• Wednesday 1 February 2012 - 19:30
  Lecture: Between Reason and Religion #4: Tariq Ramadan

• Thursday 2 February 2012 until Sunday 1 April 2012
  Discursive platform: The Residence (reading room)

• Tuesday 28 February 2012 - 19:30
  Lecture: Philippe Van Parijs Linguistic justice for Europe & for the World

• Tuesday 6 March 2012 - 19:30
  Lecture: It's the economy, stupid #4: Mariana Mazzucato

• Saturday 14 April 2012 until Sunday 8 July 2012
  Exhibition: 'Orban Space' The Work and Practice of Luc Deleu - T.O.P. office

Discover our English activities! written by deBuren in: News

Koopman Collection written by deBuren in: Blog

Tags: koopman collection, philip freriks, picasso

Good news? written by Paul Lewis in: News

Tags: paul lewis

Inequality: the enemy between us (Richard Wilkinson - MO* Lecture) written by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in: Blog

Tags: kate pickett, richard wilkinson

Now that we can see and feel the sun again in all its glory, everyone at deBuren wants to go outside and sit at pavement cafés – wonderfully relaxed while people watching… and overhearing? This month ILAH illustrates the suffering that sometimes accompanies this relaxing pastime…

(Click on the image to enlarge)

Text in image (from left to right): ‘Talking Jiberish’

“What shall we eat, ladies? A glass of wine, everyone?”

“Yes, a chardonnay for me, please.”

“From a moral point of view I don’t eat ‘foie gras’, because of what I’ve seen on television.”

“Exactly, I rather prefer a couple of ‘cuisses de de grenouille’.”

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: 'Talking Jiberish' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

How did you spend your Valentine’s day? Red roses? Moonlight? This week ILAH painted a more realistic picture of love.

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: 'Love' by ILAH written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

In 2010 several Flemish and Dutch artists made beautiful graphic columns for deBuren. You can view these visual pearls by Barbara Stok, Steve Michiels, Michiel van de Pol, Maaike Hartjes, Matei Branea, Brecht Evens and Daniel Ginelli on our website. This year we continue the graphic columns in a slightly different way. One artist will make a topical visual commentary for every month of the year. A new permanent, yet familiar face will join us: Ilah.

© ILAH | www.ilahcordelia.com

Inge Liesbeth Alfonsina Heremans are the names that belong to ILAH, the slave and master of the Flemish comic. She studied Applied Graphics at Sint-Lucas in Brussels and Philosophy in Leuven. Since 1996, she draws the short comic ‘Cordelia’ for De Morgen. In the meantime Oogachtend published nine Cordelia albums (2001-2008). ILAH also draws ‘Mira’ for Flair (since 2007) and two Mira albums appeared as a result of that. Heremans created posters for the Boekenbeurs and De Lijn and she was nominated for the Bronzen Adhemar/Vlaamse Cultuurprijs voor de strip 2009.

Graphic column: Little Night Pony written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: ilah

There’s nothing wrong with knowing your art historical classics, in a time as visual as ours. What (or whom) pops up in your mind when you look at the second graphic column by Brecht Evens, winner of the first Willy Vandersteenprijs (2010)? We immediately came up with a couple of renowned names from the history of painting. How about you?

© Brecht Evens | brechtnieuws.blogspot.com

Brecht Evens (º1986, Hasselt) is a Belgian cartoonist. He studied illustration at the Hogeschool Sint-Lucas in Ghent and won in 2010 the 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' with his graduation album Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (A place where you don’t want to be). The 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' is a prize that is given to the best original Dutch graphic album published in the last two years. Work by Evens is printed in comic magazines such as Hic Sunt Leones and Parcifal.

Graphic column (2): 'Breakfast' by Brecht Evens written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: brecht evens

The multicultural society is not only a hot potato in Flanders and The Netherlands, but also in other European countries. In his graphic column the artist Daniel Ginelli comments on the statement made by Angela Merkel last week.

