Kabaal Orkest
Kortrijk, Belgium 2025
The KABAAL ORKEST Machine is a movable playground to explore sound.
Everyone is a bit noisy—and the KABAAL ORKEST Machine offers the capacity and access to explore and produce sound freely. It invites children to manipulate, discover, and create sonic experiences using hacked electronic toys, analog mechanisms, and resonant surfaces.
The machine encourages listening as a way of seeing—creating new images by hearing, not looking. It’s an invitation to make the unrecognisable recognisable and the recognisable unrecognizable, to find fascination in the mundane and everyday, and to blur the lines between sound and music.
The machine has an outside and an inside. Sound travels in both directions: from the inside out, and the outside in. Children communicate through sound, perceive through sound, and play through sound. The KABALL ORKEST Machine becomes a space of shared imagination and discovery—a playful orchestra of materials, movements, and noise.
The KABAAL ORKEST Machine was created during a two-week residency at Wildernis—a children’s free play island in Kortrijk, Belgium, run by the association Wildebras. The aim of the residency was to get to know the place and its community, and to contribute a lasting project to support the space. The process was hands-on and collaborative—rooted in experimentation, collective thinking, and a shared creative flow.
Credits:
Conception and Construction: João Gonçalo Lopes, Sophie Netzes, Mariana Sardon, Diogo Monteiro, Patrick Hubmann
Production and logistics: Paredes Meias
Hosting Institutions: Contructlab Belgium, Wildernis
Finantial Support: Culture Moves Europe