Brussels in English

Instead of spending the summer on holiday at the beach or mountains, Sébastien de Fooz went for a walk. Embarking from his home in Etterbeek, 45 year old de Fooz walked the streets of Brussels for a month, equipped with just a backpack. Sleeping under the stars, in churches or parks, de Fooz wandered the city to meet new people and experience Brussels from a different perspective.

For the 20th anniversary of the Grand' Place's inclusion on Unesco's World Heritage List, the Comision Gestora Internacional de Alfombristas de Arte Efimero invited flower carpet makers from Belgium, Catalonia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Malta, Mexico and Spain to create flower carpets portraying Unesco sights in their homelands. We speak with artists from the different countries as they create their...

Brussels Design September 2018 is more than 100 cultural and commercial design events across the city. There will be exhibitions, conferences, an Arts & Crafts itinerary, the Commerce Design Awards and the Brussels Design Market (BDM) - in all, many, many places for interaction between designers, architects and the public in stores and pop-up stores, galleries and cultural spaces. We hear from...

Folkloric giants, made of papier maché, cloth and wicker come to life in a magical way when they dance in the streets during folkloric festivals and parades. They are part of the folklore of 75 countries but in no country does the importance of giants come close to the place they have in Belgium. Jean-Paul Heerbrant of the Albert Marinus Center tells us what he thinks is the reason for the prolife...

This August the biennial flower carpet on the Grand- Place will be back, 1,800m² filled with over half a million flowers, mostly begonias. The country of honour this year is Mexico. We hear from Richard Poncin, the CEO of Tapis de Fleurs de Bruxelles, from  the carpet’s designer, Ana Rosa Aguilar Aguado and from Sylvia Reyes, cultural attaché at the Mexican Embassy. Translator: Elena Curzio Vila ...

Located underneath the famous Atomium, Couleur Cafe features reggae, hip-hop, world music and more. This year, Leon Bridges and Young Thug are on the lineup as well as returners Selah Sue, Milky Chance and Ziggy Marley. With a “Secret Bar” hidden away, a “Namasté Zone” to relax, and over 40 food stalls from around the world, Couleur Cafe is an international music festival right in the heart of Bru...

The story of a Brussels resident planting flowers in potholes has inspired a citizen-led campaign to do the same in five Indian cities. Staff at Radio City in New Delhi invited listeners to get involved after stumbling upon The Bulletin's story about Anton Schuurmans' one-man protest against poor road conditions in the Belgian capital. Radio City producer Ankur Shrivastava explains more.

Over the last few years, the name Dierendonck has become synonymous with the best Belgian butchering. Restaurants such as Vincent, Mauru, La Paix, In de Wulf, The Jane and Pistolet Original proudly let their customers know that they use mostly or only Dierendonck products, and at the new Brussels store on the rue Sainte-Catherine, more often than not, there’s a queue spilling out into the street....

The first edition of the Brussels International Film Festival opens with a Belgian exclusive, a screening of Terry Gilliam’s long awaited movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. There will be a national, a European and an international competition of the latest in great movies, the best of the new, and retrospectives and cult movies, the best of the classics. The guest of honour is film icon Claudia...

On Saturday 26 May from 11.00 to 19.00, at the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, bring your leather shoes because the best shoe shiners from all over Europe will compete in the first European Shoe Shine Contest. It’s the brain child of Marcello Faraggi, president of the European Shoe Shine Association (ESSA). Marcello tells us what's in it for us.

Brussels is now home to the largest (4,000m²) aquaponics farm in the world. Located on the roof of the Foodmet, the latest food hall to be built at the Anderlecht Abattoir and part of the new master plan for the site.  Specialising in the circular economy, Architect Steven Beckers is the founder of Building Integrated Greenhouses (BIGH) which has built this farm. He tells us about the project in w...

Korean music group Ssing Ssing performed recently in Brussels. They combine an extravagant visual style and stage manners with rock band music coupled with traditional Korean folk vocals as well as elements of pop music, ballads and shamanistic rituals. They spoke with us as they were preparing for their live show at Halles Saint-Géry. http://sori.nyc/ssingssing/

Belgium has always been a place for different cultures and languages to come together. Throughout its history, though, there has always been one thing that helps it all makes sense – its comic strips. We meet William De Graeve said, one of the directors at the Comic Strip Museum.

