Walking around the St. Catherine’s area – a nightlife hotspot of bars and restaurants in central Brussels near to where I live – images of women on the walls staring at passersby on the street have been catching my eye for a few weeks. These curious works are by La Dame Quicolle, the Woman Who Sticks. A Parisian artist now living in Lille just a short distance from Brussels, her real life characters are known as ‘Les gardiennes de la rue’.
These are all real women who the artist has met and who have told their stories to her – they are often survivors of violence, sexual assault or harassment, often in public spaces. Her work is an indictment of how public space is so often dangerous for women. Placed amongst us on busy streets, we pedestrians bear witness to a unspoken reality, giving visibility to stories that remain untold or marginalised.
The street guardians, as as they are called, are motionless, observing the scene, dressed to attract little attention. These are the clothes the women themselves chose for their ‘portraits’, choices that are as revealing as their stories. Both things seem to make some people uncomfortable, or angry, and some of the artworks end up being decapitated or having their eyes gouged out.
They undoubtedly have an impact as you walk past, more so when you know they are real people with troubling stories to tell. It is a strand of feminist and protest street art that seems to thrive in Brussels. Elsewhere, in a city that has all too many reminders of Belgium’s terrible history in Congo, I came across a defaced poster of Tintin holding a hand chopped off a prominent statue of Leopold II, the Butcher of the Congo.
The bloodied severed hand is symbolic of the punishment meted out to Congolese men, women and children by colonial authorities. The statue itself is found behind the royal palace much of which was paid for with the wealth extracted from Congo by Leopold II. There’s a degree of irony in Tintin being the ‘hero’ of this tale. Tintin in the Congo can only be read as parroting the propaganda of Belgium’s genocidal colonial enterprise.
Another piece outside the Gare du Midi had a pointed Xmas message – it must have been there for a bit – overlaid on an photo of the destruction of Gaza. Slightly lighter, and more in keeping with the surrealist heritage of the city, are a series of small sticker art pieces by another Parisian, Antoine Caramalli, and images of garbagemen by Belgian artist, Jaune. Both find their way into unlikely spots around the city.
It’s interesting how often you stumble across these amusing delights in St. Catherine’s, which is becoming a hub of street art. Elsewhere, there are larger murals telling forgotten stories such as that of Belgian adventurer, Hélène Dutrieu (1877-1961), a pioneering female cyclist, motorcyclist, racing car driver and aviator; as well as scenes from Belgian comic books.
A piece of stencil art in Saint Gilles unearthed another, more contemporary life, that of Ivana Hoffmann – a 19 year old German woman who travelled to Syria to fight alongside Kurdish forces against ISIS during the Syrian Civil War. In Germany, she had joined the Turkish Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), and fought out of conviction. She was the first non-Syrian female combatant to die in the war.
In the Marolles district, there’s a giant piece on another bleak subject – child abuse – on the side of an apartment block by French artist, Amandine Lesay. Around the corner from which is a piece called Diversity: the union as more than the sum of its parts, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the legalisation of same sex marriage in Belgium.
In a city where street art is political and memorialises the forgotten, it was nice to find a positive story (although, weirdly, it looks a bit like Michael Jackson).
These are fabulous.