We invite you to come to the opening this Friday and see how Jörg Baier is looking into the sun, Corinne Chotycki warns of slippage with eggs, Céline Cuvelier paints over the tourists in a Unesco World Heritage destination, Marianne Csaky pastes people into other places, Alexandra Huddleston portrays the infinite in the right now and right here, Elizabeth Hudson plays with sticks, words and banana skins as political actions, Sonia Hufton dresses a space and transforms it into a painting, Mimi Kunz makes ink move paper.

Christine Langinauer (ad)dresses the structural organization of living things, Rebekka Löffler lets shapes move in painting, Simon Medard hangs fresh paintings on a washing line, PAROLE paints writing, Alix Rothnie forms momentary sculptures to join the mountains, Erika Roux brings us so close to people we witness what happens between the action, Bobby Sayers lets us see and imagine a place all at once, Corrie Thomson lets sculptures pose in new settings, Stéfan Tulépo breaks the crusts of objects, and Esther Venrooy lets cargo ships drift on sound waves.

Through the enthusiasm of many beautiful people the exhibition grew into a festival, including a performance evening, food design, concerts, DJs, and a poetry reading.

What is poetry to us?

Elizabeth Hudson, Adalbert Jahnz, Sarah Reader Harris, George Kosmopoulos, Mimi Kunz, Marcello Shea (Wrek), Volkmar Mühleis, Antoinette Naomi Reddick, Bobby Sayers, Hannah Van Hove, Christine Langinauer and Patrick Ten Brick read contemporary texts and others that speak to them today: poems from friends and strangers, from local writers and authors who live or have lived far away.

For more information and the full program please visit

The post Something Beautiful: A visual art and poetry festival in Brussels appeared first on Brussels Express.

Sunlight ebbs up the walls while I walk along Avenue de la Couronne. There is sand covering the cobblestones, the beach coming through cracks on the pavement, and the thought that only the rain washes it away. What the situationists once found in Paris, how the streets you walk through affect you, works in wondrous ways in Brussels.

The plants growing in a doorway suggest that while whoever lives there was on holiday, someone rang the bell and the garden grew through the house to see who was there.

Brussels doesn’t belong to anyone. If it did, surely there wouldn’t be any dog poo on the ground. Or it belongs to those who make it their own, like the little green parrots who travelled from Ixelles to every other park and tree in the city.

Not only is there no dominant picture of Brussel-Bruxelles, but it holds locations for all kinds of movies in close proximity. While pink love hearts shoot out from the walls of the ING center at Trone on Valentine‘s Day, the little round garden that the building hugs seems to be the entry to Narnia. High facades hide wholly different buildings behind them, as if they were part of a Truman show, questioning that what we see is what we know.

Some houses pose as casually dressed castles. Every one of them is so peculiar that their specialness becomes ordinary. Around one balcony all kinds of architectural flavors are mixed: pillars that change appearance midway, a Tympanum, and rounded balustrades – as if there was a vote of all the people living in the building to say that yes, everyone had a right to their taste, and the compromise was to only do it to the outside of your own room. Towers reach into the air like feelers, windows stick out of big roofs like heads wearing hats, and gardens cover the uneven skin of the city.

Junya Ishigami, a Japanese artist and architect, said that to children furniture was architecture. I think of that when opening a big door whose handle is at the level of my nose. The door belongs to the house of my doctor and behind it stands a big dog. The waiting room has a chimney and armchairs with big upholstery. When I come out of his office near Parc Tenbosch the sky is bright blue.

Half an hour later, in Matonge, rain turns to hail giving the street goosebumps and the trees in Parc Royal are dark scribbles on grey sky. There is already what looks like a Japanese cherry tree in bloom and statues expose, almost wiggle, white marbled-toes.

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This week I entered the Berlaymont building for the first time. Walking into it as a visitor feels like going on holiday except after passing through security there is no duty free. The corridors are lined with pictures of people and solar panels. The windows don’t fully open but the views are spectacular.

Looking out towards rue de la Loi there is the Europa building with a facade made of 3,750 wooden window frames set around an interior in the shape of an egg. The combination looks fragile and stable, closely tied and open, complicated and simple, strange, and it’s as it belonged here. It looks agile and utopian next to the older Justus Lipsius building where large tiled columns arch together at the roof towering over rectangular window panes.

Rain turns to snow dancing in mid-air before blanketing the streets, acting as a canvas for dog poo on the side walk, mingling and dissolving in puddles, then disappearing from view. The sky is blue and lit windows emanate life like human beehives.

In other places windows do fully open and it feels daring to exercise that freedom. Stepping out on the balcony in one of the tallest buildings in Brussels, the 26 story apartment tower next to Bar du Matin, is like walking at the edge of a cliff, or looking down from a suspended roller coaster. Everything below looks like mini Europe. It is maybe the only place that offers a full view onto the star-like architecture of the prison of Saint Gilles. The voices of guards can be heard up here, calling out the numbers of inmates who walk in the round fenced off grey yards. The building blocks are separated by green grass, a no man’s land between walls. The inmates of the prison of Saint-Gilles and any other Belgian prison have the right to flee. Only they ought to leave their prison clothes behind. The pursuit of freedom isn’t punishable. Stealing is. The law demands that they navigate their way out of their cells without breaking or stealing anything.

On Google maps Brussels looks like a web of streets around cells of houses. Zooming in on street level we face poly-stylistic facades. It seems like each house was built to unique measurements, with windows at and of different heights.

