Walking as art
The flâneur has long been a familiar figure in urban culture and in the 1960s the French Situationists under Guy Debord created the concept of the derive, a walk without advance planning and set routes.
It basically entails getting lost in order to discover more about a city and ourselves. Organised walks are increasingly becoming a popular form of live art in urban environments. Organised walks are scheduled as part of Tok Toc Knock (see the programme on www.kvs.be)
So, next, I wandered through the increasingly posh EU District, where the architecture is reminiscent of 19th century bourgeois aspirations, and present-day rental prices indicative of the proximity of the EU Parliament building. Nonetheless, this is, like so many parts of Brussels, a mixture of working-class and immigrant streets with ongoing gentrification. I wonder whether the recession will halt this process and leave these houses and streets for those people with fewer means but genuine communities.
In one street, I watched a woman walk out of a house with a plastic food container. She was wearing the hijab and she knocked on the window next door to announce her arrival, then entered the house through the unlocked street door. In other streets, silence reigned and doors with brand new coats of paint were firmly closed.
This was not an entirely arbitrary observation or thought, because my ultimate destination was the ‘exhibition’ in the Domo de Europa Historio en Ekzilo (The House of European History in Exile), an installation created by Flemish theatre-maker Thomas Bellinck, inspired by the EU’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 and the forthcoming permanent museum of the history of the EU due to open its doors in 2015.