A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join De Toerende Tourist Zhao Dandan to discover the new exhibition: Belgian Autumn - A Confabulated History.
Zhao Dandan, is a Chinese young woman who was selected by the Province of Antwerp to have an Antwerp holiday for a whole month. I decided to meet her at the FoMu.
You can read her journey on the De Tourende Toerist blog.
Belgian Autumn - A Confabulated History by Jan Rosseel
In the early 1980s Belgium experienced a collective nightmare. 'De Bende van Nijvel’ committed a whole series of violent robberies, especially at supermarkets. Thirty years later Rosseel decided to dig in the memory of Belgium to tell a confabulated history.
Belgian Autumn is not a reconstruction of the facts. Rosseel combines evidence from police archives with photographs of key locations and some fictional characters. No one was ever convicted and that will never happen. Numerous procedural errors, missing or destroyed documents, political involvement and cover-ups: the list of painful elements in this case is endless.
Rosseel departs from testimonies and memories. Rosseels father was one of those who were killed by the gang. Belgian Autumn is a subjective story that refreshes our memory and makes room for new memories and new stories.
Jan Rosseel (BE, 1979 ) studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag (NL) and the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus (DK). Along with the exhibition, the book Belgian Autumn is launched, published by Hannibal.
You can find more info on the FotoMuseum Antwerpen website.