Sometimes I think I should do like Claude Lévy-Strauss had done with Tristes Tropiques, first published in France 1955, starting a parallel blog telling more about behind the scenes, the real ups and downs accompanying a project like this. Taking your kids out of school and kindergarten, moving into a new city without a paid job, knowing anybody … only to follow up your ideals in the search of a different and individual approach to life.
Being a mum, with kids on your side who really suffer due to the change of social environment and language (!), cultural manager & independent worker who did not follow a call by the EU or a splendid institution to come to Brussels (only a crazy idea in my head) … but I am also an anthropologist, with the aim of integrating this background into my work in the field of art.
Especially navigating through a field which it mostly smoothed surface - the art and culture field. Having reached a current low-point it may be the right time to also share this part of the story with the people who follow my blog. Blogging, especially in the art and culture field, is mostly an endless sequence art consuming’s manifestations - either critical or not.
Even though it might sound sometimes as if I am hopping and reporting from one art event to another, the content of this blog to write about an experiment. About navigating from one EU country to another and to get into to touch with how collegues, people in the field of art, deal with the current political shifts in Europe. Which answers do find artists and culture producers in their artistic practises and the programming in institutions? What are the socio-political realities in Europe’s informal capital? … Having prepared this stay in Brussels for a long time and very intensively still, we are facing so much contrary wind, not only from kids who have a more than imagined hard time to adapt to the new environment, but also from unexpected bureaucratic pressure which is enormous … in troubling times it feels so hard and ridiculous at the same time to go on with your work, develop further your ideas and keep on going.
For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.