© Daniel Ginelli

Graphic column (1): 'MultiMerkel' by Daniel Ginelli written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: daniel ginelli

Now that fall has come to stay, it seemed appropriate to cheer you up with some visual pearls. The first graphic column of this fall will take you to a luscious location. Brecht Evens, winner of the first ‘Willy Vandersteenprijs’ (2010), sent us this beautiful drawing. Will you dream along with us?

© Brecht Evens | brechtnieuws.blogspot.com

Brecht Evens (º1986, Hasselt) is a Belgian cartoonist. He studied illustration at the Hogeschool Sint-Lucas in Ghent and won in 2010 the 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' with his graduation album Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (A place where you don’t want to be). The 'Willy Vandersteenprijs' is a prize that is given to the best original Dutch graphic album published in the last two years. Work by Evens is printed in comic magazines such as Hic Sunt Leones and Parcifal.

Graphic column (1): 'Residence' by Brecht Evens written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: brecht evens

citybooks

Travel without moving! written by deBuren in: News

Tags: city books

This year, deBuren also looked across the border and took Elsschot to Heerlen, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Jakarta... and as of this weekend: California!

Peter Laurence is a young American who taught himself Dutch by reading De eeuw van mijn vader by Geert Mak. He wrote about his progress on his amusing blog ‘Learning Dutch with Geert Mak’.

Touched by his enthusiasm for the Dutch language and culture and his longing to promote this in the United States, deBuren sent him the graphic adaptation of Elsschot’s Kaas by Dick Matena. The original drawings are in possession of deBuren and travelled around the world in the last couple of years, but they are always available as a virtual exhibition on our site.

Now, Peter Laurence initiated a new project. He will read the graphic novel of Kaas and write about it on his new blog: ‘A Slice of Kaas’. At the same time he is trying to promote Belgium in the US. He has already written a hilarious script for a commercial titled ‘Belgium. Come for the weather.’...

deBuren wishes Peter the best of luck, we will follow his progress up close and offer him two suggestions to promote the Low Countries: Radiobooks and citybooks!

A Slice of Kaas written by deBuren in: News

Tags: dick matena, kaas, peter laurence

Life is somewhere and sometime else

In 2009 I spent more than four months in Berlin and one month in London.  I went to Berlin without knowing anyone and having any  purpose except that of being out of my hometown.  But Bucharest came to me through of friends, relatives, former girlfriends.

Each of them discovered the city which for me was no longer a foreigner. Being there for the third time, I wasn’t turned on anymore by the Panorama, the Mauer Park or the Brandeburg Tor, although I’ve been so happy on the first day that I could have danced in the streets that was no longer in Romania. I became a guide for my visitors, showing them, inevitably, mostly the same places: those which appear in In Your Pocket guide or on tourist websites. Places that everyone arriving in a city wants to see and capture, thus proving their friends that they’ve been there.

Whenever I had a guest I had to go to Oranien Strasse, to the monument of the Holocaust or to the Sony Center, I started observing the tourists deluging public spaces, the density of cameras per square foot, the never ending clicking and rising arms anticipating the exposure; the physical and behavioral changes people suffered in order to push a button; the conversations interrupted unexpectedly when a sight or situation worthy to be captured turned up;  the present process which in the future would become memory.

I became, as Kafka would say, an observer of the observers. I started frequenting again the areas which aroused the flashes of cameras. Though I was living in the most populated places in Berlin or London, Alexander Platz or Trafalgar Square, I felt like being the only man alive among zombies hungry for images. A clicking person is extremely fragile. I often approached them to the limit of indiscretion. Taking a photo is an act of isolation in a public space; it’s like listening to music on headphones. With a camera in front of the eye one sees without watching. At that moment you never question reality. You produce directly for the memory. Here and Now become Then and There.

Time Travel: Life is somewhere and sometime else written by Jean-Lorin Sterian in: News

Tags: time is a book: bucharest

TIME IS A BOOK is a project founded by artists Dirk Braeckman and Els Dietvorst. Time Travel spread over 300 books internationally. deBuren went to Bucharest and posed these questions to four young artists. Can art be engaged? Can you, as an artist, still be radical? Today, anarchistic cartoonist Matei Branea responds under the title ‘Time is a chair'.