David Nollet is a recently self-published photographer who came to Brussels in the 1990s. He said that the loss of interaction between neighboyrs in his small town seemed to hurt his soul. It was healed when he came to Brussels. Nollet found this healing in the people on the streets. He said people in Brussels are different - when they are photographed on the streets they don’t look defensive, the...

Following on from Saturday's successful bread festival, the Schuman roundabout association have some extra events planned for the roundabout this coming week.  This includes a chess party on Monday, games of tennis on Tuesday and an open global cafe on the roundabout on Wednesday. We hear from Marion Wolfers, president of the Rond Point Schuman association and Jacob Gloser, CEO and founder of Go T...

Created for Brussels European Capital of Culture in 2000, the Zinneke Parade has become a mainstay of the city's cultural landscape. Every two years two dozen Zinnodes (think of the Krewes of New Orleans' Mardi Gras) rally around a theme (after such themes as Water, Disorder, Temptation, and Fragility, this year's theme is Illegal) and create an unforgettable, entrancing, striking and magical spec...

Perspective Brussels, the Brussels region planning agency and Visit Brussels have just launched Spots. Brussels . This is an online guide to the over one thousand cultural venues in the region , the theatres, cinemas, youth centers, cultural centers, museums and artists’ residences.  Rien van de Wall of Perspective Brussels tells us all about it.  http://spots.brussels

Next Saturday (5 May) sees the return of the now annual bread festival, La Fête Du Pain at the Schuman roundabout, right in the heart of Brussels' EU Quarter. It is being held on the same afternoon as the EU Institutions Open day and this year is going to the biggest one yet, with bakers participating from countries such as Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Iran, and Morocco as well as local participants...

A campaign group is lobbying for the 310,000 non-Belgians living in Brussels to be given the right to vote at regional level, and rectify what they’re calling the “biggest democratic deficit in the EU”. The non-partisan 1Bru1Vote movement has attracted more than 3,500 signatures in an online petition. Nora Bednarski explains more.

Racso Jugarap moved from his native Philippines to Germany in 2009 to work as a chef. He relocated for work a few times and wound up in Brussels about three years ago. And then he started creating wholly unique works of art. Though he had no formal education in the arts, he did have persistence. Targeting more than 200 galleries in Brussels, he finally got a few of them to sit up and take notice....

The Brussels Short Film Festival (BSFF) is back in its 21st edition from 25 April to 6 May, recently having been honoured by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival for Academy Awards nominations. Claudia Cortés Espejo, William Henne, Laura Vandenwynckel, Boris Kuijpens, Rocío Álvarez, and Mathieu Mortelmans all have films that qualified for the national competitio...

On 12 May, people will gather in Parc du Cinquantenaire at 4.00 in the morning and run or walk through the darkness of early morning into the light of dawn to raise money and awareness for suicide prevention. The first Darkness into Light fundraising walk was held in Ireland 10 years ago and since then it has grown to 180 venues around the world. We hear from some of the people involved in the Bru...

The EU might have 28 countries and 24 official languages, but that doesn't stop this Brussels-based choir from making harmonious music together. The European Union Choir has been reflecting the union's diversity since the enactment of the Treaty of Rome, making this 60th year a special time to celebrate through music.

Brussels is blessed with a very rich circus arts culture thanks to a combination of private, public, performing and educational efforts. This year these varied expressions of circus arts are all gathered under an umbrella called Focus Circus which will last until March 2019. Virginie Jovray, head of the Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque (ESAC) and Majo de Càzares, from Guadalajara, Mexico, a gra...

In the last of our series on expat photographers, we meet Nicolas Witczak - for whom photography became his gateway into the world. After reading books and learning techniques through videos, Witczak's self-taught skills are seen through powerful and vibrant photos. To help him overcome his shyness and keep him motivated as a photographer, he has began posting one photo a day on his Instagram acco...