Category: History

Posted on

Pictures at an exhibition

The playlist on Spotify, which accompanies the exhibition “Unforgettable” in Ghent, is an interesting extension of the unforgettable artists into today and tomorrow. You may be inclined to share your opinion in the way Maria Iskariot does it in “Dat find ik lekker” or more like Sophie Straat in “Dansen met de dood”. Anyway, women artists are coming front stage and this is great news despite all the backlashes we, unfortunately, witness in the 2020s. The curator of the playlist Murielle Scherre has managed to take us, a bit like the exuberant Modest Mussorgsky in his “Pictures at an exhibition”, beyond the marvelous exhibition rooms to a broad exploration of contemporary women artists’ world of imagination in music, visuals and songs. A great intergenerational accomplishment. 

Screenshot
Posted on

Forgotten but Unforgettable

Many women painters and artists who worked during the 17th and first half of the 18th century have been forgotten until recently. The galleries of the time and many years later gave little attention to the women artists of that time. Most of them were relegated to be of minor importance in the course of art history. The exhibition of the Museum of the Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium has accomplished to rectify this place of women painters in art history. The fine pieces of art, ranging from painting to sculptures, were frequently signed by men, probably to achieve higher market values and become visible in the public sphere at all at their time.
The exhibition is a kind of a revelation of how difficult it was for women to move from an “object of art” to be the subject painting including painting themselves. This also dealt with the view or regard of others towards women. Additionally, the exhibition features a section on “Social Expectations”, which deals with the expectations of the Flemish and Dutch societies towards women. Family values, marriage, wealth and social status were of utmost importance.
These women painters were forgotten far too long, but have staged their comeback as “Unforgettable” in the 21st century.
(Image: “Pictura at an exhibition” taken in the MSK Ghent 2026-4)

Posted on

Individualism and beyond

For many social and political scientists it is interesting to look into the origins of our present day individualism. In a permanent drive to learn more about ourselves, millions of persons on social media try to visualize primarily themselves in different roles and life situations. Saint Augustine was the first philosopher who exposed his own personality and past choices of pleasures on earth in a journal like fashion named “Confessions”. Isn’t this what every person is somehow doing on facebook, tiktok or instagram? Thousands of entries deal with persons succumbing to earthly pleasures. Saint Augustine writes about his own very personal experiences and this invention of “the individual path” to philosophical, spiritual, religious ideas and convictions makes him a milestone in the history of ideas.
Maybe the original version of the text is further advanced than the Christian AI chatbot that has recently been released, because Saint Augustine proposes in the last paragraph of the Confessions 3 questions and finally 2 sentences to close his journey into his philosophical and religious mind.
(Image: Saint Augustin & Saint Monique, by Jean Boedts on Confessions Book 9, Ch. 10 on his mother dying, Church Saint Augustin, Brussels Altitude 100)

Posted on

Writing to yourself

Over more than 2000 years, humans have written in various forms about and to themselves. The “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius are one of the earliest and finest example of this tradition. Originally, the intention was to write something we call “journaling” today. Out of a motivation to understand yourself, others, your relationship with others and society’s evolution, Marc Aurel drafted in Ancient Greek (a kind of elite or secret code for his Latin-speaking contemporaries) originally with no intention to address larger audiences. The French translations and publications in 2026 still use as title for the Meditations “Pensées pour moi-même” (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν). The kind of “inner dialogue”, or dialogue with yourself as a literary form, has become a philosophical tradition.
Roger-Pol Droit (2008) ascribes a similar literary style in his introduction to the “Confessions” by Saint Augustine in a recent French edition. In moving from a culture of oral traditions to a reading and writing tradition in Europe, the style of reflections about oneself and others shifts more and more to the printed formats. Originally reserved to some happy few, modern techniques of contemporaneous recording of sound and video enlarge the possibilities of input through transcriptions, editing, storage as well as analysis of own input.
The possibilities for a democratization of reflections of our own experiences have increased, and yet, AI might jump in very quickly to some already pre-established truths about ourselves in analyzing this data, which might be hard to fend off.

