a medieval crafts workshop venue, a cultural centre, and so on. As two members of the organising committee got a small, two-hour tutorial from Urban Species team members at the regional FabLab CityFab 1 on the design and use of the lightboxes, participants could enjoy their help or assistance throughout the process of designing and animating their lightbox. The result was a variegated series of designs, from simple ones to very complex ones, with a whole range of colours and colour palettes, each touching upon the shop’s or organisation’s personal identity!

Team
Concept and coordination: Urban Species, asbl Fort Ensemble vzw
Participating organization: vzw Fort Ensemble asbl

Place of intervention
Rue du Fort, 1060 Saint-Gilles/Brussels (BE) 

Intervention dates/period
12/12/2019