#371 Erkenningsnummer P708816
march 11 2015 \ newsweekly - € 0,75 \ rEad morE at www.flandErstoday.Eu currEnt affairs \ P2
Politics \ P4
Neighbourly agreemeNts
Flanders signs a co-operation agreement with the Netherlands on key issues such as radicalisation, airspace and embassies \4
BusinEss \ P6
innovation \ P7
miracles of the micro-world
A Flemish biologist has made his 300th discovery of a new species of diatom, one of the world’s tiniest – and most beautiful – creatures \7
Art on the fringe
Education \ P9
art & living \ P10
flaNders iN PolaNd
The Polish city of Gdan´sk launches Flanders Week, a festival celebrating the historical ties between the two regions \ 11
© Frédéric Van hoof/Visit Flanders
leuven arts centre stuK is marking 37.5 rebellious years tom Peeters more articles by Tom \ flanderstoday.eu
You have to be a bit obstinate to celebrate your 37-and-ahalf birthday. “It’s in the DNA of STUK,” says Marleen Brock, who for her PhD examined the history of the Leuven arts centre, right from its start in 1977. The resulting book and exhibition display the sheer tenacity and stubborn independence of the cultural hotspot.
I
t may seem a bit unusual to invite a student from the Dutch city of Nijmegen to dive into the arts archives to tell the story of STUK, a leading Flemish arts centre. But that’s precisely what Marleen Brock’s PhD supervisor at the University of Leuven’s department of cultural history asked her to do. The result is a book available this month from STUK.
“I didn’t know anything about the Flemish arts scene,” Brock admits. And her unprejudiced view worked to her advantage. As an outsider, she was primarily struck by the passion of the people working for STUK, the arts centre that grew from a small student initiative to the prominent art house it is now. “In the first few years there was hardly any budget,” she says. “The university paid one and a half employees. The other staff members were in special employment programmes or worked as volunteers or during their civic service. When there was a bit of money, it was first used to cover operating costs and artists; the wages of the staff came last.” Flemish theatre director Guy Cassiers told Brock how he produced his play De cementen tuin (The Cement
Garden) in 1984 with only 50,000 Belgian francs (€1,250). “There was no budget to cover travel costs from Antwerp to Leuven, so his production team slept in the room where they were making the show,” Brock says. “Since the scenes had to be played in a darkened environment, they slept during the day and worked through the night, in the converted chemistry lab of the Arenberg Institute.” Those were the days when STUK was still ’t Stuc (an abbreviation for Student Centre) and closely involved with the left-wing student movement. “At the end of the 1970s, the need for an arts building was voiced first by the university’s Culture Council,” says Brock. “But it was only when a building on the social sciences campus continued on page 5