© Matei Branea | www.branea.ro

Graphic column: 'Time is a Chair' written by Matei Branea in: Graphic column

Tags: time is a book: bucharest, time travel: bucharest

deBuren asked young Romanian artists to respond to the book, first during an evening debate in Bucharest, followed by an artistic reply. Last week we published the manifesto of director David Schwartz and this week we publish an essay on literature, commitment and feminism by Ana Chirițoiu. Next week, cartoonist Matei Branea will take his turn and the final participant is photographer Jean-Lorin Sterian who portrays the artist as the ‘observer of observers’.

These contributions will eventually be made available on www.timetravel.be, where everyone can upload their own contributions.

Time Travel: Bucharest written by deBuren in: News

1

It was the autumn of 2009, but it looked more like late summer in Venice. I was invited there to talk about contemporary young Romanian writers on behalf of the literary magazine I was working for, Noua literatură. I had brought along a selection of eight short stories that I thought to be representative for the new writing: one of them tackled being a writer between the East and the West, two other ones referred to travelling (I have to admit that my reading was more in the sense of touristic consumption), one was about the cyber control the state manifests over its citizens, one about the impossibility of being a writer or a translator for a living, one was simply funny and in the others one would have had to look far in order to identify social concerns, but they were nonetheless well written and entertaining. I distributed them among the public – Venetian students of the Romanian section –, read them aloud, talked about them and asked for comments.

Most of the comments I have forgotten, despite the very engaging dialogue, except for the one of a student who introduced herself as studying sociology and having taken part in a program of social assistance in several Romanian towns and villages. She was curious to know whether there are books written on such themes as work migration, abandoned children, poverty, rural life, gender relations and so on, which she encountered there and thought could make interesting themes for literature. Much to my own discontent, I could not come up with numerous examples.

I also find such themes as the ones the Venetian student enquired about artistically bounteous, and yet in a dossier on this subject hosted by the magazine I worked for, most of the writers invited to have their say did not share this opinion: some thought there needs to be drawn a line between the writer and the citizen, others that writing is an individual occupation and, especially when it is uninvolved, it saves one from the fallacy of stupidity, others said there are already plenty of writers who gained their glory mainly by being preoccupied with the fate of kangaroos, Amazonian forests, blacks, women, ring-plovers and the like, or that the only possible engagement for a writer is the artistic one. They would probably be offended (some actually were) by a sociological reading of their books, which do in fact support one, even though it is not explicitly invited by the actual content.

By and large, the conclusion of the dossier would be that ideology and social commitment, be it overtly expressed or not, are to be avoided in literature or at least not praised for themselves. I tend to agree to the latter opinion, but I can’t help adding a necessarily complementary question: can art be praised for itself in lack of an ideology? One of the authors invited in the debate opportunely said no. There are instances of books that have successfully embodied both extremes – either complete ivoryness, or total commitment – and even more examples of equally successful books situated at any point inbetween. But there are few instances of contemporary Romanian writers who show interest for current social realities, be it in the form of extra-literary involvement / action, or in that of fictional representations of social problems. The first case of disinterest can be accounted for mostly by sociological remarks: the social status (or symbolic capital) of artists is virtually non-existent, in a country where surveys have shown that a person buys one book per year, rendering literature as a niche form of entertainment or information. The second case requires a more elaborate explanation.

2

It is well known and widely accepted that it does not necessarily take a dictatorship for one to be a (genuinely) socially committed author. Nevertheless, it is generally alleged that one of the major causes for the lack of interest, if not overt refusal, of most Romanian authors to address social and political themes in their books is what was known as the intensely required (and equally intensely fabricated) social engagement of authors during the communist years. This is to say it was mostly the request that political successes be rendered by means of careful documentation which set the Eastern artistic mind frame to conclude, louder and louder, especially after 1989, that the only morality in art is that it be sufficient to itself, that is, aesthetically purified from political interventions, and that concepts as ‘ideology’, ‘commitment’, ‘documentation’ and so on are to be rendered irrelevant – if not directly disqualifying – when discussing an author’s work, and even more so when conceiving it.

