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Beffroi Mons2015©Icarus Projects |
Head on. We are men, parbleu, not slaves! Hopeless hunched over mobile’s display, having a lateral view’s skill reduced to an octogenarian mole’s and instinctive reflexes just equal to our index finger’s contraction, we still have a chance to get rid of our chains: running to Mons as soon as possible.
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Cie Carabosse: Installations de feu @Mons2015 |
"On January the 24th,
our dynamic Belgian city will officially open the celebrations as European Capital
of Culture 2015 - discloses Silvia Lenzi, director of the Office for
the Belgian tourism in Wallonia and Brussels in Italy - and on the streets more than 18
thousand mirror balls will be turn on, together with thousands of candles, as
well as countless fluorescent robots: the light of genius and creativity is indeed Mons’ year leitmotif.
More
than 5,000 artists and 400 organizations will organize 300 events at least and
each of them is ready to point the spotlight on the creative festival Mons
Superstar or the equally experimental fab-lab Café Europa. However, Hainaut’s
capital overflows to the point of genius and culture that just even one of its
treasures can remind Europeans who they really are".
official program
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Le mythe de la Tête d'Or @ Mons2015 |
It should just looking up
there, where the park Château Comtal climbs and a huge "coffee pot"
serves hot truths, but very easy to go up in smoke. Because the ungenerous name
for the civic tower of Mons, saddled on Victor Hugo’s ironic instigation,
perhaps reveals the shape, but it doesn’t capture the essence at all.
The "énorme cafetiere
flanquée au-dessous du ventre de quatre théières moins grosses" is, and first
of all remains, a cornerstone of our civic consciousness. In a word, a belfry: an
extraordinary stairway to heaven that, in the eyes of the ancient Walloon and
Flemish cartographers, testifies to "the spread of katascopos’ exercise:
the view from above, exerted on the globe, that leads to a relativism of values
and of human achievements, but also to the adoption of an intellectual
perspective, a spiritual gaze that reveals the beauty and order of the world
beyond the glitter of appearances and limits of human knowledge".
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Beffroi - Vue Aerienne @ DR |
This is definitely one of
the reasons that, in 1999, prompted UNESCO to include 32 civic towers of Wallonie and Flanders in the list of World Heritage, then replenished in 2005
by other 23 examples soaring in northern France. The whole area between Amiens
and Middelburg, in Netherlands’ Zealand, preserves almost intact the proud
bastions of modern democracy, slowly awaken in medieval Europe of Commons but,
from that moment on, able to withstand the absolutist pretensions of churches,
kings or emperors. And, hopefully, also of those European governments that now
try to charge us with annoying labels or, worse yet, to attribute to others
their appalling faults. Among the most emblematic
examples, it could not miss the belfry of Mons: the only Baroque one in the
whole Belgian territory. Capped by an unusual paunchy roof - pompous attempt to
patch the collapse of the venerable structure bearing the civic clock – Mons’ tower
is indeed the soul and the pivot of the city. Counting 365 steps, which run within
a structure composed by the incredible number of 459mila Bray’s sandstone and
blue stone bricks, it’s been the point of reference for anyone who wants to get
around the city since 1278: from its 87 meters it peeps any suspicious movement
and, if anyone lingered on fragrant Ratons de Car d’Or or vanilla-scented Macarons,
would soon scrubbed from the silvery emphasis of 49 bells mounted inside.
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Collégiale Ste-Waudru - Vue aérienne @ Ville de Mons |
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Collégiale Ste-Waudru @ C. Carpentier |
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Du broeucq Collégiale Ste-Waudru © visitMons / Gregory Mathelot |
In defiance of the local
saying "C'est comme la Tour Saint-Waudru, on n'en will jamais le
bout", the works for the construction of the new tower museum are now in
the pipeline and, despite not having reached 190 meters yet (as they aimed at
the time of Mons’ patron), however, have given rise to the next big thing.
