Step into a world where robots, puppets and soft machines seem to come alive during an exhibition tour and performance at FTI Festival.

What happens when technology is not only a tool, but something that moves us, unsettles us or prompts us to act? What if a puppet looks back at us, a robot hesitates, or a softly moving object suddenly seems to ask for our care? This evening brings together two artists who give objects a sense of life. Not as perfect machines, but as vulnerable, strange and sometimes deeply moving beings.

Artistic researcher Laura Vandewynckel works at the intersection of film, theatre and visual arts. The Parliament of the Pitiful is the final outcome of her doctoral research at RITCS School of Arts and Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In the exhibition, she brings together mechanical puppets, robots and kinetic sculptures. Her work draws on stories of scapegoating, both old and contemporary, but reverses the perspective. It is not the majority that speaks, but those who are usually denied a voice: the scapegoat, the animal, space debris or another excluded being.

Ugo Dehaes also explores moving bodies, but from the perspective of dance. After twenty years of working with dancers, he began building robots. He became, as he describes it, a choreographer of things. In Soft Tissue, created in collaboration with VUB, Dehaes combines dance, technology, puppetry and humour. Seated around a large table, the audience watches up close as soft robots move, search, fail and perhaps even touch us.

Together, these two artists reveal another side of technology. The focus is not on the smart or efficient machine, but on the moment when an object gains presence and seems to ask something in return.

The programme takes place twice. Please select one of the two available time slots when booking your ticket.

Time slot 1
17:30: Guided tour of Laura Vandewynckel’s exhibition The Parliament of the Pitiful, followed by the try-out of Ugo Dehaes’ Soft Tissue
Expected end: 19:00

Time slot 2
20:00: Guided tour of Laura Vandewynckel’s exhibition The Parliament of the Pitiful, followed by the try-out of Ugo Dehaes’ Soft Tissue
Expected end: 21:30

Tickets will soon be online through the website of FTI Festival.

Ugo Dehaes started dancing at the age of eighteen. One year later, he was admitted to PARTS, the renowned dance school founded by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. In 1998, he joined Meg Stuart’s company Damaged Goods, where he worked as a dancer for three years. In 2000, together with Charlotte Vanden Eynde, he founded the company kwaad bloed. In the years that followed, he created a new dance performance every two years. Around 2018, Ugo took a radically new direction: he became a choreographer of things. He learned how to build and choreograph robots. Alongside several installations, this period also saw the creation of the internationally successful productions Simple Machines and Moving Skin.


Laura Vandewynckel studied Language and Literature at Ghent University and dramatic and audiovisual arts at RITCS School of Arts Brussels. Her stop-motion film Paradise (2014), a playful yet critical reflection on ‘ethical’ tourism, was selected for La Cinef Cannes and TIFF. With the Sifnos Award La Cinef, she created Pharmakos (2017), documenting a collective reenactment of the Greek Pharmakos ritual with inhabitants of Sifnos. Her animated short Le Crépuscule (2023), on the impact of nightmare news on the collective mind, is touring international festivals.

Laura has written and directed theatrical works including A modest contribution (2018), on good intentions with bad consequences, and participatory performance Stick Together (2021), inspired by stick games, dances, and fights. Her production, Lost in LEO (2023), is a puppet performance about impact and climate change from the perspective of space debris. She teaches at RITCS and is completing a PhD on automata as activist tools.