Simon Breynaert is a Belgian visual artist and spatial designer working across photography, 3D scanning and architecture. His practice explores how spaces are perceived and activated, translating architecture and movement into clear, atmospheric images.

Working between autonomous and commissioned projects, he designs temporary spatial interventions and documents installations and performances. This dual practice informs a visual approach that connects image, context and lived experience. 

Based in Brussels, he collaborates with designers, architects, cultural institutions and creative studios.

Fuse Brussels

Horst Arts & Music

Studio Hans Op de Beeck

Stan Vrebos

Temporary Pleasure

Fenia Proost

For the studio of Hans Op de Beeck, I created a highly detailed 3D scan of a circular architectural space, a complex room intended to host a new immersive watercolour work.
The scan was ment for visualising the installation, allowing the artist and his client to understand how the artwork would be experienced across the curved interior walls.
This 3D scan functioned as a visual guide, supporting the development of an artwork designed to envelop the viewer from all sides.

Project Visualization support with 3D Spatial Mapping

Studio Hans Op de Beeck 

For HORST Arts & Music 2025, I was invited to scan the festival’s scenography as both a physical and digital exploration. Through a series of 3D scans, the temporary installations, stages and threshold spaces were translated into a shared digital archive.

Using photogrammetry and Gaussian splats, the work captures the spatial atmosphere of the festival and preserves its design beyond the event itself. This archive gives the temporary architectures a second, vital life — extending the impact of the festival’s scenography into a durable, three-dimensional record.

Mapping Scenography in 3D

Horst Arts and Music 2025

Headspace transformed a domestic living room into a temporary interior during Brussels Design September.
I developed the visual identity with logo, poster and printed communication, and created the photographic documentation of the space.
The project connects two practices: designing how the exhibition is read, and observing how it is experienced.

Spatial Identity & Exhibition Documentation

Headspace

Architectural Performance is a publication bringing together a series of spatial experiments focused on activating and temporarily redesigning spaces through scenography. The book documents interventions, workshops and installations using light, smoke, projection, sound and darkness to challenge how spaces are experienced and inhabited.

The publication includes projects such as How The Chairs Have Turned, AP1 and AP2, alongside smaller experiments that question the conventions of exhibition-making. Rather than treating space as a neutral backdrop, the work explores architecture as an active participant — where body, movement and environment form a single experience.

Designed and produced as a complete project, from research and visual development to layout and imagery, the publication functions as both documentation and inquiry. It reflects an ongoing interest in moving beyond exhibition spaces and architecture as we know it. Through the AP series I try to highlight a democratising spatial experience and bringing art into direct, physical relation with everyday environments.

A Framework for Reading and Engaging Architecture as Living Performance

Architectural Performance Publication

Perceptual Meditations of Digital Landscapes is a photographic project exploring how landscapes are perceived and constructed. As a colourblind image-maker, the work approaches nature not as a fixed or neutral reality, but as something shaped by perception, interpretation and difference.

Through walking, observation and digital processing, physical environments are translated into altered visual spaces. By shifting light and colour, familiar landscapes become unfamiliar, revealing how vision, and the limits of it, shapes the way we experience the world.

This work continues the perspective of the 21st Century Explorer, a figure that navigates between outer space and inner landscapes, between what is seen and what is felt.

Visual Field Notes of the 21 Century Explorer

Perceptual Meditations of Digital Landscapes

As a digital explorer of the 21st century, I navigate through forgotten architectures and transitional landscapes, places where human presence fades and nature quietly reclaims its space.
This photographic series reflects on the act of discovery itself: how we perceive, archive and translate our surroundings once the human narrative begins to dissolve.

Combining visual documentation with spatial awareness, the work becomes both exploration and mirror, tracing the thin line between abandonment and rebirth, memory and mapping.
Each image acts as a fragment of a new cartography, a meditation on what remains when the world reclaims its silence.

Digital Reflections Among Ruins

Since 2024, I have been working in close collaboration with interdisciplinary designer Fenia Proost as her visual documenter and image-maker. Through photography and video, I translate her work, spanning costume, performance and object design, into a coherent visual language.

