Belgian Erasmus

Joachim Deneire 26 years old Hasselt´s artist • A colour : blue • A food: cheese • An animal: dog of course • A film: “Requiem for a dream” • A group of music: Jim Morrisson and “The Doors”, and Bob Dilan, of course. • A quote: “It is hurt to shake somebodys hand when you are making a fist?.” It´s a confucciuos proverb. I also like this one of Mahatma Ghandi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win”.

Located on the higher part of Brussels, the parliamentary area looks down its nose at the rest of the city. Diplomatics, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists... most of them with briefcases and dark blue suits. Not many women. Behind, the older, poorer and original Brussels. Space Léopold Once you enter into the European Parliament (EP), you may notice that the security is such an important issue. All the visitors have to arrange the guided tour and register in a database a few weeks before they enter into this huge complex of parliaments buildings called “Espace Léopold”, (“Leopoldruimte” in Dutch). When they arrive they must wear a plastic plate with his or her name. -“Aren´t this beautiful plates a waste of money?”- asked a Polish student. “Since 9/11 many things have changed”- asserted the travel guide. Inside, the buiding is a kind of luxury laberint with wide corridors, spiral staircases and even a fim studio (whose aim is to support the european cinema). We saw t

--> Erwin Ringel, Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, 1988: “suicide is a eternal solution for something that it´s often a temporal problem”. “My friend Marÿke suffered borderline and lived in a menthal institution for more than 2 years. Then, she had an apartment in Bilzen with a therapeutical program. A few weeks before her bithday she had already told me and another friend that she was feeling really bad, she used to drink a lot, and fight with her boyfriend and sometimes even was aggresive without having a lot of control of her own feelings. But still we never expected her to take an overdose of pills on the evening of her birthday. When they looked through her belongings they saw that she had a note, saying how she wanted her funeral arranged. And she had written it in August. So she had been planning this for two months and she kept all the pills somewhere so she could take them when she thought she needed them.”- Claudia Stienaers (23), friend of a

After a white door appeared Koen Vanmechelen `s studio. Inside? A spacious ship with enormous canvas in vivid colours, a pair of chicken skeletons fighting, stuffed chickens, alive chickens running inside two big cages... He pointed at a sculpture made with chickens´s bodies:“this is the Cosmopolitan Chicken, what we aim to do in our project. But chicken is just a methaphore of human being existence and the egg a metaphore of the world”. Koen Vanmechelen is more than a conceptual artist or a Belgian philosopher: he is an authentic “chicken lover”. In the “Cosmopolitan Chicken Proyect” (CCP) he crossbreeds chicken in order to obtein the “universal chicken or superbastard”. Last year he exposed at the Biennals of Venice and Moscow, as well as in Washington, at Conner Contemporary Art. Next stops: an exposition in Leuven (30 January- 25 April), the Biennials of Poland and Dakar and World Expo Shangai. Why the chicken and not the pig or the dog? It´s the most domesticated animal