#Brussels Graff

[grusik]

Oresto & co / Bruxelles - 4 aout 2024 Artists: Oresto & co by Ferdinand 'Ferre' Feys

[mongol-fier]

Oresto & co / Bruxelles - 4 aout 2024 par Ferdinand Feys Via Flickr : Artists: Oresto & co

[radicalgraff]

Anti-cop graff in Brussels, Belgium

[byneddiedingo]

Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical. Screenplay: Chantal Akerman. Cinematography: Babette Mangolte. Art direction: Philippe Graff. Film editing: Patricia Canino.

With Jeanne Dielman (to shorten its unwieldy title) Chantal Akerman tests the medium to see whether a story can be told without melodrama, without excess camera movement, without a music track, without all the usual cinematic techniques. She also tests the audience, to see if they will sit through a 201-minute film in which minutes go by without anything happening other than a woman taking a bath, washing the bathtub, preparing dinner, eating it with her son, washing dishes, and so on -- all in long takes with no apparent forward narrative drive. The answer is yes, a story can be told that way. As for the audience, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a high tolerance for cinematic riddles, or who can't sit raptly looking at a painting in a museum for minutes on end. Most of the scenes are filmed straight on, as if looking at them through a frame. In short, Akerman treats a kinetic medium, motion pictures, as if it were a static medium like painting. Is it the greatest film of all time, as has been claimed? I think it's at least a great film, but I don't have any urgent desire to see it again soon. What it did to me was make me aware of watching, of patiently waiting to see what image would be presented to me next, what piece of the puzzle that is Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) would fall into place. It takes place over the course of three days, on the first of which Jeanne presents herself as a supremely capable and precise person, going through the motions of her daily existence (which include receiving a man into her bedroom, because she makes a living for herself and her son by discreet prostitution) with calm efficiency. On the first two days, we don't follow her into the bedroom with her client, but the camera lingers in the hall, looking at the bedroom door, until the light fades enough to indicate a passage of time, whereupon she and the man emerge from the bedroom and go to her apartment door, where he pays her and indicates that he will see her again in a week. She then goes to her dining room and puts the money in a blue-and-white tureen, whose lid makes a satisfying clink when she covers it. (In the absence of a music track, ambient sounds take on a greater role.) Later, her son, Sylvain (Jan Decorte), comes home from school and they have dinner, listen to the radio, go out for a walk, and come back home to rearrange the living room furniture so he can unfold the sofa for his bed. They go to sleep. But because many of these incidents are presented in real time, we are allowed to examine them in detail, to notice the furnishings of the apartment and the lack of affect of both mother and son, who have settled into a routine. We also notice the way a blue light, apparently from a sign outside their apartment, bounces off the surfaces of the furniture: It flashes and flickers in a way that suggests a rhythmic repetition but never quite resolves itself into a pattern. In that regard it's unlike Jeanne and Sylvain, who clearly have a pattern to their lives. And that's why it's a shock on the second day -- which begins about an hour into the film -- when Jeanne fails to do up a button on her housedress, something that Sylvain brings to her notice. Or later, when other elements of the pattern of her life don't fall in place: She burns the potatoes she is preparing for dinner; she forgets to switch off a light when she moves from room to room; she fails to put the cover on the tureen after putting the money from the second day's client into it. In any other context than the one established by the first day depicted in the film, these details would be insignificant. But Akerman makes them significant, even troubling, by having made us aware of the cold precision of Jeanne's routine. That this eventually builds to a remarkable climax (I use the word advisedly but not facetiously) is made possible by the mastery with which Akerman has set up her film. I kept wondering what Alfred Hitchcock, the master of voyeurism in cinema, might have made of Jeanne Dielman, a film that makes voyeurs of us all.

[goatles]

[Anti-genderists] position themselves as challengers of the existing elites (the vaguely defined “they”), protectors of the world’s colonized peoples, the disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged, whose livelihoods as well as authentic cultures and traditional value systems are threatened by globalization. An unexamined assumption underlying the anti- gender worldview is not only that local and authentic cultural identity is always “familial,” that is socially conservative and heteronormative, but also that gender conservatism constitutes this sovereign identity’s essential core. Anti-genderists fashion themselves as defenders of an oppressed, silent majority, as in a 2015 in- flight interview, where Pope Francis stressed that “colonizing empires […] seek to make peoples forget their own identity and make them (all) equal” (Pope Francis 2015). This populist strategy allows anti- gender actor to justify attacks on enemies or even violence by claiming the need for self- defense against all- powerful forces. (...) The anti- gender movement portrays itself as a safe haven from the turbulent and dangerous world, a sort of Heimat to use a term popular in Germany. Genderism is portrayed as a global force, while resistance is always presented as local. (...) Conservative parenthood has emerged globally as a new political identity, a site of social solidarity and a form of resistance in relation to the state, transnational institutions, the market and feminism, which is viewed here primarily as a form of individualism. Within this framework, feminism is presented as an integral part of neoliberalism, while the traditional family becomes the last frontier of resistance, a place where there is still hope and a sense of community. It is a narrative with enormous affective power, one that endows subjects with a sense of dignity and collective agency, while at the same time giving voice to anxiety, which results from increasingly precarious working and living conditions under global capitalism.

