In 2015, the Viewfinders club organised an exhibition at the “Halles Saint-Géry” / “Sint Gorikshallen” in down-town Brussels. As kind of “chief organiser” I came up with the theme – “Brussels – A Love Story”: an opportunity to show that our members – Belgians, ex-pats and immigrants alike – know something more than the average about this city we call our home.
March to April 2016, we re-ran this exhibition, with some additional images, at the “Gasthuisberg” hospital in near-by Leuven. Gasthuisberg is huge – we hear numbers of between 10.000 and 20.000 people there – making it bigger than some towns in the area! Our display there – some 58 photographs printed using the beautiful “Chromaluxe” process – seems to have been well appreciated! One of my pictures – below – was donated to the hospital when we took down the exhibition at the end of April.
I called this picture “Villo Nouveau”. It was taken while on a bike ride around Brussels using one of the rent-able city-bikes – the one in the picture. It’s parked outside the “Hotel Solvay” on the Avenue Louise / Louizalaan, which is not only a UNESCO World Heritage monument, it’s also a wonderful example of art-nouveau architecture – like the stylised iris flower that is the emblem of Brussels.
Little did we know when we designed this exhibition that our beautiful city would soon be in such need of a great deal of total loving care… I hope our exhibition – a love story in quite a pure sense – can help in some way.
Though the physical exhibition is now finished, you can still see the images on the “virtual exhibition” web-site at http://www.dafos.be/HSG2015-LEUVEN2016/index.html .
