Ter Beken Living Lab
The site of Park/Castle Ter Beken has a multi-layered history, where various human and non-human interactions have taken place, but only the ones of human-centred ecologies are well known and being transmitted.
As an 18th-century walled castle, located on the border of Drongen and Mariakerke (Ghent), it was built on the site where a feudal castle once stood. In the beginning of the 20th century, it became a luxurious country retreat of the Casier family, who were active in politics and the local flax textile industry. A catholic training centre for young priests was built in 1948 and turned into a boys boarding school in the nineties.
The built structures organised the domain and its surroundings according to the binaries of their times (nature-culture, outside-inside, female-male, servant-master, profane-sacred, e.o.) and the narratives of the Castle as a cultural heritage site do not take into account the role nor the interactions with the non-human actors.
Acquired by LUCA School of Arts in 2019, the site is now a Living Lab for students, researchers and neighbours promoting post-anthropocentric and multispecies thinking and co-creation, including the non and more-than-human entities of the site, hosting a Dye Garden, the community building project Common Terre and the SIT-PLU Lab for situated artistic research.
SIT-PLU Lab
Situated Creative Practices for the Pluriverse (SIT-PLU) is a Creative Europe initiative tackling socio-ecological challenges through innovative, context-specific artistic interventions. Drawing on the Zapatista concept of the pluriverse—"a world where many worlds fit"—the project embraces diverse ways of knowing and living, foregrounding buen vivir(social well-being), communal interdependence, and the relationships between human and more-than-human entities.
From 2025 on The SIT-PLU Lab will host a range of activities to reformulate the monolithic and anthropocentric narratives of the domain into inclusive, healing, and regenerative new narratives that testify to its multiple (hi)stories and pluriformity, with the more-than-human entities/actors included.
SIT-PLU Lab
Common Terre Community Project
Common Terre is a community-building project initiated by engaged neighbours of the Mariakerke Neighbourhood and LUCA researchers.
Common Terre is developing a framework for collaboration between academic and professional educators, researchers, students, activists, and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) of biodynamic farmers. The vegetable plot garden offers a safe space for adolescents at risk of homelessness and social/financial exclusion in collaboration with a social restaurant in the neighbourhood of Brugse Poort. Participants learn and collaborate through alternative forms of farming, gardening and economic (re-)distribution oriented to inclusion and care-taking. The site is an experimental setting to create new commons and cultivate regenerative practices.
Weder Common-terre
Fleur-couleur Wildpluk.com/kasteel
Brugboerbart