Festival ARTONOV 2026: performance inside the Art Nouveau houses — Brussels

For three weeks each October, a handful of Brussels’ Art Nouveau interiors stop being places to look at and become places to listen in. The twelfth edition of Festival ARTONOV runs from 4 to 23 October 2026, with an opening evening on 3 October, and takes its programme into the Hôtel Van Eetvelde, the Maison Pelgrims and the Hôtel Winssinger, alongside the Uccle Cultural Center, USQUARE and the festival’s own ARTONOV Lab.

The 2026 edition is built around the 160th anniversary of cultural and diplomatic relations between Belgium and Japan. Its guiding line is borrowed from the Japanese ceramicist Kanjiro Kawai: “We do not work alone.” The programme is deliberately interdisciplinary — chamber concerts of classical and contemporary music, dance, theatre, performance art, installations and exhibitions, with work made for children as well as for adults.

The question the festival sets itself is whether old forms, rituals and shared memory can still produce something that changes the people in the room. Asking it inside rooms designed at the turn of the twentieth century is the point. The houses are not a backdrop to the programme; they are part of the argument.

Practical details

• When: 4 to 23 October 2026; opening evening 3 October at 6pm
• Where: various venues across Brussels, among them the Hôtel Van Eetvelde, the Maison Pelgrims, the Hôtel Winssinger, the Uccle Cultural Center, USQUARE and the ARTONOV Lab
• Organised by: Festival ARTONOV, Brussels
• Programme and tickets: festival-artonov.eu

Cultural Heritage Online lists this festival for readers travelling in Brussels this autumn.