Over time, this ongoing collaboration has developed into a shared visual research, supporting the communication and evolution of her practice across projects and contexts.

Visual Documentation for Fenia Proost (2024–Now)

Performing Objects

Since 2022, Club Dérive has provided a space to experiment with the visual translation of scenography and architecture. What started as documentation evolved into a broader research on how space can be communicated through image.

Working with photography, video, 3D scanning and graphic design, this ongoing series explores different ways of visual storytelling, capturing how environments are built, experienced and remembered. These experiments have shaped a growing skillset that bridges design, documentation and communication.

Visual Research for Club Dérive (2022–Now)

Between Image and Architecture

Visual Research for Club Dérive at Daisy Chain 2023

Visual Research for Club Dérive at Recyclart

Designed and produced by Club Dérive for LLOSS Festival, Two Towers was a scenographic intervention developed for the Schans van Landmolen fortress site in Kruibeke, Antwerp. The project explored the location through a dialogue between architecture and scenography, between the static and the temporary.

Using scaffolding materials, the structure mirrored and doubled the existing bunker, creating a temporary architecture of opposing qualities that both complemented and contrasted the original site. The scenography functioned as an active spatial framework for the festival, shaping bar flow, a larg dance platform and use throughout the event.

Scenography Design & Visual Documentation with Club Dérive

Two Towers

Pauli Postcard Display is part of Drift Publishing, a graphic–spatial practice that approaches architecture as something lived and mutable rather than fixed. The project explores how movement, wandering and observation can function as graphic methods.

Developed through dérives on the Bijloke site in Ghent, the research resulted in a series of experimental publishing tools where walking becomes drawing and printing becomes a way of navigating space. Central to this is the Pauli Postcard Display: a mobile column that subtly references the neogothic Pauli building while replacing monumentality with movement and interaction.

By inviting passersby to engage with printed fortunes, the installation shifts architectural experience from control to coincidence. Publishing becomes an active gesture, a way to reframe space, circulate spatial observations and extend the encounter beyond the site itself.

Drift Publishing: Where Graphic Design meets Architecture

Pauli Postcard Display

This visual concept was developed as a potential album cover for the Brussels-based music collective Karmaten. Although the design was ultimately not selected, it represents a concise intersection of key elements within my practice.

Combining logo design, photography and 3D scanning, the cover merges simple visual components into a layered composition. Through intentional cropping and concealment, familiar elements become abstracted, creating a subtle tension between recognition and opacity.

Cover & Logo Design

Karmaten

88 is a visual research project that deconstructs the numerical sequence 1–99 into abstract graphic forms. Through fragmentation, numbers shift from functional signs to autonomous compositions, prompting new ways of reading and navigating sequence. The work manifests as a non-linear publication, laser-printed objects and in situ interventions, examining how numerical symbols transform across material, spatial and contextual settings.

Number, Book and In-situ Design 

  88

 transforms an everyday corridor into a moment of pause.

By introducing smoke into the glass passage, the space itself remains unchanged, yet its perception shifts. One side becomes opaque and tactile, while the other stays visible, altering how the corridor is read, crossed and observed.

The intervention slows down a space of rapid movement, suspending its usual function. Through the windows, the corridor turns into an observatory: a place to look, linger and reflect. Architecture acts here not as a backdrop, but as an active participant, activating an in-between space where experience briefly moves from the ordinary to the dreamlike.

Threshold Appearance Appearance, Bijloke, Ghent

Architectural Performance (AP3)

Video Documentation of AP3 in Threshold Appearance Appearance, Bijloke, Ghent

Architectural Performance is a series of interventions that activate existing spaces by treating architecture as an active body. Through temporary actions, the work shifts perception and invites awareness of how environments influence movement and experience.

AP2 was developed for a group exhibition at Tour & Taxis. A bare, open structure functioned as an observatory within the hangar, a place not meant to show, but to look from. Through light, sound and smoke, the space periodically gathered into a single presence. For brief moments, architecture became perceptible before returning to stillness.