Moreover, the autonomy of aestheticism has served a more twisted purpose than that of alienating artists from society: in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution, several cultural policy-makers made use of it so as to perpetuate the glory of the writers who had served the official politics in the former époque by means of their oeuvre, which was argued to be beyond their human deeds and, moreover, beyond the themes it had been set to illustrate (and often succeeded in doing so).

Formally, the exploration of socially engaged art has a history almost equally long on both sides of The Iron Curtain, but it took very different shapes in the different spaces: while socio-political critique was an important trend with several Western artists, often to the degree that the local establishment felt incommoded by it, with Eastern artists it was a direct request from the Party for artists to turn to society in order to describe the accomplishments of socialism. It can be argued that in the latter case the request stood as an invitation to merely produce fiction, which is indeed the way several artists (especially writers) have tackled it, but this argument is usually overlooked when blaming the horrid sonority of such phrases as ‘social involvement’ on past uses and abuses of the term. It is now enough to mention that documentation was the duty of art under dictatorship in order to compromise the idea of fieldwork; since the prerequisite of checks and balances with what was then called reality was abolished, together with the regime, it has apparently become superfluous to impose such a prerequisite upon ourselves.

By means of time and politics, the generation that had endured communism soon became the cultural mainstream and perpetuated its purist beliefs to the point where it would cause serious clashes with younger generations, the priorities of which were perhaps others. Social and political concerns in art have been discouraged – not only in reviews, but also in the preferential granting of access to publications, stages and galleries. This time the censorship was merely symbolic, but how’s a defender of aestheticism to say that symbolic deeds weigh less than practical ones, especially in a country where, for lack of actual dissidence, the aesthetic concern was much-praised as a means of symbolic opposition to the former regime?

3

My bitter remarks could go on and on, but the discussion is fairly uninformed and highly idiosyncratic. I’m not aware of surveys being made as to what the proportion of writers who swear on pure aestheticism and their reasons to do so is, and this subject hardly ever enjoys any discussions. Participation in debates regarding public and social subjects tends to occur in what I’d call extravert societies. Ours is not such; it has often been said that communism has failed in perhaps its greatest scope: creating a public sphere. And so far the transition to democracy did not manage to change much in this respect either, not even when shutting the windows could not help the noise of the street or that of the public sphere from entering one’s solitary study room.

What the transition to democracy, often described as ‘catching up with the West’, did manage, however, was to create a sense of cultural sufficiency, which renders themes as social commitment as passé, due to a two-fold self-indulgent logic. It is said either that, once we’ve read books, watched performances or seen exhibitions containing the results of (Western) socially engaged art, we can have a say in it and not need to practice it any further; or that so numerous artists have formerly exercised socially engaged art that the present may be exempt of its presupposed benefits. But it is only honest to admit that neither of these rationales can stand for an actual experience of political art; the former is artificial, the latter is counterfeit.

Social engagement no longer appears to be the Golden Fleece in Western literatures either; when it is still practiced, it simply conveys personal choices and a personal ideology, and there are probably cultural circles where it is even regarded as naïveté or indeed as a desertion from aesthetic value / incumbent artistic subjectivity / honesty / individuality. Even though they ceased to be major intellectual conquests, there are nonetheless books of fiction being written on such themes as human rights* or feminism – a species that would have to wait before it appears in Romania, if it ever will, despite the necessity that it does. A necessity reclaimed in the name of a reality that calls for a representation, and furthermore, in the name of morality and – were it not such a censurable word – didacticism. But the obviousness of such representations is made void by the sufficiency described above, perverse enough to make many be amused by political correctness without ever having practiced it.

