Malta from a distance

The day that Trump came to Brussels was eerily quiet. He brought his "political pornography" to town on a public holiday. My workplace for the day, BOZAR, Centre for the Fine Arts, was open but empty. The only people working appeared to be security men. My young citizen journalist colleague met me at the appointed time but felt so vulnerable that our Brussels connection advised her to go home.

I used my badge to gain entry to to the Pol Bury exhibition and to Malta, Land of Sea. Each exhibition is fascinating and together they set my brain whirling.

I have seen so many exhibitions in the two short weeks I have been here. The previous weekend, I loved Singing Brussels, also held at BOZAR, when local choirs invited visitors to sing with them. I felt that locals were inviting me into their space. The exhibitions have been International and most of them I could never hope to see in Malta. Even Malta, Land of Sea, would perhaps be different viewed in the context of Malta.

So my whirling brain has been circling the relationship between the local and the global, between thinking and action.

Around BOZAR square, hoardings mask development of some sort. A series of street portraits, perhaps of identities that would be recognised by local people, turn the square into an outdoor gallery. Each portrait is presented in a different style and one is distorted in a particular way. It draws my eye each time I walk here from my flat in the Arab quarter. In the Pol Bury exhibition, I understood the local influence on that particular portrait.

I did not know the work of local artist, Pol Bury, before and I was entranced by his slowly, imperceptibly moving pieces: fine dots on thin wires bunching and separating like growing things; monumental steel forms that move according to ancient irrigation principles, local and global together.

Yet it was fame on a global level that brought the resources enabling the artist to explore expensive materials like metal. If I have to choose, I prefer his fine work with wire points and the slightly clunky movement of wood blocks. Perhaps I want my art to remain grounded in the local rather than taking on a global patina. I like to discover the local through the work of local artists, to feel a sense of place in the cultural processes whereby artists have both responded to and created the local.

Which brings me to Malta, Land of Sea. The exhibition is self-contained, introspective, focused on the small archipelago at the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. The objects are juxtaposed according to line and form rather than following the chronological patterns of a retrospective. This is not an exhibition about the history of colonisation although most of the artists represented are not locals. Rather, the placing of pieces encourages the viewer, the flaneur, to consider the local in shaping the lines and forms given life through creative endeavour over millennia.

With catalogue in hand, today I return to Malta to vote in National elections for the first time. I wish I could vote according to art rather than artifice.

Piss poor

Maneken Pis is small. The blue plastic copy outside the waffle shop is ten times larger. If, like me, you prefer to discover a place by wandering, you would miss it except for the crowds of tourists taking selfies. But, at the end of my first week in Brussels, I have seen the small boy pissing naked on a weekday and dressed in the football gear of a Spanish club on Saturday. Currently, work is proceeding on the facade behind and the tiny Maneken is backed by hessian sacking drapes yet he continues to piss in public with great confidence.

On Saturday, our free city centre tour guide (departs three times a day every day from the Grand Place) asked why the boy pisses and then proceeded to offer three mythical explanations. Two stories are heroic battle tales of Maneken saving Brussels from her enemies by (1) pissing from a tree into the eyes of the opposing warriors and (2) peeing on the lighted fuse of the dynamite intended to blow up the city. The third explanation is more Shakespearean. Ammonia in piss was highly valued and poor people in the city would send their children to this spot to pee for money. Hence the expression "piss poor".

The tour guide, an actor trying to pay the rent, probably made more from tips than Maneken Pis would see in a lifetime, probably more than all the beggars in Brussels would make together in a week.

And there are plenty of beggars in Brussels. Old and young Caucasian men beg from their sleeping quarters in doorways and under construction scaffolding. Women with white hair neater than mine sit on the floor in the Metro, begging cups held out as though offering tea. Women, and a few men, cradle children with one arm and hold out their other hand. One man has a dog. The man outside the Bourse, where I visited The World of Steve McCurry exhibition, looks like Bob Marley grown old.

I have already spent most of my allowance for six weeks on the rent of my flat, so I try not to notice the beggars. Yet the thrust of so many begging cups threatens to burst my bubble as I float through my first week as a citizen journalist. I am already overwhelmed with the clash of appearance and reality, of rhetoric and a good enough truth.

