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Imagine all the writers

Arab Spring revisited at Brussels biennial literature festival Passa Porta
© Catherine Helie

Nearly 100 writers from 30 countries over five days at 27 locations in one city: Numerically, Passa Porta is an impressive festival. And a glance at the programme suggests that there’s reason to believe that this fourth outing of the literary celebration will be as good as the previous highly praised editions.

The slogan for this year’s Passa Porta Festival is “Imagine!” It’s a large umbrella under which very different kinds of literature can be presented. It’s clear that the power of imagination reigns in the work of many visiting authors. It’s no coincidence, of course, that the festival puts an important focus on the consequences of the Arab Spring.

Christophe Verbiest
(March 13, 2013)

Complementary colours

Painter Luc Dondeyne celebrates his 50th with not one, but two exhibitions
A new view on Paris in Luc Dondeyne’s “Elsewhere”

Flemish painter Luc Dondeyne, who turns 50 later this year, sums up his recent career with Distances, a book illustrating all his works since 2002, and two exhibitions. Bedrijvencentrum Concentra in Antwerp hosts a selection of those paintings, while the exhibition Elsewhere in Mechelen’s Galerie Transit is a collection of brand new works.

Bedrijvencentrum Concentra is a business complex that houses the editorial staff of Flemish newspaper Gazet van Antwerpen. It’s not a place you would expect to visit an exhibition of paintings, especially as some of them are scattered throughout the editorial offices.

“It’s not the white cube a museum normally is,” Dondeyne admits. “But I like the confrontation between my paintings and reality. I think my work is able to resist it.” To be clear: Visitors can freely enter the offices to see the works.

Christophe Verbiest
(March 6, 2013)

Five hundred years of shared history

Vienna’s Kunstkammer is reopening, with a room dedicated to the Hapsburg Empire in Flanders
© The Bear as Hunter, Gregor Bair/Valentin Drausch/Heinrich Wagner, 1580-1581

After nearly a decade of waiting, planning, collecting and curating, the renovated and expanded Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna will reopen its doors to the public on 1 March.

The collection, made up of 5,000 objects from the 13th century up to 1904, tells the history of Europe through the objects of its greatest rulers. One of the 30 rooms in the 3,000 square-metre exhibition space is sponsored by the Flemish Department of Foreign Affairs, which worked closely with Flemish museums. Its room is filled with articles from the private households of the imperial Hapsburg family during the time they were based largely in Flanders.

Katy Desmond
(February 27, 2013)

Driven by melancholia

A comforting, minimalist second album by the contemplative Jan Swerts

Three years ago, Jan Swerts surprised Flanders with his debut album Weg – a title that can be translated as Road or Gone, and in this case, refers to both). Last week, the 36-year-old released his sophomore effort, Anatomie van de melancholie (Anatomy of the Melancholy). Again, he deals in minimalistic piano songs, sparsely adorned with instruments (strings, horns and once even an electric guitar). He sings them with his high-pitched, sometimes androgynous voice.

Swerts (pictured) thought that Weg was going be the only album he would ever release. “I worked on it for almost a decade and paid for everything myself,” the musician tells me at his home in Heusden-Zolder in Limburg. Cost, he says, is “the main reason why it took me so long. Sometimes I had to save money for a year to pay for studio time or the artwork. Though, I must admit, I’m also an extreme perfectionist.”

Christophe Verbiest
(February 20, 2013)

Literary haven

As Antwerp works to be recognised by Unesco as a literary destination, the city’s movers and shakers tell us why it already is
© Jess De Gruyter

The Antwerp World Book Capital accolade put the port city on the international literary map in 2004. Since then, Antwerp has become a beacon to both writers and readers with its creative methods of spreading the written word.

Poet Michaël Vandebril is the driving force behind Antwerpen Boekenstad (Book City), which promotes the port city as a literary capital. “There is a dynamic literary life here, and we want to provide that extra impulse to make the atmosphere conducive to writing,” he explains.

Karishma Bhansali Mehta
(February 13, 2013)

Ministers pay tribute to “Flemish giant” Raveel

Self-portrait by Roger Raveel © Roger Raveel Museum

Culture minister Joke Schauvliege and minister-president Kris Peeters last week paid tribute to a man described as “a Flemish giant”: painter Roger Raveel, who has died aged 91.

Peeters expressed his “deepest condolences” to Raveel’s family and friends. “He was a great painter, graphic artist and sculptor, relentlessly innovative and contemporary. The almost unbearable tension of his work gave expression to the complexity of life and earned him considerable admiration. He will live on in his works of art and in the Roger Raveel Museum, which pays testimony to one of our greatest artists ever.”

(February 6, 2013)

Extreme makeover

Former crooner Helmut Lotti reinvents himself on an exceptional new album
© Stef Lernous

Helmut Lotti was already a star in Flanders – with music influenced by both crooners and Elvis Presley – when, in the second half of the 1990s, he broke through internationally with his “classic” albums. He sang popular classical tunes, like “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto or “Toreador” from Bizet’s Carmen, and traditionals – turning “Tiritomba” into his signature song. Sporadically, he came up with tunes himself.

The first classic album, Helmut Lotti Goes Classic, is still the top selling album of all time in Belgium. From 2000 on, he continued making albums in the same vein: Latin, symphonic pop classics, Russian songs and a tribute to Elvis Presley, his all-time hero. His final foray in that area was Time to Swing, four-and-a-half years ago.

Christophe Verbiest
(January 30, 2013)

Literary love

Saint Amour celebrates its 20th edition with an ardour-filled tour of authors and musicians
© Marco Mertens

Seven exciting contemporary authors and three musicians (like Helmut Lotti, pictured) get your blood flowing during the chilly two-week run-up to Valentine’s Day. Saint Amour is celebrating its 20th edition by recognising two important anniversary dates relating to the late, great Hugo Claus.

On 14 February, 1984, the Antwerp-based literary organisation Behoud de Begeerte was born. A rough English translation: Conserve the Desire. Its aim: to promote literature through a wide variety of meticulously crafted evenings revolving around the written and spoken word. Behoud de Begeerte’s most famous event to date is Saint Amour, a night of love, lust and longing brought to you by an eclectic mix of Flemish and Dutch authors and musicians.

Rebecca Benoot
(January 23, 2013)

Expressing the unspeakable

The inimitable Antwerp band Dez Mona tours their Sága song cycle
© Mous Lamrabat

Dez Mona are, without any doubt, one of Flanders’ most original bands. Formed in 2003 as a duo, with Gregory Frateur singing and Nicolas Rombouts playing the double bass, this Antwerp-based ensemble at first combined torch songs, spirituals and jazz. But when the band got bigger, the sound did, too.

Last autumn they made their most rock-influenced album, A Gentleman’s Agreement. It’s their fifth and the first one to feature guitar. As a matter of fact, they expanded their line-up with not just one but two guitarists. Still, the sinister jazz, baroque fantasies and tormented melodrama that characterised their first three albums haven’t evaporated.

Christophe Verbiest
(January 16, 2013)

Points of contention

Toneelhuis stages the famous British novel that spans 300 years and two genders
© Koen Broos

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a novel of ideas – about gender, death and the passage of time – woven from historical fact and fantastical drama. Guy Cassiers of Toneelhuis has taken up the enormous challenge of staging the story of the aristocratic man who turns into a woman and lives the course of 300 years.

“With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. the Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.”

Lisa Bradshaw
(January 9, 2013)