"Belfry’s reopening returns to the city not only a space for deepening and enhancing their own story - explains Amalia Brancart, communications manager for the Belgian Office of Tourism Wallonia - Brussels in Italy, as well as author of a study on the revitalization of the belfry tour - but sheds light on why the civic towers of Belgium, like those of France and the Netherlands, are now so fundamental for our rights. Standing out from the beginning by lords’ or army’s bastions, but especially introducing a city life’s scan apart from church’s one, the belfry reminds each of us that we are born, we live and we will always be a community of equals".
"Belfry’s reopening returns to the city not only a space for deepening and enhancing their own story - explains Amalia Brancart, communications manager for the Belgian Office of Tourism Wallonia - Brussels in Italy, as well as author of a study on the revitalization of the belfry tour - but sheds light on why the civic towers of Belgium, like those of France and the Netherlands, are now so fundamental for our rights. Standing out from the beginning by lords’ or army’s bastions, but especially introducing a city life’s scan apart from church’s one, the belfry reminds each of us that we are born, we live and we will always be a community of equals".
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Carlo V |
From the shop boy to the
upright judge in the court, each one finds its raison d'être within the four
walls that invariably overlook every free community and whose interior spaces,
today, finally begin to be visited.
Right there, year by year, have been housed the keys of the city, the treasures of the city, the cells for the criminals, halls for supreme meetings, chimes able of taming folklore’s monsters, but for the Europe that keeps on pushing the boundaries and, instead of its citizens’ good, often puts petty economic interests ahead, those stone giants have come to represent, paradoxically, the stubborn "provincialism" of the Other: whatever visitor passed by, Charles V ’s troops, Louis XIV’s or Reich’s Army, the belfry has always awakened an appetite for easy loot.
Yet, if their doors had been left open and the flights of stairs ran up to the top, well other reward would hand them out: like every free city, from there, discovers to be a confused development of two perpendicular axes crossing exactly where the belfry is, so the world of Christians, Muslims, Jacobins or octogenarians moles, appears what it really is.
Right there, year by year, have been housed the keys of the city, the treasures of the city, the cells for the criminals, halls for supreme meetings, chimes able of taming folklore’s monsters, but for the Europe that keeps on pushing the boundaries and, instead of its citizens’ good, often puts petty economic interests ahead, those stone giants have come to represent, paradoxically, the stubborn "provincialism" of the Other: whatever visitor passed by, Charles V ’s troops, Louis XIV’s or Reich’s Army, the belfry has always awakened an appetite for easy loot.
Yet, if their doors had been left open and the flights of stairs ran up to the top, well other reward would hand them out: like every free city, from there, discovers to be a confused development of two perpendicular axes crossing exactly where the belfry is, so the world of Christians, Muslims, Jacobins or octogenarians moles, appears what it really is.
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Oronce Fine (1494-1555) Map of the world, 1534-36 |
Per sfuggire alle
ritorsioni politiche o religiose, nel Rinascimento venne infatti escogitata una
tecnica di rappresentazione del globo il cui valore, oggi, pare più attuale che
mai: come suggerirono magistralmente il cartografo francese Oronce Finé nel
1531 e poco dopo il collega fiammingo Mercator, utilizzare la proiezione
azimutale permetteva di mostrare la terra senza prospettive che privilegiassero
un regno, piuttosto che un impero; eppure la loro scelta non risultò così
innocente come pretendeva d’essere.
To avoid political or religious reprisals, Renaissance’s genius devised a technique of globe representation whose value, today, seems more relevant than ever: as masterfully suggested by the French cartographer Oronce Finé in 1531 and, shortly after, by his Flemish fellow Mercator, using an azimuthal projection allowed to show the Earth without privileging a kingdom’s perspective, rather than an empire’s one; yet their choice did not turn out as innocent as claimed to be. It concealed the secret of a philosophy that the authority, of any kind it is, has never been stopping to look at with suspicion: to lift our eyes, to open a point of view, starting from a top polar point, ended up transforming the terrestrial globe into a curious "heart-shaped" projection. Metaphor, for Luther’s followers, evoking the idea of an inner emotional life as principle by which to shape the physical world.