4

Take, for instance, feminism. ‘Feminism is so passé’, I hear prominent local artists say, while statistics show that in Romania a woman is being abused every 2 minutes and that, throughout 5 years, more than 700 of these cases ended in death**. Even though local statistics don’t fall short from global ones, they may be relatively far from those in Western Europe, towards which we aspire without taking notice of the gap between the aspirations of intellectuals and the realities of the field. In fact, such figures may be more similar to those of countries like Somalia, of which we are otherwise appalled to read in the news. There are no surveys to show to what extent public Romanian intellectuals are aware of such data as they serenely preach disinvolvement from social issues in art, frequently rendering it a gratuitous leftist caprice which has failed to change the world anyway, but which poses a serious threat to change art. Thus, feminism does not even resound here in academic circles – there is no feminist criticism, no feminist studies, and the few translations from feminist authors remain largely unnoticed.

I browse The Guardian and find an article in which several feminist authors talk about the books that influenced them; I wonder how long it will take before an important daily newspaper in Romania approaches the subject and also how much it takes before it finds five local feminist authors. The most frequent objection such intellectuals formulate against feminist literature – and any other form of engaged literature – is that such writers have sacrificed their art for the sake of the direct purpose. Did Jeanette Winterson do so? Did Doris Lessing? Did Emily Dickinson? Did Sappho? Who’s to judge art beyond its ideas? Is there a sacrifice involved at all? Who’s to defend the idea that such writers are writers before they’re feminists? And why would anyone?

5

It’s early summer in Bucharest, 2009. The yearly book fair Bookfest takes place in a huge building inherited from the former regime. One has the chance to meet here writers in flesh and blood. A young male writer grabs my arm and takes me to a bookstand to have me look at a poetry album he says he’s crazy about. The album consists of images of young women’s naked bodies on which poets write poems. It is printed on quality paper, in bright, full colours. It costs a lot, too. The poets in the pictures look pleased. So does my friend. A post on a feminist blog I often read, which would easily be considered radical here, comes to mind; it states that the history of art merely reproduces the history of women’s humiliation. I can’t quote that to my young male friend without expecting to be ridiculed. But I can’t think of anything else while I try to make out from the looks on the girls’ faces what other than a deep, undisputed sense of patriarchy has prompted them to offer their bodies (benevolently, as far as I remember) for writers to use them in such an uninspired manner. And also what the chances would be of an equally luxurious album of poems and photos about the abuses on women to be financed and appreciated by such sophisticated young writers as my friend. Is women’s nudity (in such obsolete, hippie forms) the only way to make poetry appealing to the audience?

Poet Adrian Mitchell is frequently quoted to have said, ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. Most self-sufficient intellectuals would not admit that exploring reality and positioning oneself in relation to it is not only a perfectly legitimate artistic act, but also a desirable one. The gap between them and their possible audience is therefore larger than life. The social reality in which a woman is abused every two minutes seems to occur in a country far away from the one where artists pronounce themselves against ideology in art while they consume albums in which poetry (supposedly aesthetic and abstract) is written on the body, as if such artistic gestures were ideology-free.

The debut poetry volume of Adrienne Rich is entitled A Change of World. It appeared in 1951. I recap the words which changed my world: falogocentrism, le deuxième sexe, queer, écriture feminine, inequality, performativity, woman-eunuch, borderlands, king kong theory, power discourse, transsexual, gender. And I wonder if it’s not time they changed other people’s world too, and thus make the gap between a room of one’s own and the facts and figures and people living outside of it less blatant. Most insist on calling the allusion to this gap an undesired remnant of the former regime. I’d simply call it fieldwork.

* Freedom: Short Stories celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a collection of short stories issued in August 2009 by Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, gathering texts by such authors as David Mitchell, Ariel Dorfman, Xiaolu Guo, Paulo Coelho, Henning Mankell and several others.
** Survey done by the National Agency for The Protection of The Family, quoted by Unica magazine.

