Antwerp’s brand new Baroque Influencers festival will run until November of this year. It comprises a series of exhibitions, baroque music concerts, a lecture series featuring speakers from Belgium and abroad, and a remarkable immersive experience for young and old. The festival’s founders, University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp (UCSIA) and the University of Antwerp, have joined forces with more than fifteen cultural houses and organizations, including the KMSKA, the Snijders&Rockox House, Tutti Fratelli and the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, to ask why we are still children of the Baroque today.
UCSIA and the University of Antwerp founded the Jesuit Heritage Foundation in 2020. This public utility foundation works on the scientific and social promotion of the movable material heritage of the Jesuits in Antwerp and beyond. UCSIA coordinates the city festival. The University of Antwerp acts as co-organizer, while curator of the festival is Harold Polis.
The Baroque Influencers festival, which started in March, boasts an impressive list of partners all helping to shape the program, which is unique int its eclecticism: the festival turns a baroque focus on a range of artistic and intellectual disciplines. Art lovers will be able to enjoy three large exhibitions and classical music concerts at various locations in Antwerp’s city centre, while speakers both local and international will spend an entire year examining the issues we are wrestling with as a society today – issues such as freedom and responsibility, purpose, human malleability and the tension between colonization and decolonization. Albanian writer and professor Lea Ypi was first to take to the stage on March 29th.
The seventeenth century was decisive for the development of Antwerp and the Low Countries. The city festival Baroque Influencers shows the influence of the baroque and the central role the Jesuits played in Antwerp.
The baroque embodied the meeting between tradition and modernity. The Jesuits helped to shape that process thanks to their religious conviction and social commitment. Baroque Influencers examines how international and far-reaching that development was, how it continued into the twentieth century, and what the legacy of the baroque means today in our super-diverse society. The historical legacy of the Jesuits is an occasion for us to open a dialogue about the great challenges ahead.
1. Rubens
Three different exhibitions will allow visitors to embark on a visual journey through time from the 17th century back up to the present. In the galleries of the St. Charles Borromeo Church, they will discover how the Jesuits used devotional pictures, emblems and other visual material to disseminate their convictions in the 17th century.
It is not possible to think of Baroque without thinking of Peter Paul Rubens: during Baroque Influencers, more than forty unique works will find their way back to Antwerp for an extraordinary, partly virtual exhibition at the Snijders&Rockox House. Meanwhile, in the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, visitors can use augmented reality to find out more about the sodality to which Rubens and Van Dyck belonged in the 17th century.
2. The avant-garde and a contemporary sodality
The avant-garde is undoubtedly the most fascinating artistic period we have known in our part of the world after the Baroque. During the new city festival, the KMSKA’s Print Room will be dedicated to shedding light on the religious dimensions of art society De Pelgrim (The Pilgrim, 1924-1930), whose members included Felix Timmermans, Gerard Walschap and Marnix Gijsen and who sought to marry modernity with faith.
At the Port House, the city festival will re-establish links to the present, as curator Sergio Servellón shapes a contemporary sodality in partnership with the Port of Antwerp-Bruges, Antwerp Art Weekend and the Sofie Van de Velde and De Zwarte Panter galleries.
3. Baroque Influencers today
In the run-up to the city festival, the organizers are launching a fortnightly podcast bearing the same name. Each episode focuses on a universal subject that is both centuries old and achingly current, and sees podcaster Anke Verschueren inviting all kinds of contemporary influencers to explore how our baroque heritage lives
on today. How has the art of persuasion changed over the last four centuries? And what debts do 2022’s influencers owe their baroque predecessors, the Jesuits, either consciously or unconsciously? The first episode, featuring artist Jaouad Alloul, is now available on Spotify.
4. Upcoming highlights
Solidarity in the European Union
24 April 19:00 – 20:30
In this lecture deputy prime minister and minister for social affairs and public health Frank Vandenbroucke will focus on three interrelated topics. He will dwell on the relation between the European Union and the welfare state. While welfare state solidarity largely remains within the boundaries of nation-states, the latter do not operate in a vacuum. As he will argue, solidarity understood as income insurance and redistribution is of key importance in a multilevel perspective and in the development of what he calls a European Social Union.
Covid-19 not only made clear that an inclusive welfare state makes it easier to fight a pandemic, it also showed that even well-organized national welfare states reach their limits in the face of such a transnational challenge. European solidarity was key to reinforce national response capacities. The minister will shed light on the EU social agenda beyond 2024 by highlighting the priorities Belgium will put forward when it holds the presidency of the Council of the EU in the first half of 2024.
After the lecture Ms Kathleen Van Brempt, Member of the European Parliament (S&D), and Mr Karel Lannoo, CEO of CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies), will reflect on minister Vandenbroucke’s presentation and go into dialogue with him. The discussion will be moderated by Sarah Marchal, professor of Social Policy at the Herman Deleeck Centre of the University of Antwerp.
Why shopping for our spirituality in all corners of the world can be a problem
3 May 20:00 – 21:30
In this talk, Liz Bucar uses the framework of appropriation to unpack the ethics of yoga. What does it mean to insist yoga is a spiritual but not religious practice? Are we entitled to borrow any practice in the pursuit of our personal health? What forms of structural injustice does the popularity of yoga depend on and reinforce? A leading scholar of religious ethics, Bucar draws on her own experience becoming a certified Kripalu yoga instructor to explore the moral risks of intercultural borrowing. She argues that when we ignore the core religious beliefs of the faithful and commodify their practices, we risk further marginalizing minority groups and reinforcing social inequities.
Liz Bucar is an award-winning author and professor of religion at Northeastern University in the USA. In her latest book, Stealing My Religion, she unpacks the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation—religious appropriation—asking what the implications are for borrowing the religion of others. As Bucar continually tests the limits of borrowing dress, doctrines, and rituals from Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, occasionally reflecting on her own missteps, she comes to a surprising conclusion: the way to avoid religious appropriation isn’t to borrow less; it’s to borrow more.
How dangerous is the faith of the other?
9 May 20:00 – 21:30
In the sixteenth century, Christians in Europe, and thus also in Antwerp, wrestled with the question: ‘what to do with dissenters from their own circles?’ Was it a matter of eradicating ‘heresy’ through criminal law and on the battlefield? Or did the ‘conscience’ not allow itself to be forced, but only to be convinced? Shouldn’t city administrators be managing things better to ‘keep it all together’? And wouldn’t it be better to look for a form of tolerance and ‘forbearance’ – an emergency solution to the division, waiting for the moment when theologians would agree again?
In the Netherlands, this discussion led to a revolt against Habsburg authority and a civil war that divided the Dutch to the core. It led to the permanent schism between the regions, and the departure of tens of thousands of Antwerp citizens from their city, often to the new Protestant Republic. After 1585, the city then became a testing ground for a whole new baroque and militant Catholicism. Especially under the leadership of the Jesuits, people experimented with new ways of arming the faithful against heretical ideas and mobilizing them to fight the Protestant enemy. But behind the scenes it sometimes proved more practical to tolerate than to persecute, and Antwerp’s reality resembled that of its Protestant neighbors much more than it appeared at first sight.
Judith Pollmann is professor of early modern Dutch history at Leiden University. She has published widely on religion, violence and politics in the early modern Low Countries, most recently with Raymond Fagel, 1572. Civil War in the Netherlands (2022) and with Marnix Beyen and Henk te Velde, The Low Countries. A History for Today (2021). She is a foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts.
