Marguerite Duras on a World Cup night

The literary evening got underway against an unusual background: that of the honking of horns and jubilant cheering as Belgium celebrated a World Cup victory on the streets of Brussels outside. Inside, journalist Laure Adler quipped to the packed hall how touched she was that so many people had turned up to listen to her on the same evening as a national football match.

The Frenchwoman had her Belgian audience on side and didn’t lose them for the duration of her interview about the life and work of the French writer Marguerite Duras, who would have been 100 this year.

Adler, whose 1998 biography of Duras has been reprinted this year, explained how she found Duras to be a writer who pushed the boundaries not only in literature but also in cinema and theatre. Duras is a writer she admires greatly and with whom she has identified ever since reading Un barrage contre le Pacifique at a particularly low moment in her life. Duras was also a writer who Adler had the opportunity to meet on several occasions.

Not everyone has always been so admiring of Duras. Adler mentioned the intellectuals Duras hung around with, many of whom mocked her. In fact, when Adler first approached Gallimard with her idea for a biography of Duras, the response was “You’re mad! No-one is interested in that!”

But Gallimard did publish Adler’s biography and in the intervening years has reprinted Duras’s works in its Folio paperback editions, opening the author up to a new generation of young readers. In China, the author of The Lover and Hiroshima mon Amour is the most read foreign writer!

Back to the drawing board

Adler’s biography on Duras took a while to see the light of day, not least because no sooner had she finished her first draft than Duras entrusted her archives to the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), providing a mass of new source material for the biographer. Adler threw her 700-odd pages straight in the bin and made a fresh start.

If the tales that Adler touched on during her public interview in Brussels this week are anything to go by – Duras’s childhood in Vietnam, her World War II experiences in France, her marriages and affairs, her alcoholism, her relationship with her French teacher mother and her absent father…- the story of the writer’s life almost sounds like a novel in itself.

The evening's interview was interspersed with readings of Duras’s work as well as audio clips of Duras herself speaking, with images of the late author projected on two large screens throughout. The event, organised by Brussels’ international literature house Passa Porta, provided a fascinating insight into a woman whose work I first studied on a film course at university. Given that it’s her centenary year, maybe this is the year to revisit her work; there will certainly be plenty of opportunities to do so.

Copyright Bellone 2011-2014

I cannot wrap up this post without mentioning the venue of this week’s event: La Bellone. What a wonderful architectural discovery in the centre of Brussels! From the main street (Rue de Flandre 46) the building isn’t particularly striking, but enter and the main corridor opens on to a covered courtyard dominated by a magnificent 17^th century façade. Built by Cosyn, the same architect who designed the Maison des Boulangers (Roi d’Espagne) on Brussels’ central square, this hidden gem is today a listed building.

Manifesta comes to Belgium

Waterschei mine, location of Manifesta9
©Anna Jenkinson

My destination: a former coal-mining complex in Genk (Limburg province, Belgium). My reason: Manifesta, the roving European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opened at the site this weekend and runs until 30 September.

I say contemporary art, but in fact there was as much history and heritage on show as there were new creations. From coal sacks hanging from the ceiling (as devised by Marcel Duchamp for the 1938 International Surrealism Exposition in Paris) to bookshelves filled with miners' employment booklets, from sculptures made of coal to a colourful, cascading installation of fabric by Chinese artist Ni Haifeng, the exhibition takes the visitor through centuries of industrialisation to the present day.

Ni Haifeng, Para-Production, 2012
©Anna Jenkinson

Inspired by the location's coal-mining heritage, the curators sought to underline the interaction between contemporary art, historic art and heritage. The result is a well-integrated exhibition with a strong thematic focus and plenty of resonances between archive documents, historical material and contemporary installations. The legacy of Manifesta 9, according to the organizers, will be an emphasis of how deeply embedded culture is in our society.


This year's biennial, unlike its predecessors, is taking place in one location: the beautifully renovated Waterschei mine. Officially known as the Andre Dumont mine after the man who discovered coal in Limburg, the site was completed in 1924, remaining a working mine for several decades before closing its doors in 1987.

Kunstenfestivaldesarts: Mexican theatre tackles guerrilla warfare

We may only be halfway through Kunstenfestivaldesarts, an annual arts festival that takes place across Brussels, but I’m pretty sure I saw one of its overall highlights this last week: the Mexican documentary theatre piece El Rumor Del Incendio (The Sound Of Fire).

