Lietje Bauwens and Wouter De Raeve present their film WTC A Love Story during this Thursday Night Live! Through the fictionalised story of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers in Brussels, WTC A Love Story explores public participation in urban redevelopment. Jack Segbars will then lead a public talk with a hybrid palette of activists, artists and other experts who organize themselves within the context of Rotterdam, against similar socio-political developments.

In 1970 the Northern Quarter was destroyed to make way for ‘Little Manhattan’, a modernistic, business-oriented dream donned with two World Trade Centre towers as its crown jewels. This project failed, leaving the two towers mostly empty for years until the owner’s renewed interest in the area in 2017, initiating plans for its redevelopment. Lietje Bauwens and Wouter De Raeve witnessed these changes from their studio located on the 25th floor of WTC-tower1 and decided to intervene in the debate by making a film with the actors who claimed a voice in the transition: politicians, an activist, the private owner, designers and others. In WTC A Love Story these actors, replaced by performers who are partly instructed by the actors, become mirrored in a recursively generated narrative. Through this method of recursively weaving fiction and reality, the process of political representation is accelerated, bringing missing perspectives and voices to the fore. The film thus investigates how participation and representation can be organized differently. Against the backdrop of the WTC towers, the film shows how creative and participatory engagement and input are instrumentalized within the decision making processes leading to gentrification.

The talk with initiatives from the Rotterdam context, moderated by Jack Segbars, explores which methods are useful to critically analyze the current political-governmental climate, characterized by bureaucratic elusiveness and appropriation of resistance, and what new forms of organization may offer to counter the socially deep and affecting processes of gentrification and the destruction of living environments, as is happening in the Tweebosbuurt in Rotterdam? In what activist ways can we engage in the political-societal debates and in city planning? What possibilities are there for art and artistic practices? Which actors need to be included in regards to the ‘redevelopment’ of the social sphere, and what would such a cast look like?

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