By offering a space to enter and observe, the project emphasizes looking as an act, and positions the human body as a participant in the reading of space.

In addition to the collective experience, this work was made possible through collaborations with diverse and cross-disciplinary artists and organisations.

Tour & Taxis, Brussels

Architectural Performance (AP2)

This scenographic intervention reconfigured the club space to create intimacy, focus and varied spatial experiences. By lowering the perceived ceiling with a textile structure and positioning the DJ at the center of the room, the dance floor became a shared, enclosed environment.

Light, structure and sound were used to guide movement and proximity. A central chandelier functioned as both lighting and spatial anchor, while the reversed sound setup introduced zones of intensity and calm within the same room. The result was a club space that encouraged closeness, circulation and multiple ways of inhabiting the night.

How The Chairs Have Turned

Arena Sweet Arena is inspired by the timeless structure of the classic arena, with multiple levels that allow visitors to explore and experience its structural form. The distinctive curvature acts as a guide to the centre of the action, while the diazomas and vomitariums create a captivating interplay of circular and perpendicular aisles, stimulated by structural dance platforms.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Arena Sweet Arena is its interactive nature. Ownership of the velums, the retractable awnings that adorn the arena, is left entirely to the visitors. A system of pulleys allows them to retract or unfurl the velums as they wish, creating a dynamic interaction between the attendees and the environment. The patterns created by this movement are recorded and processed, creating a lasting tribute to audience participation.

Arena Sweet Arena

An Uaimh Bhiin (The Sweet Sounding Cave) was a temporary installation by Temporary Pleasure in collaboration with Lugh O’Neill, presented at Brutus, Rotterdam. Conceived as an immersive, cave-like architecture, the work was activated through sound, a video installation, performances and different audiences.

I was commissioned to document the installation across its different states. Through video, photography and 3D scanning, I translated the spatial design and its embedded media into a coherent visual archive that reflects how the space was experienced and activated.

The resulting archive supports and extends the project beyond its temporary existence, providing Temporary Pleasure with a precise and atmospheric reference for communication and presentation.

Exhibition Documentation of An Uaimh Bhinn by Temporary Pleasure & Lugh O'Neill

A Body of Architecture

The Sweet Sounding Cave

Scenography for Hackers is a five-day workshop initiated by scenographer Stan Vrebos, focused on hacking light as a scenographic material. Participants explored how low-cost lighting could be transformed into spatial installations through experimentation, making and play.

My role was to develop the visual narrative of the workshop and document the process as spatial storytelling. Using photography and 3D scanning, material experiments and temporary constructions were translated into a layered visual archive.

Visual Documentation

Scenography 4 Hackers

For XRDS Festival, I translated their scenographic vision into a digital language and promotion.

The visuals evoke a sense of space, energy, and immersion. Just like the festival, they reveal a new world for the audience to enter. Our collaboration aimed at creating an artistic interpretation as well as a visual narrative to promote the festival. Through the use of 3D imagery, digital textures, and color, the work opens a window onto the XRDS world shaped by light, rhythm, and structure.

XRDS Fuse 2025

Architectural Performance (AP1) marks the starting point of a series, introducing architecture as an active presence rather than a passive container. The work focused on a discarded shipping container, a space typically associated with absence, waste and avoidance.

By emptying the container and activating it with smoke, sound and light, its role shifted from functional object to perceptual body. The installation suggested a space that was breathing or burning, drawing attention not to what the container holds, but to how it is experienced.

AP1 repositions a site of rejection as a place of awareness. Meaning does not reside in objects, but in human presence and interpretation. Architecture becomes active through perception, and the viewer becomes responsible for what the space signifies.

Containers, Brussels

Architectural Performance (AP1)

For Choreomania, I collaborated with Temporary Pleasure to visually document their performance from within. Using video and 3D scanning, the focus shifts from scenography to moving bodies, translating the energy of the night into a spatial visual narrative.

The project resulted in three short video works that move between performance and hyperreality, tracing the transition from rehearsal to the intensity of the dancefloor. Rhythm, movement and atmosphere shape the edit.