To avoid political or religious reprisals, Renaissance’s genius devised a technique of globe representation whose value, today, seems more relevant than ever: as masterfully suggested by the French cartographer Oronce Finé in 1531 and, shortly after, by his Flemish fellow Mercator, using an azimuthal projection allowed to show the Earth without privileging a kingdom’s perspective, rather than an empire’s one; yet their choice did not turn out as innocent as claimed to be. It concealed the secret of a philosophy that the authority, of any kind it is, has never been stopping to look at with suspicion: to lift our eyes, to open a point of view, starting from a top polar point, ended up transforming the terrestrial globe into a curious "heart-shaped" projection. Metaphor, for Luther’s followers, evoking the idea of an inner emotional life as principle by which to shape the physical world.
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Reflections @ sayforward - She |
No coincidence that the poet John Donne in his
"The Good-Morrow", tried to show how the deepest knowledge of the
world rises just from a game of glances between two lovers:
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Reflections @ Caspani - He |
The attempt to transform
the Catholic symbolism of the heart in a doctrinaire principle closer to the Stoic
sensitivity than to the Christian one, urging the man to roam the world through
his own eyes, was destined to be a dangerous act of insubordination to
authority; because a world heart-shaped, which asks us to be looked at as we
look at our own heart, so is an act of devotion, but also a form of inner
withdrawal out of control, a bold step towards self-consciousness and
awareness. And if mortals may try to interpret their hearts, it must be very
clear that only God - or whoever it takes its place - is
"kardiognostes" (knower of the heart): able to see the heart without
any help. Almost like a huge webcam embedded in the sky. Looking up at the tip
of the belfry, as well as rising on its summit, proved, and still proves, an unbelievable
revolutionary act; yesterday an intolerable sin of hubris, replacing man to God
in contemplation; today a disturbing act of liberation from a perspective
within which the other constantly tries to limit ourselves.
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Lumeçon |
As the Grand Place is transformed into a true battlefield and, simultaneously, a stage for St. Waltrude relics’ exposition, belfry’s area remains the heart of the city. Also because the last is just 200 meters far from the first: it’s from the Gothic collegiate dedicated to the saint - one of the best examples of Gothic Brabant style standing out beside the tower - which starts the procession of the Car d’Or, a golden carriage otherwise placed between the soaring nave of the church. And it’s still the belfry to mark, through its flawless bells, the various stages of the ceremony, when the daring thrust of the carriage along the flight of Saint-Waudru (Waltrude’s husband ready to punish his fellow citizens with a year of bad luck, if his ancient companion’s remains do not come to him in one tug), is followed by the assault on Dragon tail’s hairs as mascot.
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Saint George & Lumeçon |
Nothing escapes the eye of
the tower, so sharp and penetrating that it had made the first settlement city
for the Belgian Freemasonry, whose panoptic triangle has been carved since 1721
in the Lodge of Perfect Union and at the number 3 of Leopold the First’s street
boasts its modern headquarter of emancipation. Not surprisingly, in Mons,
taught Marie Popelin, companion of the first feminist capable of challenging
the Catholic Church in Belgium and impart secular education to the fair sex:
the Italo-Belgian Isabelle Gatti de Gamond. Neither wonder if, just a monsoise
girl of Italian descent - Marny Di Pietrantonio – today has been appointed by Abbateggio's
mayor (Abruzzo region) to coordinate the representatives of the wide Italian community
through the project “Emigrants”. An ethnic component particularly vital and
politically very busy, as evidence Mons mayor’s career, as well as Wallonia’s
president, Elio di Rupo.
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Grand Place - Réussir en Wallonie @ Severin Marie |
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Van Gogh et son double © Warner |
And it is certainly
the tip of the belfry that Van Gogh looked at, when between 1879 and 1880 he
served as evangelical pastor in the nearby Borinage, while he was saving intoxicated
miners’ lives: the same suffering faces and bodies that are alive in his well-kept
drawings at the maison cuesmoise today, but some English soldier swears he recognized
among the ghosts coming to aid His Majesty’s army during the bloody battle of
Mons, in the First World War. Vincent knows it: those dim lights, into the deep
blue of the loneliness, were but a grateful sigh to wonderfully starry starry
nights.
http://www.belgium-tourism.net/contenus/mons-2015-european-capital-of-culture/en/4156.html
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Amalia Brancart & Silvia Lenzi |
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