Posted on

Gardening Evolution

Researchers continue to study the impact of gardening on biodiversity and survival of insects. The study published by Tscharntke, Batáry and Vidal (2026) points our attention to the importance of areas in our gardens that are allowed to grow without mowing for several years. In many traditional gardening projects even in the 21st century, we observe a cut of grass-shoots in fairly regular time intervals, once a months for example. An English style lawn will be cut very short even more often than this. If we want to allow for an evolution of gardening and regaining biodiversity, we shall have to reserve substantial areas of a garden to allow grass-shoots to grow over several years (!). Such an evolution might be perceived in 2026 a bit like a revolution in gardening. Untidy spots are a response to “the need for unmown long-term refuges, protecting intact grass shoots for persistent insect populations” (Tscharntke et al. , 2026). The tree “Cercis siliquastrum” (Judas-tree) in the “Jardin des Plantes” in Paris dates back to 1785 and shows the impressive strength of nature to outlast changing gardening fashions even in a hotspot of gardening culture, history and evolution. Grass-shoots below might be allowed to last a couple of years as well.

Posted on

Before and After

It is not always easy to precisely identify the state of before a transformation from the state of after a transformation. In human developments we can observe lengthy periods of for example puberty. Other transformations of biological changes might be more obvious to identify like a broken bone, but a broken heart transformation might be less obvious as it might occur gradually and progressively rather than abruptly. Much the same can be said about illnesses like diabetes or cancer. The task of science is to study the whole process and this includes the theoretical model of such transformations. The arts have dealt with this complexity before and many artifacts take care to show or make explicit the kind of transformation they have undergone. The woodwork by Birkenmaier (before 1687, in catalog of Metamorphosis exhibition, Amsterdam 2026. Image below) is an early example of being honest about original piece and the evolution of the piece of art into the transformed “oeuvre”.

Posted on

Metamorphosis

In the antique writings of Ovid “Metamorphosis” there is an extensive description and mystery about the metamorphosis of several characters. The narrative about various forms of metamorphosis has influenced our perception of change as having a mystic component. The arts before the enlightenment have drawn lots of sceneries of metamorphoses across the centuries. Maybe in form of sculpture this narrative has continued to be present even into the 20th century. The exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the essays in the catalog testify to this long shadow of Ovid’s original narrative. No need to mention Kafka as another adept of “Verwandlung” or Rodin, who reveals persons as semi-detached from stone. Wood and the return to ashes shows us the come and go of metamorphosis of human beings. Imagining mankind as a sequence of metamorphoses is a metaphysical as well as sociological perspective of our presence on our planet. (Image: Daphne transformed into a Laurel tree, Bernard Salomon, 1557). 

Posted on

Mind mapping

The exhibition in Paris on “Cartes imaginaires” at the BNF regroups treasures of maps across centuries in an interesting way. The technique of putting together elements in a map has been developed and refined over long time spans. Map are mostly in our minds as  depictions of geographical details allowing a broader overview amidst lots of detail. The mind mapping of today as a managerial or pedagogical tool is not much different even if AI might make is believe that it is a modern tool. The exhibit of “The island of Marriage” (image below BNF, “Cartes imaginaires”) in the middle of lots of distractions and potential distractions has a particular charm to it as it tells many tales and storylines for writing lives and novels. Our own lives or the depiction of life courses might be represented in a single map, maybe even comparable to a sequence analysis of events. The history and potential of maps and lives as mind maps is going to accompany us for quite some time as it already did for centuries. 

Posted on

Critique of Maps

From a sociological perspective on maps we learn for example, that maps are also instruments to reflect property rights. This can be past claims of imperialism or recent claims of independence. A depiction as a map has historical and societal implications. Superposition of maps according to political, cultural or linguistic communities often reveal contested areas of domination and liberation movements. The specialized field of the history of maps can sharpen the senses for a critical view of maps in the 21st century. (Image:  Brankiza Zilovic, Nusquama 1984 exhibition “Cartes imaginaires’ BNF Paris).

Posted on

Fact and Fiction on Maps

As a matter of fact, for centuries maps have played in both registers, fact and faction. In geography we expect maps to represent geographical facts, and yet based on a historical perspective on the subject, we realize that early cartographers had to brush over, at their time unknown, territories. What did many of them do? They imagined what could be the case.
In the early days of “creating a map” the artists had to rely on some sort of fiction or were intentionally creating a fictive image of the unknown world. Out of this “science and fiction” approach, a whole discipline of literature has evolved, science-fiction. The imagery of Manga-mania in the 2020s owes a lot to this drawing and mapping of fiction in form of stories.
Maps tell lots of stories. They are powerful in their neurological function, similar to mind maps that are a tool to structure our thoughts or story lines. The gesture to point at an area on a map of the Arctic, Greenland for example, can send shivers across the globe. Maps make stories and stories may lead (eventually) to shifts of attribution on maps. In the same vein: the mapping of power also reflects the power of maps, be they based on facts or fiction.
(Image: Exhibition: Cartes imaginaires, BNF Paris 2026-4-8, Gerardus Mercator, Map of North Pole 1595)