While houses seem to go straight up from the sidewalks their backs are often composed of Tetris-like shapes. The view out of a rear window in an artist studio in Anderlecht or a family home in Ixelles shows balconies and extra rooms that spring forward into the green space between the buildings. Sometimes whole houses can be found in these enclosed areas, hidden from street view.

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In New York City’s Central Park there is a statue of a dog. Balto, a Siberian Husky, became famous for leading a rescue mission through blizzards, bringing medicine from Alaska to Nome.

In Tokyo’s Shibuya station there is the statue of Hachikō, an Akita Uni dog who went to meet his owner at the station every evening, and continued to wait for him every day for nine years after the man had died.

In Brussels’ Park Cinquantenaire, or Jubelpark, there is a dog sculpture, too. It is called “The dog », and often referred to as “the green dog“. It was made by Jean-Baptiste Van Heffen and originally exhibited at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, then placed in the park. While temporarily moved to the entrance of park Woluwe for an exhibition, it gave it’s name to a café there: Café-Laiterie du Chien vert. Some say the green has been added to the name because people rub the sculpture for good luck.

To me, Brussels is like this sculpture. It doesn’t incarnate one story, it inspires many. When walking up Montmartre in Paris, seeing Manhattan from a ferry or watching waves of people cross the street in Tokyo there is a moment of recognition ̶ it’s like I thought it would be from what I saw in the cinema. Where is this movie-moment in Brussels? The TV usually shows the European Parliament and the Commission. I can see the later from my window, behind a hilly roofscape of Art Nouveau houses.

At night not only are the commissions’ windows are lit, but there are lights on the lake. Someone is canoeing around swimming candles. On New Year’s Eve, someone shoots rockets over the lake, delighting all the neighboring parties. In January, birds walk their shadows across the ice.

Let me add a quick note on the weather here. I don’t think it’s grey unless you think of grey as all the colors mixed together. Sunny in the morning, rain at lunchtime, thunder in the afternoon, clouds at dinnertime and clear sky at night. It’s April, always. And windy.

The park around the lake, populated by ducks, doves and parrots, kissing couples, caring grandparents, people practicing Tai Chi or peeing against a tree, is at its most beautiful in tulip season when the round flower beds bloom in red, yellow, pink, black, purple, and white. A series of ink drawings inspired by them was shown in my first exhibition here, held in one of the many artist-run spaces. The day after the opening I walked into a gallery in the center, inviting them to see it. On the last day of the show the gallery manager came in with his kid. He just happened to live next door.

Proximity plays a leading role here, people are approachable and distances walkable, places are near. When arriving in 2015 I got a job in an Irish pub I used to go to to write, swapping stories with the bartender. Michael Collins, in rue Bailli, is owned by the same people as De Valera at Place Flagey (now closed), the pubs named after two Irish men who hated each other are but a street away.

When Collins closes in the late night or early in the morning the staff sends people to Supra, one of the four restaurant/bars marking the crossroad in rue Bailli. It’s a place like a time machine, the twin towers on a poster behind the bar, old curtains and all kinds of characters.

At 9 or 10 a.m., there are people like me, writing, drawing, toying with ideas. There are tourists having croissants, regulars drinking a little glass of red, or beer, having coffee and cigarettes, talking. Coffee to go hasn’t really caught on here. Asking how someone came to live in Brussels often triggers answers like, « I came for this person/internship/event… twelve years ago. »

In the bus the next stop is announced as « Froissart – Froissart« . It’s written the same, and it sounds like the same and it is Flemish and French. As an artist this daily diversity freed something in me. I used to believe that I ought to choose a medium, maybe a language. Here the disparate inspires new forms. In a frameshop/gallery in rue Bailli I look at Christian Dotrement’s Logogrammes, which merged poetry with painting, making us see poetry. In a collaboration of Belgian-Maroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and artist Anthony Gormley shown at the Théâtre National clay forms a floor for dancers who then turn it into masks, into a camera, a cocktail, a penis.

Maybe there isn’t the movie moment in this city because it never settles into one coherent form, it’s image is never dominated by a single feature. Bureaucratic and disorganized, beautiful and dirty, grand and familiar, green and dense. If the soul of Brussels were a thing it’d be a kaleidoscope, or a moving stage.

My favorite Vietnamese restaurant is furnished by the upholstery of a German train. My yoga classes takes place in an old garage that has been turned into a dance Academy, and the writing desk I share with a clown is in a laundromat that became a creative co-working space.

The map of Brussels looks like paper under a microscope. The roads aren’t straight, it seems to have grown organically and it takes time to figure out which ways run kind of parallel. There are gardens between clusters of tall town houses. Looking out of back windows reveals not only green spots but all kinds of rooftops and balconies, hidden views. Windows aren’t on one level here and buildings are so diverse they seem natural in their assemblage of different styles.

Next to a big mosque in Park Cinquantenaire is the Pavilion of the Human Passions, designed by Victor Horta. It houses a monumental fresco by Jef Lambeaux showing, yeeees, the Human Passions. Downtown, a few streets from Grand Place, after a rainbow colored zebra crossing there is Mademoiselle, a cabaret presenting local and international artists. Although the decor is simple walking in after work feels like entering a theatre  ̶  the atmosphere is extravagant and casual, exotic and familiar. Burlesque, boylesque, draglesque  ̶  anything goes here, and that feels like Brussels to me. A stage is a stage is a stage and a city is a city is a city, until we attach a story to it. Brussels has many. It’s as we like it.

Good to know

An anthology by Brussels Writers – The Circle – will be launched on November 22nd at Waterstones in Brussels, and is also available online here.

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