Jozef Wouters revisits FLOW, the public outdoor swimming pool that Decoratelier created for POOL IS COOL in Anderlecht. Built and managed in close collaboration with a large group of local young people, FLOW was conceived as a radically inclusive and sustainable social space. Until its closure in 2025, it functioned both as a tangible reality and as a scale model—highlighting the lack of outdoor swimming opportunities in Brussels.
With the original structure now gone, this lecture sets out to imagine building another one. Drawing from an archive of photographs, emails, sketches, drawings, and notes, Wouters explores FLOW as a collection of stories—some realized, many unrealized. Moving from technical details to speculative dreams, these stories form a dialogue between builders and users, words and materials, fears and desires.
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Jozef Wouters (1986) is a Brussels-based scenographer and theatre maker. His work always relates to a specific location, opening up a dialogue between spaces, processes and imagination. Operating from Decoratelier, a continuously evolving project housed in a former factory in Molenbeek, he initiates diverse projects and collaborations: performances such as Underneath which Rivers Flow and The Soft Layer, festivals, residences and scenographic projects ranging from theater spaces to nightclubs, from a temporary space for the social restaurant Cassonade to the open-air swimming pool FLOW. In doing so, Decoratelier evolves into both an architecture studio that creates performances and a theatre company that builds spaces. In 2019 Decoratelier received the Flemish Culture Prize (Ultima) for Performing Arts. In 2024, FLOW was one of four Belgian projects shortlisted for the European Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Awards. Wouters’ book Moments before the wind, a heterogeneous collection of notes and reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique (edited by Jeroen Peeters) was published. Since 2017, he has been an autonomous artist in residence with Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods.
