Juhu* Genk again! At the train station the guy from the info office asked me 3times if I not want to go to Ghent, but I told him no to Genk, I’ve already been there.
Today is the first day of my second trip to the city of Genk in the Flemish province of Limburg with a population of about 66.000 people. I am assisting the Italian artist Francesca Grilli with the artistic research for the EU-project Acupuncture in cooperation with C-Takt and In-Situ. I have to confess, it’s surprisingly exciting. We have the pleasure of having a plentitude of thrilling encounters and get to know manifold picture of this city, a wetland area where a hundred years ago lived about 1.000 people.
For the first 3-day visit in April we were diving into the exciting history of the city from the urban development, industrial and social perspective - the landscape painters settling down here inspired by the natural surrounding at the beginning of the 20th century, the history of the 3 coal mines which made people from all over Europe to migrate to Genk and then the huge Ford company employing up to 12.000 people in Genk producing around 2.000 cars per day … crazy place this town! The mines were closed in the late 1980ies and the last Ford was produced here in 2014 before transmitting the production to Spain. Hence, Genk is an innovative place investing into opportunities for the people also after social disasters like thousands of people suddenly loosing their jobs … so we also got to know Thorpark specialized in new technologies and education or C-Mine, an wonderful cultural center - both are former mines transformed into sites of the 21st century…
This time we are focussing more on the contemporary live in Genk getting to know the underground hip hop scene talking to 3rd generation Italian migrant rappers, visiting one of the big mosques, interviewing former Ford-workers and 1st generation Italian migrants …
Let’s see what comes out of this research - we gonna propose an art piece in public space - and I am already happy about the opportunity to get to know this city, its past and current plans for the future; quite inspiring for a woman grown up in an culturally poor industrial area on the Austrian countryside …
For the whole blog of the brusselsARTproject click here.