Time Travel: They Called It "Dictatorship". I'd Call It "Fieldwork" written by Ana Chiritoiu in: Column

INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO

Obedient televisions. Controlled newspapers. Obeyed art. Official art. Non-reactive art. Absent art. Lack of activism through art. Lack of engaged art. Lack of radical art. Lack of art. Lack of political involvement. Lack of civil rights activism. Lack of sense of justice. Lack of justice. Lack of minority rights. Lack of minorities' public representation. Lack of minorities' right to express themselves and to be represented. Lack of freedom of speech. Lack of spontaneous mass protest. Lack of riot. Lack of community spirit. Lack of community gathering. Lack of community. Lack of gatherings. Lack of social action. Lack of political action. Lack of radical action. Lack of action. Lack of immediate, instant, collective reaction/action.
Refusal of the instant art.
Refusal of the debate.
Refusal of the community.
Refusal of the minority.
Refusal of the representation.

FIGHT BACK! REACT!

The Romanian Orthodox Church is spending one billion dollars on building the biggest cathedral of South-Eastern Europe. REACT!
The government is shortening the retirement payments by fifteen percent. REACT!
The extreme religious right members are throwing stones at the Gay Parade. REACT!
The president is calling a journalist a “stinking gypsy”. REACT!
The ministry of foreign affairs states that “the Roma people should be sent to a camp in Africa”. REACT!
An American marine officer kills a man in a car accident and is protected by diplomatic immunity. REACT!

Right here. Right now. Watch / Observe / Document / Debate / Protest / Perform. React!
Every week.
1.    Instant reaction: act/re-act instantly and respond to present day political issues and immediate events.
2.    Public reaction: perform your statements in public crowded places.
3.    Represent the unrepresented: perform the absent, the invisible, the unpopular.

Immediate response to social and political issues. Perform the political present. Shake the “reality construction”. Fight the passive. Fight the inert. Fight the delay. Act fast and furious.

For three months, every week, a cross-disciplinary team of artists, sociologists, activists will build up performance reactions on major outrageous topics. The subject, the scenario, the set, the rehearsals will be concentrated in one week. Every seven days, a new show will be performed in a public space.

This is a call for instant gathering. For instant reaction. Act here and now. Debate the present. Perform the result. Gather / work together / document / react instantly and furiously / represent the unrepresented / tell the untold. In-your-face.

ART IN PRESENT-DAY ROMANIA

Can art still be radical? In present-day Romania art should necessarily be radical. And therefore it is not. Since the foundation of Romania, in the 19th century, art was, with some exceptions, either totally unengaged or, more often, art obeyed to the political regime. The same with historical and social sciences. As for more than fifty years of the 20th century, Romania has been run by dictatorial regimes (either monarchial dictatorship, fascism or communist totalitarianism), art has rarely been, if ever, allowed the luxury to be provocative, infamous or/and openly against the political leadership. History was changed, forged and mystified, social sciences were adapted to serve the regime and the artists often watched this with silent disapproval or rewarded obedience. On the other hand, the abundance of obedient art called political art and perceived as political art (especially in the communist era) has led to despise and exclusion of any form of political art in the 90s and 2000s. These habits are very difficult to change or shake in present-day Romania. And therefore any engaged form of art, that stands against the political regime, against the religious values, against the common prejudices and beliefs, can be seen as radical.

In this context the Instant-Art Manifesto tries to cover three big issues.

First, the lack of immediate reaction to major scandalous events – so far the artists usually react with 10, 20 or more years later even to big bloody social episodes (the pogroms, the labour camps for Jewish and Roma people in the fascist era; the evictions, deportations and tortures in the 50s; the Coup-d’etat called revolution in 1989; the fights between Romanians and Hungarians in Targu-Mures in March 1990; the repression against intellectuals and Roma people called Mineriad in 1990). These bloody events are always hidden, never discussed and debated in public, absent from history schoolbooks. The lack of immediate reaction is many times followed by no reaction at all. The lack of reaction leads to oblivion.

The second issue is the lack of the custom of gathering, of the community spirit and of the organized collective protest. In recent years Romanians only gathered together in extreme moments of their history. And even in those moments they were often manipulated and forged to react.