This has also been Pride week in Brussels. On Wednesday, we three citizen journalists attended a debate, Colors of the Rainbow, at BOZAR, centre for Fine Arts. I learned that Malta has been placed at the top of the EU league in terms of LGBTQ rights. In the rainbow bag (in Australia it would be called a show bag) we found a blow up beach ball with the slogan be Equal, be.Brussels. At  the reception afterwards, wine and canapés were consumed in bulk. On Saturday, the city was a crush of humanity for the parade. My internal map of Brussels grew as I tried to dodge the gridlock around dancing queens and deafening music. On Sunday, the pavements were covered in shattered glass and
in corners off the main thoroughfares, a smell of piss lingered as though Meneken had lost his aim.

Along with the beggars, two thoughts have been worrying at the back of my mind. The first is that the LGBTQ community, like the social justice movements of 1970s and 80s, has become dominated by men. The concern is less about creating a world where all people are respected and heard, regardless
of sexual orientation as one aspect of our humanity that makes us diverse. The focus appears to be about strengthening the rights of a particular group of men in relation to another dominant group of men. The parade was mostly about individual men strutting their stuff, drinking lots of beer and pissing in public.

The other thought brings me back to the beggars. Pride week in Brussels has been a costly celebration  of our diversity. The expense of police presence in securing the parade route and of cleaning squads to sort out the mess afterwards perhaps could provide hot meals and a bed for all the beggars in the
city. I know that this is too simplistic but I continue to grapple with the contradictions of my first week as a citizen journalist. In Europe, the Union has brought peace and prosperity for a growing number of people but the gap between the very rich and those who are living in abject poverty has to be addressed.

Finding place

I am in Brussels. I am not full of muscles. If you are not from the land down under, you may not find that funny.

Anyway, I am in Brussels as a citizen journalist with the Maltese Presidency of EU. If you are from the land down under or indeed anywhere else in the world, several aspects of the previous sentence need explaining. Hence this blog. I already have one blog at footloosewithjo.blogspot.com but when I tried to go in from Brussels, I could read but not write. My trusty little machine kept informing me that I didn't have a blog and would I like to start one. So here it is.

This job and this blog are experiments. In both cases, I don't know what I'm doing. Last year, I responded to the ad because I liked the idea, I wanted to find out more about Malta in relation to EU and I figured a few weeks in Brussels would be interesting. Once I got into the selection process just before Christmas, I became more excited because it seemed that I was tapping into a collaborative way of working that is still rare in Malta, at least in relation to an outsider who can't speak Maltese. The applicants were invited to go along to a series of Futuring workshops run by an organisation called TimesUp, a European arts company who have just completed their project with the Maltese presidency by presenting an exhibition at Solipsis in Rabat in Malta. Way back before Christmas and before citizen journalists, I had registered for TimesUp Floriana workshop. It looked like the strands of my interests in Malta were starting to weave into a picture.

So, I got the job along with nine others, mostly young and recently out of college. The beurocratic business of signing contracts proceeded and I was happy to see that I would be working with TimesUp on gathering material to go up on a beehive at the entrance to Dar Malta in Brussels. Ten citizen journalists met with the artistic director and worked out when we would go to Brussels in groups of three. Time passed. The first group set off. I learned incidentally that TimesUp were no longer involved even though they continued with their Malta project. I continued to meet them from time to time at cultural events. I heard nothing from anyone else. I had imagined that we would all have access to the beehive so that we could build a sense of a developing project and spark off other citizen journalists' input. The hive was not accessible. I got in touch with the two others who would be in Brussels at the same time as me. We supported each other in our ignorance.

I arrived here last Friday, late in the evening, having booked an apartment for a week with the intention of finding something cheaper when I was here. That story is told on my FB page. The week has been exhausting as I started to learn about a fascinating new city, a political union across an entire continent and a job that appears to be non-existent except as an appearance of an idea. The citizen journalists have conducted interviews and these have been uploaded carefully but there is nothing beyond the mirror. Like the Maltese construction industry, there is nothing behind the heritage facade.

Which brings me again to this blog. This is my attempt to bring meaning into seven weeks in Brussels. Tomorrow I move to another apartment, not much cheaper than this one but in a more pleasant area. My colleague citizen journalists are coming to help me move and we will trundle my luggage, including the books I have already succumbed to, across Brussels. At the weekend, I will write the story of my first week as a citizen journalist in Brussels.