Artist-run Brussels
Brussels is a hotbed of artist-run spaces and projects – they form a vital layer of the ‘micropolitical ecosystem’ that supports the city’s dynamic art scene. Pieter Vermeulen surveys this ever-changing landscape of bottom-up initiatives and assesses the challenges they face in terms of sustainability, self-organisation and institutionalisation.
The sales pitch for Brussels as a contemporary art hub has been in the works for more than a decade. Lazily dubbed ‘the new Berlin’ and praised by the New York Times for its ‘cosy chaos,’ the Belgian capital’s art scene defies any attempt at city marketing or commercial labelling. While it is undeniably true that the city has been attracting increasing attention on the international artistic stage, its success story is not one-dimensional or easy to summarise. Often cited economic fact (…)
