Monday, April 13, 2009

Beaufort 03

Easter Monday today... businesses closed everywhere as it's a bank holiday in our wonderfully Catholic Belgium. Weather was supposed to be sunny for a change... and it kinda was, in continental Belgium. Not at the coastline though. Without checking the weather bulletin we decided to go visit a few works of contemporary artists as part of an open air expo, called Beaufort 03, the third of its kind ever, along the entire Belgian coastline, from Knokke to De Panne. This is 60 km long, in case you were wondering. Of course the entire day proved as gray and misty and chilly as it could be, and this up to a few km away from the coastline. It was so foggy that we haven't even been able to see the North Sea! I could hear waves breaking somewhere out there (was low tide you see) but saw no water. We drove to the sea and saw none of it! Only in Belgium! Never mind...

So, we first drove to De Haan, where, entirely unexpectedly, we found out that Albert (Einstein) himself spent some vacationing long ago and even walked at the 'zeedijk'. There were even pictures of him posing to a photographer along the pedestrians walkway at the zeedijk! Anyways, de Haan had a couple interesting works. One belonged to the Belgian artist Daniel Buren, named Le vent souffle ou il veut and one of the Chilean artist Brigada Ramona Parra named Saqueando nuestra historia, whatever this may mean... something with Chilean history, I reckon. The third work we visited was in Westende, created by Aeneas Wilder from Scotland.

There's not much to say about... watch the slide-show and judge for yourselves... Worth the visit if you happen to be around. Pity for the lousy Belgian foggy weather though. It felt like early winter, and it's mid spring, for cryin' out loud.

1 comment:

Nikolaos Antoniou said...

3 out of how many is not a bad score Vassily. And the reason you did not see the Sea is very simple: the sea did not exist yesterday, the mist was artificial and Beaufort was actually 0. But still, as always, you seem to have had lots of fun :-)