Bas

26 years old, The Netherlands

Dog lover, beer drinker, book enthusiast

Huge Bruce Springsteen fan (favorite album: Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.)

Working together with different persons, who have different backgrounds and interests, will always be a challenge. Sometimes our meetings were difficult, our ideas different, our encounters tense. Mostly, however, they were productive, vibrant, insightful, spontaneous and at times even blatantly funny.

I thank you all, Cindy, Janine, Jen, Karen, Sebastian, and Trevor, for the fantastic atmosphere that has been surrounding this research project for the last several months. I thank Rowena for her support, and her advice in the crucial periods when it was most needed. I thank Holi, who unfortunately had to leave us early, for introducing us to Globe Aroma, and for her dedicated passion for the research seminar until the last day.

At the end of the line, we grew into the process, as a team. As we learned more about dissent and creativity, we learned more about ourselves along the way. As the deadline grew closer, we grew closer together as a group.

It was all totally worth it.

See below my personal reflections on the different visits to Globe Aroma:

Globe Aroma, Brussels, 18-12-2017, 14:00-16:00

Our first contact with Globe Aroma happened on the 18th of December, 2017. I remember being somewhat nervous and excited to be going there, as I did not know what to expect and what the opportunities would be for us to cooperate with them. It was a quiet day at the office for Globe Aroma, two or three persons were present in the building and we were greeted by Brecht, one of the employees of Globe Aroma. We had a productive and fruitful meeting and there were signs of common understanding from both parties. Brecht showed us around the building, into the workshops and the repetition rooms. Already this whole diverse pallet of artistic opportunities became apparent to me, making music, painting, writing poems, making sculptures or just drinking coffee and be social with one another. The fact that Globe Aroma had as a goal, as Brecht explained, to include professional artists to give workshops, and to be a low key artistic and hangout place for migrants and inhabitants of the neighborhood, was for me also a confirmation of that we could do some interesting research here around the topics of space, inclusion and migration in Brussels.

Alkenkaai, Brussels, 17-2-2018, 13:00-16:00

On Saturday the 20^th of February, we went to Brussels to join the Globe Aroma artists and other shocked and concerned citizens after the police raids on the 9^th of February. It was an encounter between a sizeable amount of people, rejecting police violence, illegal raids and increasing polarization. I felt encouraged to join my voice with all of the others and felt an emotional tingling going through my body as an excerpt of the diary of one of the persons still being arrested was being read out on the podium. As well, I knew I was there to keep my senses open for our seminar research. In the back of my mind, trampled by the spirit of the rally, were the theories and plans, so carefully formed and constructed in the seminar meetings of November and December 2017. I kept in the back of my mind that an anthropological theory of art and creativity looks at the social relations that encompass a piece of art, the networks, processes, objects and spatial components that together merge into the creation of the specific art object by a given artist. Then I remembered a part of a lecture given by the Nigerian writer Ben Okri (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFjKztov GQ&t=4s), that we watched during the last seminar meeting, where he stated that the intrinsic value of art is that it becomes meaningful when we see it as a process of creation or imagination, that is, when it appears in excess of function. The concrete objective of the protest rally seemed obvious, to voice out against increasing police aggression towards safe havens for migrants in the capital city of Belgium. The means to make it meaningful though were a variety of creative practices, whether through music, reading a diary, citing excerpts of novels, or exposing paintings. In sum, and I realized this afterwards, this protest, although it was to chaotic, crowded and politically laden to carry out decent observations or interviews and we had to stick with small talks, made me realize that we had to go back to Globe Aroma to talk with artists, and ask stories where creativity plays the main part, to understand how the lived experiences of these migrants, through Globe Aroma as a safe space in the wider context of increasing insecurity, result in an expression of creativity that is able to give meaning and make sense of these bigger processes, of which the protest at the Alkenkaai was an important expression.

Globe Aroma, Brussels, 6-3-2018, 16:00-19:00

Today we went to Globe Aroma to conduct some interviews. When we came in at around 4 o’clock it felt a little uncomfortable to open the conversation with the people in the building. The first interview we conducted was with an artist from Togo, I decided to take the slow and personal approach, in order not to make the interview too informal. I co-conducted the interview with Travor, who obviously had a different, more formal and academic approach towards the interview. During the interview I had to make sure that I did not follow his lead to be getting too academic, as I saw a growing misunderstanding and uncomfortability on our interviewee’s face. This was mainly due to the language barrier (as French was his first language), so I decided to ask general questions about his life in Brussels, his creative practices and what Globe Aroma meant to him. It soon appeared to be the case that he used dancing, singing and painting as a way of personally expressing the things he experienced in Brussel, the hypocrisy of the police, as he was one of the migrants arrested at the Globe Aroma raid. I was taking the long approach, trying to hear from his own perspective what he found interesting and what he didn’t want to convey. After the interview I asked him to show me around to some of his artworks and I got a better sense of what he wanted to show with his artwork. In general today, I had the feeling that without the barriers of the recordings, I was able to have more genuine conversations with the people coming to Globe Aroma. In the case of the artist from Togo, it became very clear that the art he made was not only applicable to the context of Brussels, but also relates to the political situation in Togo, so it made me think about the transnational aspect of research, which is something that we did not go deeply into during the seminar meetings. After this, I had some semi-informal conversations with a musician and cook from Algeria, a painter from Mauritania and a visitor from Brussels, but the language barrier made the contact somewhat difficult. I say somewhat, because in some instances, the language barriers made the conversations also more genuine, trying to get to the essence of what people wanted to converse with me about, the themes that came back in their artworks and so on. I talked off the record with an employee and an intern of Globe Aroma in Dutch, and I conversed with an engineer from Burundi in English. In general, reflecting upon myself, I realized that it felt better to let them speak, than to ask too many questions, as I got the impression that they felt easily cornered. The themes of globe aroma as a family, a space for social activity and the political context of Brussels were things that eventually, sooner or later, always came to the fore.

Globe Aroma, Brussels, 16-3-2018, 13.30-14.30

In this last more formal meeting with the organization of Globe Aroma, we presented our T.R.E.E. plan to Brecht and Els, two of the staff members of Globe Aroma. We explained them our main analytical ideas about Globe Aroma as a space for togetherness, in the aftermath of the police raids. We explained to them that we thought that the connections of Globe Aroma were reflected in two ways, outwards towards other organizations and inwards towards individuals among each other. In this sense, to strengthen the resilience and visibility of Globe Aroma, we introduced our concept of the digital tree, in which all the visitors of Globe Aroma are able to contribute to the growing network of Globe Aroma, making this open and visible for everyone to see. They were quite happy with our idea, and they told us that they also had brainstorms in which ideas like this came up, and that they definitely thought the idea is worthwhile. At the same time, they threw up that for the organization every penny counts and that they did not have, at the moment, the finances to be initiating such an initiative. The positive remarks we got from them, however, made me feel that we were constructing in a positive way to the organization, and that, in the small amount of time that we have been going there, we were somehow able to catch the essence of the organization, as well from the perspective of the artists as the organization itself. Looking back on this now, and also looking forward, I realize that many questions still remain unanswered, and thematic fields left unspoken, and we should dedicate one part of our site to the further recommendations or fields of interest with regards to Globe Aroma, transnationalism, migration and the cultural sector in Brussels.