Photography by SANDER HOUTHUYS
Ahead of this year’s Brussels Art Week, scheduled for 10–13 September, hube catches up with its founders, Evelyn Simons and Laure Decock. The art week’s epithet is RendezVous, a word that perfectly encapsulates its casually confident, exuberant dynamism.
Decock and Simons’ non-profit framework foregrounds community over commerce. Their curatorial eye wanders in search of authenticity and gazes in awe at the uniquely collaborative energy of their beloved city. Their priority is facilitation—the careful creation of opportunities for togetherness through openness. Chance encounters, glances, crossed paths, and coincidences are praised and protected.
hube: Laure, Evelyn, throughout your careers, you have both assumed a variety of roles within the creative industries, from curator to consultant, writer to artistic director. Could you each tell us a little about your backgrounds? How did your respective experiences lead you to found Brussels Art Week? What common ambition unified your trajectories?
Evelyn Simons: I studied Art History in Ghent. It was a very academic course which didn’t really prepare us for a professional career in the art world. I graduated in 2011 and had a lot of difficulty finding a job due to my lack of experience and having no family ties to the art world.
For four years, I worked other jobs whilst doing free gigs in the art world, keeping its exploitative system afloat: mostly writing and manning art booths at fairs. In my free time, I applied to open calls, and one of those was the jackpot. I became one of the laureates of Fondazione Prada & Qatar Museum’s Curate Award in 2017, which allowed me to organise an exhibition in Athens: carte blanche, with a great production budget and guidance from the Prada Foundation. In the meantime, I used my savings for a postgraduate degree in Curatorial Studies at the School of Art in Ghent. After that, I worked for some years at Fondation CAB in Brussels, co-curating shows and setting up a residency programme, whilst freelancing on the side.
From there, I worked at Horst Arts & Music, an arts and electronic music festival on a military site near Brussels, where I ran the visual arts and performance programme for five years. I combined my love for in-situ, commission-led curation and public space with a research focus on protest and club culture—these two avenues still define my curatorial practice today.
After Horst, I wanted to keep working on these two rhythms. Laure and I were together when we found out Brussels Gallery Weekend would end, and we took the leap to launch our own non-profit, rethinking the art week format into RendezVous. We’d bridge the commercial with the non-profit; the established with the emerging; the local with the international. This is very important to us.
