Category: Life course

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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. 

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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)

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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)

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Learning through Confessions

In the original text of the Confessions by Saint Augustine there is an interesting testimony to his personal learning style. He hated learning Ancient Greek as child, apparently mainly due to the strict teaching style, which obliged him to learn Greek and punishment for being less interested as a child (Book 1 Chapter 13). However, he explains the predilection for Latin in language and grammar in later childhood and adolescence through the encouraging teaching style. Saint Augustine has reflected on his own learning style, put it in words in order to answer primarily to himself on what made him learn. The rhetoric style, which he applied rather consistently throughout his confessions, is build around the continuous questioning of his own past behavior and convictions. This is a kind of internalised conversation, which in the Greek tradition, was centered around dialogues with other persons as in the Socratic dialogues. The questions beyond the rhetoric style are also the beginning of a learning process even if the outcome might be open and in modern times a lot of new answers have been contributed through scientific methods and continuous discourse. Multilingualism was already a practice more than 2000 years ago for the young Augustine of Hippo.

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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.

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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). 

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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. 

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Learn from failures

It is easier said than done. Acknowledge a failure and most people will probably pretend to know better already. Don’t worry. This is not the case. Many of the best “learnings” have come from learnings from failures, be they own mistakes or of other persons, organizations or institutions. If you really want to learn from a person, try to get honest take home messages from their “best” failures. Marc Aurel has proposed this in his writings on governance and, prior to him, Aristotle compared Greek constitutions to derive the most adequate, or the best of the many failures to achieve democracy. This is a perspective if you aim to improve on the achievements of current or past actors. Incumbents can only tell you about how they got where they are currently, not about any likelihood of future occasions. Hence, current failures are a very valid source for learning.

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Master AI

In 2025 the exhibition “Cartooning for Peace” at the BNF in Paris had already an exhibit authored by Stellina Chen from Taiwan, which summarized the evolution and projected the consequences of an all encompassing AI revolution (Image below taken at exhibition 2025 BNF). Currently we exercise ourselves in using various forms of AI or learn how to program them ourselves. It is our aim to master the new technology so it becomes a helpful tool. However, there are already many instances where it is no longer us mastering AI, but the AI has turned around the table and has started to master us. The applications of AI have entered our work tasks, tries and frequently succeeds in improvements of our routines and processes.
In private life a similar revolution is happening, when AI offers advice, which is hard not to follow and very convincing most of the time. Since getting involved in a conversion with AI tests your logic and debating competences, we find ourselves more and more in situations where AI is telling us what to do in the best of a convincing manner. After centuries of humanity to find freedom from oppression and the freedom to what we want ourselves, we seem to be ready to hand over control to AI. We are just like toddlers in this respect, willing or obliged to follow our master.

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Dementia Prevention

The United Nations reports on countries’ activities like dementia prevention plans. Focus is on the medical sociological analysis in which dementia is not only determined by a person’s individual life course, but it is also a society-level issue. Looking at dementia prevalence and incidence over time as well as major known risk factors, Mukadam et al. (2024) conclude that low education level, smoking, obesity, hypertension and diabetes all contribute substantially to the risk of dementia. The trick with education is simple. If you start on a dementia trajectory from a high level of education, it will take longer until you are fully dependent on other persons. For the other causes there intrinsic or genetic components, but a large share of dementia risks can be reduced through behavioral changes early in life. My all time and all ages favorite is walk whenever and as long as you can.