Spring 2025: What I am working on ...

Spring 2025 — I’m living through an exceptionally intense and fertile period. Threads of practice are converging, sometimes unexpectedly, across facilitation, teaching, research, creative work, and slow, unfolding conversations. Not everything fits neatly. Some things are still ripening.

I’m currently involved in a number of professional assignments with partners across sectors:

Supporting Oxfam America in developing a strategy for their Rights in a Digital Age programme.
Co-designing and facilitating a total system future search on long-term care in Flanders, alongside two senior colleagues.
Assisting the King Baudouin Foundation’s Knowledge and Impact Centre in shaping a strategic agenda that is as much cultural as it is technical.
Helping the European Public Health Alliance renew its strategy for the 2026–2029 period.
Supporting the Federal Health Care Knowledge Centre in a foresight process on the future of general medical practice.
Collaborating with architecture office 51N4E on new policy approaches to urban nature and spatial imagination.

Alongside this, I continue to mentor several younger professionals as they navigate the early stages of their paths. These conversations are often held over walks, museum visits and even camping trips.

In teaching, I’ve just concluded the first edition of the Landscape & Imagination course, part of the Advanced Master in Urban and Territorial Design jointly offered by EPFL Lausanne and ETH Zurich. It was moving to see how an open, collaborative pedagogy created space for trust, depth, and not-knowing. The course will return in 2025–2026. In June, I’ll co-facilitate a three-day workshop at the ReWorlding Summer School in Zurich.

I continue to contribute to the School for Systems Change (Health programme) and the International Certified Future Strategist programme led by Kairos Future in Stockholm.

This summer, I’ll also be in Paris, working with Raymond Meeks on a slow-emerging photobook concept centred on Walter Benjamin’s exile years. In parallel, I’m preparing a photobook titled The Second Coming, to be published by Hopper & Fuchs (2026). The work plays with our strange cultural moment—one foot in crisis, the other still dancing.

On 30–31 August, I’ll host the Black Triangle Festival, a 24-hour jamboree at the foot of the mining slag heap that has become the focus of doctoral research. It will mark the close of my action research, foreground the partners with whom I have been co-inquiring and offer an opportunity for visitors to attend some amazing performances and talks.

In terms of writing:

A futures methodological paper (with UGent co-authors) will be presented at the Turku Futures Conference.
A policy guidance paper for civil servants in food systems, co-authored with a team at KU Leuven.
A chapter on design philosophy, based on a keynote I gave in 2023 at the University of Bolzano.
I’ll present my doctoral work at the World Urbanisms Seminar at KU Leuven, end of June.

Creative writing continues in the margins. In March, I travelled to Sicily in search of literary echoes left by Friedrich Hölderlin, gathering material for a geopoetical essay. And I'm very keenly looking forward to the publication of my first collection of sixty poems on the occasion of the Black Triangle Festival in summer 2026.

I have been hatching an idea for a new learning program pivoting on the elusive figure of the trickster, the figure that excels in liminal subversion with the aim to open up collective possibility. More news soon. Stay tuned.

Finally, I continue to serve as an Expert Advisor to the European Public Health Alliance (2025–2026), as a Trustee at the International Futures Forum, and on the Executive Committee of the International Federation for Systems Research.