The third issue is the lack of representation of ethnic, religious, sexual minorities in Romanian culture, doubled by a refuse to represent the oppressed, the low class, the disadvantaged. Even though 6.6% of the Romanian citizens are Hungarian, very few theater performances and almost no Romanian film pictures Hungarians. With the Roma community, things are more radical, not even the official census offers a credible number of the Roma people among the Romanian citizens. The people with disabilities, the old people, the people affected by poverty, the people in the countryside, have virtually no access to culture and no possibility of representation and of exercising their right to express their beliefs.

In my opinion, art can still be radical in present day Romania, if it aims to shake the lethargy of the spectators, of the street-walkers, of the big cities inhabitants. If it screams in their face what they don’t want to hear, what they are afraid to see, to admit, to think about. If it stands consistently and critically against the political regime. If it promotes and allows to be heard the voices of the unpopular. Of course, the big problem of such an art programme will be the lack of any financial support, private or state-owned.

Time Travel: INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO written by David Schwartz in: News

This week the fourth graphic column by Maaike Hartjes: 'Green tree'

© Maaike Hartjes | www.maaikehartjes.nl

Graphic column (4): 'Green tree' by Maaike Hartjes written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: maaike hartjes

© Maaike Hartjes | www.maaikehartjes.nl

Graphic column (3): 'Billboard, billworld' by Maaike Hartjes written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: maaike hartjes

© Maaike Hartjes | www.maaikehartjes.nl

Graphic column (2): 'In the back of the closet' by Maaike Hartjes written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: maaike hartjes

This week the first graphic column by Maaike Hartjes: 'Twitter'

© Maaike Hartjes | www.maaikehartjes.nl

Graphic column (1): 'Twitter' by Maaike Hartjes written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: maaike hartjes

This week the last part of the series 'Indestructible' by the Dutch cartoonist Michiel van de Pol, in which he introduces his philosophy about the arts. “My graphic columns are rather cheerful takes on the fact that Art will always survive, no matter what.”

Today part 4: photographie.

© Michiel van de Pol | www.cartoondiarree.nl

Graphic column: 'Indestructible' (4) written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: michiel van de pol

Dutch cartoonist Michiel van de Pol introduces his philosophy about the arts in the next couple of weeks. “My graphic columns are rather cheerful takes on the fact that Art will always survive, no matter what.”

Today part 3: the art of painting

© Michiel van de Pol | www.cartoondiarree.nl

Graphic column: 'Indestructible' (3) written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: michiel van de pol

Today part 2: Literature

“Literature is connected and intertextual, there are elements trying to prevent this, but everything is resolved by a biography of Houdini.”

© Michiel van de Pol | www.cartoondiarree.nl

Graphic column: 'Indestructible' (2) written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: michiel van de pol

Today part 1: Music

© Michiel van de Pol | www.cartoondiarree.nl

Graphic column: 'Indestructible' (1) written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: michiel van de pol

“Member of the jury 2010”

© Steve Michiels | www.aboutsteve.com

Graphic column: 'The Grand Jury show' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: steve michiels

“Let this stop! After all, it’s figs after Easter!!”

© Steve Michiels | www.aboutsteve.com

Graphic column: 'After Easter' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: steve michiels

“Well, well, isn’t time to go back to work?”

© Steve Michiels | www.aboutsteve.com

Graphic column: 'Back to work' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: steve michiels

“Daddy is dissatisfied with his visiting rights”

© Steve Michiels | www.aboutsteve.com

Graphic column: 'Daddy' written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: steve michiels

In February we give the cartoonist Barbara Stok the opportunity to draw four graphic columns for every week of that month. She investigates the question ‘what is a good life?’. Which values are important and how do these values fit in our present-day society?

This week we present her fourth and final graphic column 'Zoek de verschillen' (look for the differences)

© Barbara Stok | www.barbaraal.nl

'Zoek de verschillen' (look for the differences) by Barbara Stok written by deBuren in: Graphic column

Tags: barbara stok, graphic column