23 Quai du Commerce … Brussels Street Art

In 2022, Sight and Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, named the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by director Chantal Akerman as the greatest film of all time. Sight and Sound publish their ranking once a decade, and in 2022 Akerman became the first female director to win the accolade. It displaced Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo which had taken top spot in 2012. Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane took bronze in third place.

Jeanne Dielman stars Delphine Seyrig and has become a cult classic over the almost 50 years since it hit cinema screens. It covers in minute detail three days in the life of a Brussels housewife, Jeanne Dielman, a widow caring for her 16-year-old son in a small apartment. In the absence of a husband or a job, Jeanne provides for herself and her son by entertaining a single, but different ‘gentleman caller’ each day.

Filmed on location in Brussels, the Quai du Commerce is just a short distance from our apartment and we walk past number 23 regularly. There’s nothing on the exterior of the building to indicate its association with the film. We would have remained ignorant of it but for the sudden appearance last December of a large mural on the side of a nearby building. It depicts a scene of Jeanne eating at her kitchen table in her housecoat.

It is a striking image in an otherwise drab street. The sudden flash of colour an homage to a film considered to be a feminist masterpiece, that transcends the claustrophobic domesticity and restrictive gender roles of 1950s Belgium that it portrays, to share some universal truths. It’s the work of the truly superb Spanish artist, Alba Fabre Sacristán, and commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Brussels’ Parcours Street Art project.

Parcours Street Art is responsible for many of the most impressive murals adorning the walls of buildings across Brussels. Several of them are found in this same area, but they are otherwise scattered across the city. As we have explored Brussels over the last year, I’ve slowly been ‘collecting’  murals and smaller street art pieces in far-flung areas. Like Brussels itself, it’s an eclectic mix.

Some of my favourites include the majestic Ecosystem Restoration by another Spanish artist, Lula Goce. Found on an apartment building, it towers over the upmarket area along Avenue Louise, and was commissioned as part of the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. Another female artist, Fitore Alísdóttir Berisha from Kosovo, is responsible for Haunted close to Gare du Midi.

It would be fair to say that Brussels has gone out of its way to promote female street artists. In the Laeken area, French artist Anthea Missy has created Women bike the city. It draws inspiration from the fact that in Brussels only one in three cyclists are women (it’s a terrible city for cycling), and from the pioneering women’s suffrage campaigner, Susan B. Anthony, who said, “The bicycle did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

Close to our apartment is another piece addressing the climate crisis and the failure of older generations to do anything about it. Belgium’s Freskolab Collective illustrate the destructive force of the Anthropocene era with the brightly painted Green City on a housing block in Yser. It also celebrates the role young people play at the forefront of the climate movement, and just appeared one day on a street I regularly walk down.

It’s not always easy to track down street art in Brussels, like much else, the city makes you work for it. Things are getting better though, and some actually useful websites have started to appear, including one promoting a new street art trail into the work of Belgian artist, René Magritte, that has appeared in the city centre.