Orso Caël

Orso Caël (fka Camille Picquot) lives and works between Brussels, Belgium and Paris, France.

Caël is a visual artist and poet working across film, photography, and text, exploring themes of marginality, resistance, and re-enchantment. Their work takes the city as stage and subject: they wander the built environment, capturing images with a painterly attention to light – the sun shifts through an intersection, reflects from a glass screen, shimmers in water droplets. These moments of beauty are interwoven with a sense of unease, as the artist similarly observes and responds to the social and ecological crises of our time. While they acknowledge the decline of our contemporary structures, Caël resists cynicism, drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Georges Didi-Huberman. Instead, they seek out the vitality and joy emerging from the cracks, experimenting with their practice to find alternative, poetic spaces of emancipation.

Trained at ENSAV La Cambre and KASK, Orso Caël was a 2022 resident at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre and has exhibited at FOMU, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Paris Photo, and more. Their first monograph, Domestic Flights, appeared in 2018. Their films have been recognized internationally, including Hollow Hours (awarded a Wildcard by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund) and Cao Bang (selected by IFFR). They completed their most recent film, SWARM, as a guest filmmaker at Auguste Orts in Brussels, and premiered it at Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in 2026. In 2026, their work will be visible in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg (DE), the Kanal Centre-Pompidou (BE), and the AFFILIATE space with WIELS Contemporary Art Centre (BE).