Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is an Extra Muros exhibition (08/05/2026 – 30/06/2026) that moves from the city into the rural landscape. Antwerp galleries shift their ground and take position at the 17th-century castle Hof d’Intere in Wechelderzande, which becomes the exhibition floor. The city enters nature.

For the galleries, this creates a site-specific exhibition context shaped by historic architecture, nature, and a strong conceptual framework. The setting allows for sustained viewing and direct exchange around the work within a shared, curated context, with an activation in the form of a mini-festival on the 17th of May.

The project takes its name from Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), first shown at the Salon des Refusés. In a century marked by political upheaval and rapid change, Manet placed an ordinary picnic at a monumental scale, traditionally reserved for history painting. The work shifted the everyday into the center of public visibility.

Today is shaped by geopolitical pressure, ecological urgency, digital acceleration, and fragmented attention. Within this context, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe returns as a framework for physical presence, nature, collective gathering, and shared space and time.

The participating artists work through attention, intimacy, surface, texture, gesture, and spatial awareness. The picnic becomes a structure for coexistence and exchange. People arrive, pass through, stay, and return.

Spazio Nour functions as the base of the project at its home, Hof d’Intere. Founded by Mahmoud Saleh Mohammadi as a multidisciplinary artistic centre, Spazio Nour works through participatory art as a concrete practice in which people actively shape the work, and the work reshapes the encounter between them.

This participatory approach connects to a region historically shaped by nineteenth-century landscape painting and early Impressionism. Curated by Bruno Devos, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe continues the historical–contemporary dialogue initiated with the PASTORALE exhibition at Hof d’Intere (12/09/2025 – 06/12/2025).

From Manet’s shift toward the everyday, through nineteenth-century painting, to Spazio Nour’s participatory practice, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe brings these lines together in the present through direct encounters between artists, place, and public.

Opening: Friday 08/05/2026, 5:00 – 9:00 PM Exhibition: 09/05/2026 – 30/06/2026 Curator: Bruno Devos Opening hours: Saturday & Sunday: 1:00 – 6:00 PM or by appointment Free admission

Venue: Kasteel Hof d’Intere, Pastorijstraat 2, 2275 Lille, Belgium