For the seventh edition of the Night of Knowledge on Brussels, researchers and experts from Brussels are joining forces to draw up a polyphonic overview of the major challenges facing Brussels today and to question both citizens and politicians about possible solutions and alternatives. This rich encounter alternates between varied scientific syntheses, debates, quizzes and musical interludes.

How do artists let the story they want to tell determine if their work will become a film, a sculpture, a painting, an installation, a choreography or performance? What negotiations take place when they appropriate different disciplinary specialisms? How do they play with their spatial and temporal parameters? What is the politics of indisciplinary practices?

In 2009, Nina Power wrote the book One Dimensional Woman about contemporary portrayals of women. Since she published her book, the #MeToo movement and other pressing feminist questions have emerged. How does Nina Power evaluate her book and the appeals she made then, today – on International Women's Day?

Sociologist Rolando Vázquez explores how the contemporary search for authenticity connects to the impoverishment of experience in modernity.

Two men – both imprisoned in one way or another – want to live it up one last time. Begin the Beguine is the last text that the legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes ever wrote. The jet-black allegory about love and death was kept in a cupboard for 25 years by Cassavetes’ heirs. Until the German publisher S. Fischer Verlag asked Jan Lauwers to take on the staging of this masterpiece.

Rokia Traoré is an icon of African music. She narrates the epic of King Soundiata Keita, the King who based his power on respect and not on greed or violence, and the unifier of the great 13th-century Mandé Empire. Traoré blends classic songs by the Mandé griots into her narrative. These poets and singers were responsible for a unique form of oral history.

Philosopher Bruno Latour and theatre maker Frédérique Aït-Touati reflect on the relationship between human beings and their environment. Can we change our perception of the earth? No longer from a great distance, like a blue marble flying through space… But from the inside out, from the wafer-thin outer layer of the globe on which all life, human activity and resources are concentrated?

The Sublime focus opens with a screening of A Philosophers Walk on the Sublime, a short film by American filmmaker Leslie Thornton. The remarkable landscape of the Swiss Alps inflects Thornton's musings on the sublime, as it may be pursued in nature and photography. The film screening is followed by a conversation on the sublime between philosopher Miriam Rasch and sociologist Rudi Laermans.

Milo Rau and his team travel to the political hotspots of the age: the Mediterranean refugee routes from the Middle East and the areas affected by the Congolese Civil War. In this semi-documentary double monologue, Els Dottermans and the young French actress Olga Mouak intentionally occupy contradictory terrain. How can we bear the misery of others and why do we look at it?