Welcome to the M.O.L. burrow. In this social learning garden, we organise the Orientation for Locals: your roadmap for living and being together. Keep your eyes and ears open, because this course is mandatory.

Spring of 2084: six characters have found each other in a joint story. They are not looking for an author at this time, but they do need a producer. They want to create a performance, because that’s what they do, that’s their vocation!

But a series of almost comical social and ecological circumstances befall them in this sudden new world, and they constantly hinder the creative process. Until they are finally confronted with a terrifying truth: they are invisible?! An annoying roadblock with no solution, or so it seems. But does their invisibility say something about them, or about the people who look past them?

In her documentary fairy-tale M.O.L., creator and director Sandra Sara Raes Oklobdzija invites us to look at Europe’s current high-mobility culture through a critical lens. United in a fictional classroom, she points out the deeply ingrained, often absurd societal mechanisms that underpin Belgium today. To emphasise their absurdity, she takes us to ‘a possible future’ where we can get a taste of the (potential) fruits of our current civil passivity. 

She focuses on the micro-system of the Belgian arts sector, often considered one of the more progressive branches. Using a play within a play, performed by local and non-local artists, she points out the triviality of Belgian integration procedures, and the elitism and exclusivity of an arts sector that often cloaks itself in a mantle of innovation and progressivity.

Disclaimer: although all the dialogues are ‘real’ (carefully gathered through interviews with decision-makers in the arts and culture, by the creator herself), the performed circumstances are fictional. For now.

Sandra Sara Raes Oklobdzija is a Serbian artist, artivist, and philosopher, based in Brussels since 2012. Her work explores the complex web of migration and integration, with a particular focus on (collective) identity and (mis)representations. She combines her artistic practice (ROBIN vzw) with a position as a theory lecturer at RITCS, and with her engagement as a community builder, program maker, and cultural entrepreneur (KOROW vzw). Since 2020, she has been working on her PhD in the arts, provisionally titled The School of Two-sided Integration.