Things to see and forget about in Belgium

Belgitude is a word that resists translation — fitting for a country that resists definition. Here two bodies of work meet across time: Wout De Ridder's photographs of the incidental and overlooked, and an anonymous Flemish family album. The objects change. The light changes. But something persists — a way of inhabiting the world impossible to mistake. Wout De Ridder travels Belgium with a medium format film camera, turning his lens toward the incidental and overlooked — a faded shopfront, a roadside object with no clear purpose, a wall repainted too many times. None of it is unique to Belgium. Gathered together, it becomes unmistakably, irreducibly Belgian. The word for this is Belgitude. It resists translation, which is perhaps fitting for a country that resists definition. Belgium is a place of borders — linguistic, cultural, political — and it is in those in-between spaces that something distinctly its own quietly takes root. It is no coincidence that surrealism found some of its most fertile ground here. Magritte painted ordinary objects stripped of their logic. Delvaux set familiar scenes adrift in dreamlike light. Something in the Belgian gaze instinctively finds the strange hiding inside the everyday. Alongside De Ridder's photographs, a second body of work: a Flemish family album from the TinyGallery collection, spanning nearly a century of ordinary life — from the 1910s to the 1960s. The light changes. But something persists — a certain way of inhabiting the world, modest and particular, that is difficult to define and impossible to mistake. That persistence, perhaps, is Belgitude.