On Easter monday I spent the day with my family in and around Poperinge doing the “volkssportroute“, something that can be translated as a “pub games route”.
We played the kind of games people played before there were TV´s and internet. Between the games we walked from pub to pub seeing a bit of the countryside and enjoying the great spring weather.
Around nine in the morning, we gathered at the tourism centre to get our map and papers. Our first stop was De Havermuis. We had a cup of coffee there and played the first game, tonspel. It´s a big barrel with some holes in it and the goal is to throw your coins in the holes with the highest value.
To make the games a little more exciting we decided to play men versus women and I´ll have to admit that the men won the first game.
The barkeeper told us the next pub ´t Rood Kruis was really close but I think his idea of distances is a little off, really close turned out to be more than two kilometers!
Because the “volkssportroute” is as much as the games as it is about having an excuse to try different local beers and drinks we tried the Picon there and played a game of pudespel. The women were finally waking up a bit and we won this game!
We were getting a little hungry now but luckily the next stop was really close. At Het Mysterie we had a simple lunch of bread with cheese, ham, but mostly the best pâté I ever had. After lunch we played the schuiftafel.
The men were starting to get freaked out here because we were vastly better here and we were starting to get ahead of them! Since we had a lot of time here we decided to play Uilebolling as well, and the guys weren´t very lucky because we won this game as well!
To be honest, the call was really close and I suspect that the guys kind of let us win the last game because they wanted to go to the last stop.
So last friday was the kickoff for Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Spaces in the museum S.M.A.K. in Gent. The exhibition will be open until June 13 and until then many artists such as Christophe Bruno, Miet Warlop and Pierre-Laurent Cassiere will be literally hacking the public spaces in Gent.
“Hacking Public Spaces will expose the friction between the areas where the two institutions operate: the S.M.A.K. in contemporary art and the Vooruit in media art, sound and performance art. In the quest for a shared mentality in these different dynamics, the public space is taken as a common thread.”
In the museum itself Electrified 02 manifests itself as a study of changing trends that have kept the notion of public space in vogue for the last thirty years. The sixteen artists are showing both new and existing work in the museum. The actions they are undertaking in the town will be documented and gradually inserted into the exhibition.
If you want to know more about the specific actions you can check the website of the Vooruit.
Pictures of the event can be found with some of the other ambassadors: saravdv, pitslamp
The event can also be followed on Twitter via the hashtag #hps
I´ll make sure to be spending some more time in Gent the next weeks and you can surely expect some more blogposts about some of the actions in the city! Some of the artists that I´m looking forward to are Ben Benaouisse, Helmut Smits and Miet Warlop. And off course the performance OrganOOn by Roberto Gigante in the harbor on may 5 where we will experience a concert played on the biggest organ ever!
Picture by Pitslamp
While we were there we also visited the expo The Cemetery of Reason by Ed Templeton. The exposition is housing a big sample of work with more than twelve hundred photos, paintings and sculptures. I certainly didn´t like all of the single pictures but put together in clusters they complemented and fueled each other. I´m thinking of going back sometime on a more quiet moment, since last friday the museum was cramped with people.
I’ve had language classes since I was ten. First French, then English and German too. And yet, when I graduated, I still couldn’t speak either French or German. Worse, I studied like hell and I barely passed the exams. I hated languages.
And then I spent a year in Mexico. Spending a year in Mexico changed it all for me. On arrival, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish but when I came back I was pretty fluent. But more importantly, I had learned that there were other, and better, ways of learning languages.
I learned Spanish by speaking it. From day one. My host family sent me to the bakery and of course they didn’t speak English there. I went to school and despite the fact that my fellow students had English class every single day, none of them could speak it. So I learned Spanish. The hard way, because when you can’t talk full sentences to anybody, you feel damn lonely. But really, that same loneliness is the best motivation to study on some vocabulary lists and learn to speak the language better.
The only problem is that you really shouldn’t speak any English (or Dutch in my case), because that hinders your learning experience. I learned that lesson in Germany. I was on erasmus for one semester and thought that would help my German. WRONG! I spent all my time with the other exchange students, talking English. And despite having advanced German classes twice a week and living with two Germans, I still don’t actually speak the language.
I decided to do better when I spent the summer of 2009 in France. I worked there as a receptionist and while my main task was accomodating the Dutch, I also spent a lot of time with the French tourists and of course my French collegues. I made it a point to use English as little as possible and it paid off. When my dad came to pick me up two months later, he really was impressed with my vastly improved French.
Speaking different languages has really become a joy for me. Not that it is easy now, learning languages has never been my forte and it never will. Not magically anyway. But the effort is more than worth it!
Tonight I’ll be in Gent for the opening of a new edition of Electrified. I´ll be there as one of the ambassadors of the project but the event is open to everybody!
The S.M.A.K. and the Vooruit Arts Centre are joining forces to overrun the town. “Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space” focuses on artists whose field of action is the ‘public space’. Unbounded and virtually unregulated, they hack into the town with unannounced interventions. Traces of this seep into the museum, where new and existing works are brought face to face with flashbacks from the seventies and nineties.
Throughout Gent there will be various arthappenings that will literally “hack public spaces”. It´s pretty hard to explain but over the next few weeks I´ll be publishing pictures. But even better, if you are in Belgium before june 16, come by in Gent and look for some hacked spaces yourself!
Although it doesn´t officially start until tomorrow there have been some things spotted already such as this guy.
I´ll be receiving more info tonight when I´ll meet with the other ambassadors, so be sure to come back here if you want to know more!
And by the way, tonight is also the opening of Ed Templetons exposition, I´m quite looking forward to that as well!
Where? SMAK, Gent
When? april 2, 20u00