THE FREE SCHOOL - KunstenFestivalDesArts 2023
The school of integration/Lexicon
The school of integration/Lexicon
Brussels is home to 180 nationalities, with 108 languages spoken, and learning the city’s official languages – French and Dutch – is seen as a crucial parameter of successful integration. In recent months, Tania Bruguera built classes in collaboration with citizens whose mother tongue is one of the city’s many ‘unofficial’ languages: Arabic, Ukrainian, Lingala, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese and Polari. These languages link to communities with very different histories of presence and arrival in Brussels, which illustrates the heterogeneity of migration and the cultural richness created by all who have made this city their home. Each course conveys one language in a specific and very personal way: through practice or by reflecting on political concepts and how they are expressed. The School sees integration as more than an inscription in the dominant language(s); it is a horizontal process that can build bridges of cultural understanding. Each course consists of three lessons (once a week) and takes place at the Festival Centre, transforming it into a new polyphonic language school for the entire month.
The Portuguese community in Belgium has evolved over decades, from mine workers fleeing the dictatorship in the 1970s, to the wide diversity we find today. Marcos Simoes is a Brussels-based theatre-maker of Portuguese origin who is also a skilled carpet weaver. His course conveys Portuguese through a collective practice of carpet weaving. In combining the two, Simoes' course reflects on the concept of (social) fabric in the discourse on integration.