Simon Breynaert is a Brussels-based architectural photographer and 3D archivist working at the intersection of artistic documentation and spatial thinking.

His practice is built around a single conviction: extraordinary spaces deserve images that outlast the moment. Not only as documentation, but as a second life of the project. Working with scenographers, designers, architects and cultural organisations, he translates temporary installations, stage designs and architectural spaces into photographs, video and 3D scans. 

Where the Flemish Masters drew, painted and sculpted, Simon captures, renders and archives in one digital workflow. The result is what he calls future proof visual culture: images and spatial records that remain as powerful in ten years as the day they were made.

Your temporary project becomes an artwork to remember.

City of Brussels

Studio Hans Op de Beeck

Horst Arts & Music

Fuse Brussels

Klub Dramatik

Temporary Pleasure

Stan Vrebos

Fenia Proost

Waking Life

Paradise City

Architectural photography and scenography documentation
of the Forest Stage at Klub Dramatik, a temporary
installation by Ampersand embedded within a woodland
setting in Antwerpen.

Two structures in dialogue: a monolithic black pavilion
and a scaffolding rig of moving lights cutting through
smoke and tree canopy. The forest was never the backdrop, it was the space the installation was designed for.

Documented across day and night to capture how light,
fog and architecture transform the same space into
something entirely different within hours.

Scenography & Installation Documentation 

Klub Dramatik by Ampersand

Architectural photography and exhibition documentation
of Parasit. This group show was hosted inside a former steel
distribution warehouse in Molenbeek.

Each installation was documented in direct dialogue with its industrial context: hundreds of cantilever steel racks and concrete floors. The space was never neutral, it was a co-author of every work inside it.

The photography treats the warehouse as architecture in its own right, making the relationship between intervention and context the subject of each image.

Exhibition: Parasit, 30.04–10.05.2026, Jean Wauters Steel, Molenbeek
Curated by 

Exhibition Documentation 

Parasit

3D scanning and spatial documentation of Horst Arts & Music 2026, commissioned to build an architectural B-roll layer for the festival's visual communication.

Rather than documenting the stages alone, the work explores the full site as a living system: stages during construction, micro flora, off-spaces, and people dissolving into their environment. Scans were layered, scaled up and down, and treated to evaporate, adding softness and a sense of temporality to the architecture.

The result is a series of painterly stills and sequences that show the Horst site from new perspectives, where structure, nature and presence merge into a digital translation of the spaces.

Part of an ongoing collaboration with Horst Arts & Music
on the intersection of architecture, archiving and visual communication.

3D Scanning & Architectural Documentation

Horst Arts & Music 2026

HoRAbaixa: Evaporating Stage

Ring: Evaporating Stage

Architectural photography and spatial documentation of a
temporary installation by Stan Vrebos. The Office Cubicle was a room built from formwork panels and scaffolding, assembled with 3D-printed
connections inside a former steel distribution warehouse.

Capturing the materiality, scale and context of a structure
that existed for ten days.


Exhibition: Parasit, 30.04–10.05.2026, Molenbeek
Curated by 

Exhibition Documentation & 3D Archiving for Stan Vrebos

Office Cubicle

Architectural photography and 3D archiving of a temporary
tribune and stage designed and built by Stan Vrebos for
a conference on the future of Leuven's nightlife.

Photography and 3D scanning on location. The 3D archive of this
installation is available as an interactive model, allowing you
to navigate the space as it existed.

Scenography Documentation & 3D Archiving for Stan Vrebos

Tribune Voor De Nacht 

Tribune Voor De Nacht by Simon Breynaert

3D scanning and spatial documentation of a circular architectural space for the studio of Hans Op de Beeck, commissioned to support the development of a new immersive watercolour installation.

The scan captured the full geometry of the curved interior, allowing the artist and client to understand how the artwork would unfold across the walls before a single brushstroke was made. Spatial documentation as a tool for artistic development.

3D Spatial Archiving & Installation Visualization

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

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 

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

 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

3D scanning and spatial documentation translated into
a visual identity for XRDS Festival, capturing the
scenographic vision of the festival and transforming
it into digital communication material.

The work combines 3D imagery, digital texture and spatial
photography to create an artistic interpretation of the
festival environment. Structure, light and rhythm become
the visual language, opening a window onto the XRDS world
for its audience.

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.