KISDtalk with Dr. Breg Horemans and Martin Simpson

Between water and willow: multispecies co-design as a world-making practiced

TAAT collective – represented through speakers Dr. Breg Horemans and KISD graduate Martin Simpson

KISDtalk on ⏰ June 23, 2026, 5:30-7:00 p.m., room 11

Since 2014, TAAT’s work seeks to design spaces for encounter: between urban and natural contexts, between participants and art professionals, and between human and more-than-human life. In the last years, their design processes evolved from human-centred and result-driven to multispecies sensitive and process-based. In this presentation we follow their design gestures: from the shallow reed covered shores of an uninhabited fluvial island (in Lithuania), to the meanders of the Maas and Aa river (in The Netherlands and Belgium). Through Horemans’ PhD-research an eco-dramaturgical approach to spatial design unfolds, while Simpson’s river organs and wind flutes make attempts to attune the body of the designer to the frequencies of wind and water. The presentation will be partly set in the Live Agora, a hybrid working tool that supports the emergence of new multispecies collaborations. TAAT’s practice, as part of a movement of practices, disorients the body of the maker into alternative ways to make worlds: by foregrounding and valorising the simple yet powerful gesture of tuning in with each other.

Martin Simpson
is an artist and technologist based in Vienna. He studied integrated design at KISD in Cologne and electronic music and sound art at Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics at the Kunstuniversität in Graz. His artistic practice centers on place-based music, building experimental musical instruments that sonify their environmental dependencies. His interventions include river organs, wind flutes and sun harmoniums. As a member of TAAT collective he works on the Live Agora and creates participatory installations for interspecies encounters, resulting in a.o. the MaasLab Dataflow: a floating raft with waterwheel-powered webserver.

Dr. Breg Horemans
is an architect-researcher based in Brussels. He holds a Master in Architecture from KU Leuven and completed postgraduate studies in curating at Zurich University of the Arts. He obtained his PhD in Architecture at KU Leuven (2026) re-situating the design gestures of spatial practitioners in relation to more-than-human life. He is the co-founder of TAAT arts collective and associate member of Fluid Futures at LUCA School of Arts (Ghent, BE). TAAT’s research-based projects aim to bridge installation art, collaborative learning and multispecies kinship. In 2025, TAAT’s Live Agora, an open-source tool for artistic commoning, received the European Social Innovation Award for Digital Democracy.