-- Agnieszka Graff, Elżbieta Korolczuk: Gender as “Ebola from Brussels”: The uses and abuses of the anti- colonial frame

[heavygyroscope]

Brussels 2013

[caprascrew]

Rise / Bruxelles 

[laurentgrizon]

[lionelcampionphotographe]

La rue me fait signe. Je lui répond. Elle s'est fait belle. On prend la pause. On s'entremêle . . #lovestreet #streetart #streetartbruxelles #graffiti #graff #paintedwall #streetsign #streetphotography #streetpicture #streetcall #takeapause #streettalk #streetwalk #bruxelles🇧🇪 #belgique🇧🇪 #brussels🇧🇪 #belgium🇧🇪 #evere #1140 #cellphonepicture #nofilter #lionelcampionphotographe (à Evere) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBmoqeaH3CH/?igshid=qsucr3bdxsum

[mariacallous]

The past several decades have sometimes been described as a period of ‘multiple crises’. The most prominent factors are a partial economical globalization and, to a certain extent, also cultural and political globalization. These overlap with a profound transformation of the media, its seeming decentralization and individualization enabled by an unprecedented centralization on a handful of platforms. Add to that a crisis of the so-far existing forms of politics, linked to the conflict between the ‘winners and losers of globalization’. Culture wars have asserted themselves amid these factors as the fundamental principle of division.

The key to an intelligent assessment of a given state of affairs used to lie in seeing information in an adequate context. Nowadays, however, there are situations in which the very concept of adequate context falls apart, making even the most well-educated people seem like morons. Information travels across contexts, and it is not clear at all which of them is the adequate one.

Contexts serve chiefly as affirmations of pre-conceived phantasms, assembled in pre-determined patterns: for instance, in accordance with the image of American universities gone crazy, declining Western civilization, the fascization of the masses, and Russian trolls who are to blame for every single liberal failure. Social media has an immense potential to de- and recontextualize, and if anything like a permanent imprint of postmodern philosophy exists, it is the right that it never explicitly formulated: the horrifying right to one’s own context.

Some culture wars are based on the transfer of different contexts across locations. The key figures of the liberal opinion camp are often what could be called Kulturträgers: people who bring the correct emancipation approaches from the centre (such as Anglo-American universities) into underdeveloped places. They often do it without trying to lead a dialogue, guided by their sense of superiority over the ‘merely local’, sometimes manifested by diction swarming with English expressions.

In the conservative camp, in turn, battles are staged as the defense of ‘the local’ against external pressures. As sociologists Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk show, in conservative discourse, gender is framed as ‘the Ebola from Brussels’, and always as a global phenomenon. Resistance to feminism is depicted as the defense of local traditions, even though it is orchestrated by global networks including the Catholic Church, the Russian secret services, and American Evangelicals.

The horrifying right to one’s own context

[manganic-malaria]

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels), 1975

[grusik]

Andalltha / Bruxelles - 14 mai 2023 Artist: Andalltha Thierry Jaspart by Ferdinand 'Ferre' Feys

[radicalgraff]

The Brazilian embassy in Brussels was vandalised on September 5th 2019 with red paint and sprayed with slogans such as:

"Love the Amazon / Ecocide = Bolsonaro / Bolsonaro = Ecocide"

[tka-crew-blog]

🔥 XCAP rolling in ... . . #steelisreal #x #tka #paintedtrains #graffiti #steel #style #colorful #handmade #lettering #trainart #vandal #grafflife #fun #tkacrew #instagraff #graff #belgiumgraffiti #train #traffic #rolling #xcap #fresh #graffporn #outdoor #граффити #trainspotting #rolling #spraypaint #railway #welovebombing (hier: Brussels) https://www.instagram.com/p/B2R5DytCkhx/?igshid=1izml2dwi0sq7

[bjornvanpoucke]

I can't believe I'm still protesting this shit @banksy @nieuwsblad . . . . . #streetart #graffiti #art #banksy #banksyexpo #street #mural #streetarteverywhere #brussels #wallart #artist #artwork #streetartist #bruxelles #graff #streetstyle #painting #contemporaryart #urban #spraypaint #interview #sprayart #muralart #arte #love #instagraffiti #graffitiporn #arteurbano https://instagr.am/p/CONouDFB3rZ/

[heavygyroscope]

Brussels 2013