public art

After picking up the package with my organ shoes (finally!!) from the BAEF office, I wandered to the European Parliament. The first building I encountered was an old one in the midst of a half-flooded construction site; much like the ISM's former dining hall building, it was magnificent and decaying, its elaborately carved ceiling exposed to the elements and covered with white deposits. Around it, a massive complex of sleek, cold, well-maintained modernity towered.

Behind the EU complex, I found a park in which stood a curious four-foot-wide slab of graffiti-covered concrete, standing perhaps eleven feet tall. I stopped to wonder at what it was doing amidst the angles and curves of a monument of glass... and realized it must be a section of the Berlin Wall. Sure enough, it was from the Potsdamer Platz. Its 1989 dismantlement allowed the formation of ... on May 1, 2004--what precisely, I couldn't decipher from the Dutch, French, and German captions. I remember watching the news as the wall came down, not realizing its significance as an uncomprehending six-year-old, but knowing that something bad was being joyfully destroyed. To see a piece of the wall for the first time, only five days before the sixteenth anniversary of its dismantlement, was moving, for I had enough of a sense of what it stood for to be stunned by it.

Closeups of graffiti on the Berlin Wall.

Considering how many stares I get in Mechelen for dressing a little offbeat, I wonder how the little town of Putte reacts to the annual Body Art Festival. I mean, maybe Putte is much more open-minded than Mechelen, if anybody lives there at all.

In other news, Dendermonde calls itself De Ros Beiaardsted. Only in Belgium. =)