Still Standing for Culture plans hundreds of interventions this weekend

This weekend, Cinema Nova will turn into a museum piece, while the Kanal Centre Pompidou will host a human zoo made up of out-of-work artists. Hundreds of such actions will be carried out across Belgium on Saturday, the UN’s World Day of Social Justice.

Museums, abbeys, cinemas, theatres and more culturally oriented spaces will host activities to remind us that their sector is one of the hardest-hit during the coronavirus crisis. There’s no take-away option when it comes to stage productions, and online events bring in a fraction of the usual income, if any.

Saturday’s events are collected on the website Still Standing for Culture, a temporary co-operative of cultural institutions that “want a lockdown not according to arbitrary measures that effect specific sectors but a shared effort across all of society”.

Cultural spring

The public is invited to check out some of the activities, like in Cinema Nova, which is re-opening on Saturday as a museum – since museums are allowed to be open. It will be a museum dedicated to the history of arthouse cinemas, which all went bust during the health crisis “in what feels like a century ago,” the cinema wrote on its Facebook page.

“We’re going to let people see what we did here in Cinema Nova before we had to close,” Guillaume and Anne, volunteers at the cinema, told Bruzz. “We hope to get the government’s attention and let them see that these measures are too severe for the culture sector.”

There will also be concerts in shop windows, on bicycles and in cars, as well as a choir without singers, a concert featuring plants and a musical ensemble of cows. “We want to take part in culture again and tell another story about the current crisis and the choices we make as a society,” said Still Standing for Culture in a statement. “Artists and other cultural workers are not waiting for the oft-mentioned ‘cultural spring’. We are staging it ourselves.”

Photo ©Paloma Cabeza/Still Standing for Culture