The play explores a period of Mexican history, the guerrilla movements that sprang up in the country during the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent deaths, political prisoners and forced disappearances. The subject is approached through the life of one former guerrilla: historian and teacher Margarita Urias Hermosillo.

© Carlos Somonte

The three actors, all in their mid-twenties, bring the period to life in an intelligent and thought-provoking way. They incorporate into their performance archive audiovisual footage, old tapes being played on cassette recorder and documents and film clips projected onto a screen, all of which remind us that this theatre production is based on real events.

© Carlos Somonte

It’s not simply a history lesson though. There is a strong narrative that is brought out by strong performances from the actors, particularly Luisa Pardo playing the role of Margarita Urias Hermosillo. There’s also a playful element as they use toy soldiers and a children’s train set to re-enact historical scenes. And moments of brilliant production, for example when a lit match is thrown towards a large screen projecting an image of a forest that at that moment switches to an image of a forest bursting into flames.

The play’s relevance to today is also highlighted as the actors ask questions such as: can a critical look at the past change the future?; what battles were fought before we were born?; how can we build a better country?; are there other systems for running things?; and why is it so difficult to criticise the present system?

While acknowledging the differences between then and now, the theatre group says in its notes about the play that they feel as if they live in a country where people have become insensitive to inequality and are incapable of shaping political projects bearing hope. “We feel straitjacketed faced with the very widespread opinion that the world is shut for good and only one system of political, social and cultural organisation now exists. A system which proves moreover to be very difficult to criticise, even though we are brought face to face with its enormous flaws and its terrible drawbacks in our everyday lives,” the group writes.

The project, which comprises this documentary theatre piece as well as a blog and a book, is not a call to take up arms. Rather it is what the theatre group calls “an attempt to restore the idea of utopia and the possibility of creating new thinking, making it possible for us to imagine fairer worlds.”

© Carlos Somonte

The Brussels shows are the first time that the theatre group, ‘Lagartijas tiradas al sol’ (‘Lizards stretching in the sun’), has performed in Europe. It won’t be the actors' last though. A list of other cities where they will be performing this year can be found on the theatre group’s website.

Kicking off 2011 with Chinese Culture

Happy New Year. 

2011 got off to a great start as I was on tour in China with the Bruocsella Symphony Orchestra. As well as performing concerts in Shanghai and towns in the surrounding provinces (Yixing, Jiaxing, Nanjing and Suzhou), we also had plenty of time for sightseeing. 

The cultural highlights for me were the Suzhou Museum (built by architect I. M. Pei), the Shanghai Museum and Shanghai’s Moganshan Arts District. The buildings were amazing in themselves and the exhibits/artworks had me spellbound, in particular the bronzes, ceramics and jade carvings.

I hope to have an article or two published in the coming months based on my trip – as soon as that hope becomes reality, I’ll post the links on this blog. In the meantime, you can always read published articles about my trip to China last year by clicking here (The Independent) and here (The Bulletin).

Here’s wishing you a year full of inspiring cultural discoveries.

“London as a modern-day Babylon”

Commenting on a comment piece - and then in turn inviting your comments - is perhaps taking things too far, but Madeleine Bunting’s piece on the Babylon myth in Wednesday’s Guardian caught my attention on several levels.

She tells us that the Babylon myths came about on the one hand from the Old Testament, which led to western cultures’ pessimistic associations with the idea, and on the other hand from Greek historians, who lauded the Babylonians’ engineering achievements. I like this opposition of ideas.

Similarly, she highlights a contrast between the Tower of Babel in the Bible representing a multiplicity of languages as a curse and the Qur’an where a verse says God gave many languages in order for human beings to enrich, not confuse, their understanding of each other.

And the thread running through the commentary is the British Museum’s exhibition, Babylon: Myth and Reality (runs until March 15, 2009) and the political debate about London as a modern-day Babylon, “a place of violence and social fragmentation.”

History, languages, ideas, cultures – and all captured in less than 1,000 words. Here’s the link to the article.

(Credit for image: Cornelisz Anthonisz. (Theunissen), The collapse of the Tower of Babel, 1547, Etching © SMB, Kupferstichkabinett, Photo: Volker-H. Schneider)