The city of Ghent has been showing art in unusual places since 1986, when Jan Hoet’s Chambres d’amis created a sensation by featuring works in private homes. The city is now hosting an event called Track in which 41 international artists have been commissioned to integrate works into the urban fabric.

Curated by Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis, Track occupies six Ghent neighbourhoods this summer. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant helium balloon in the shape of a rock floating above the town, with a model of the Vooruit art centre on top. Other works are dotted around the town in unexpected locations, including a former boxing club called The Golden Gloves and an abandoned vineyard hidden behind the St Peter’s Abbey.

Some of the works are easy to track down. The performance artist Benjamin Verdonck has embedded a bungalow in the trunk of a massive old tree in the Vogelzang Park while the artist Leo Copers has placed mock gravestones inscribed with the names of art museums within the Citadel Park.

Other works take a bit of effort to find. The Japanese artist Tadashi’s Kawamata has created a makeshift slum on a waterfront near the Dampoort station. The work is cut off by a dangerous road, so the organisers have constructed two towers to allow people to view the work. It may not last much longer – a section of the ramshackle wooden construction collapsed in a recent storm.

At times, the locations are rather ordinary spaces. The artist Dahn Vo, for example, has been given a space in the Fine Arts Museum to display copper fragments. At other times, it seems as if Tracks has retreated to the 1986 concept of art in private homes. The painter Michael Borremans has been allocated an abandoned town house on the Korenlei to display two enormous bronze sculptures representing human faces. This turns out to be one of the most successful interventions in the city.

“This works perfectly in the abandoned, dilapidated and crumbling period room in the Hotel de Ghellinck,” according to art critic Eric Rinckhout. Maybe art needs to be safely enclosed by walls after all.

More than 40 years after it was founded in a living room in Arnhem, the Dutch dance company Introdans has performed for the first time in the United States at New York’s Joyce Theatre.

Launched in 1971 by Ton Wiggers and Hans Focking, Introdans aimed to bring professional dance to audiences in Arnhem. ‘We had the Dutch National Ballet, and they came to Arnhem once, maybe twice a year,’ Wiggers told The New York Times in a recent interview. ‘There was an audience for those performances, so I thought, ‘Well, if there’s an audience for it, why aren’t we seeking for more dance here ?’

In the early days, the company met in Wiggers’ living room. It received no sponsorship from Arnhem and survived by giving ballet lessons. But the company gradually gained recognition for its innovative work and began to tour the rest of the country. By 1993, it was touring internationally and working with acclaimed choreographers such as William Forsythe.

The company has already taken a youth production to New York but this was the first performance for an adult audience. Alberto del Saz, a Spanish dancer based in New York, was enthusiastic about the Dutch dancers. ‘They’re quite beautiful’ he told The New York Times. ‘Sometimes I look at certain dancers and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, these people are in this little town in Holland’.’

Read the NY Times-review of Introdans’s U.S. performance Heavenly here.

Today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, Introdans performs Heavenly at Meany Hall in Seattle.

The acclaimed Brussels fashion designer Christophe Coppens announced last week that he was quitting because of the financial crisis. ‘Because the price is too high and the goal  longer justifies the means,’ he wrote in a blog.

Born in 1969, Coppens trained as a theatre director and actor. His first costumes were designed for the stage and in 1990 he launched his own collection. Known for his flamboyant hats, Coppens desiged for Yohji Yamamoto and Guy Laroche, as well as working for members of the Belgian royal family.

Coppens was an immensely versatile designer, working on exhibitions and performances in Brussels, New York and Tokyo. He ran two shops in Brussels (for men and women) as well as a third outlet in Tokyo, and produced two men’s and women’s collections a year.

But it finally became too much for the designer. ‘It has always been difficult, and difficult is OK,’ he said in his blog. ‘But the past years have been unbearable, and inhuman.’

Ambitious plans abandoned
Coppens recently announced an ambitious plan to open a new workshop in a former department store in the Marolles. He was also planning to open his first shop in Paris. But debts finally forced him to stop.

In his blog posting, Coppens blamed the financial crisis for his decision: ‘banks no longer play their part as banks and factories can’t afford to take any risks’. He also argued that ‘wages are no longer payable in Belgium’ and ‘producing quality products in limited quantity is almost impossible’. It is difficult to take risks in these circumstances, Coppens said. ‘It is about restraint, cut, omission, reducing, being careful.’

Coppens is not the only talented Belgian designer hit by the financial crisis. The flamboyant Antwerp designer Walter Van Beirendonck was forced last February to shut his Antwerp concept store Walter and file for bankruptcy following mounting losses.

The De Appel contemporary arts centre is marking its move to a new home with an exhibition titled Topsy Turvy, which looks at the subversive European tradition of Carnival.

The exhibition explores the “utopian potential” of Carnival, a time when traditional power relationships are subverted and satire briefly reigns supreme. The 19th-century Flemish artist James Ensor, famous for his paintings of Carnival in Ostend, is one of the artists included in the exhibition.

At the same time, the theatre director Eric de Vroedt and the Asko|Schönberg ensemble are organising a series of satirical musical performances titled “I want my money back” (Ik wil mijn geld terug, picture above). The works, which will tour the city in a double decker London bus, present a critique of the individualist consumerism that currently shapes much of Dutch society which has its roots in the brutally mercantile Thatcherism of the 1980s.

Formerly located in the 17th-century canal district, De Appel has moved to a landmark 19th-century building on Amsterdam’s Prins Hendrikkade known as Zeeman’s Hoop, formerly home to a seaman’s society.

The revamped interior, designed by denieuwegeneratie and ADP architects, contains impressive exhibition spaces, an archive and a library with 10,000 volumes. It also has a silent garden and a basement restaurant.

The translator Damion Searls was introduced to the works of the Dutch writer Nescio during a residency in Belgium funded by PassaPorta. He obtained a grant to translate Nescio’s slim works, which have now been published by the New York Review of Books under the title Amsterdam Stories.

The Dutch reading public have known about Nescio for a long time – though he was only really discovered after his death in 1961. He is one of the most cherished writers in the Netherlands, his collected works voted one of the ten best Dutch books in a poll conducted by the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. But he wrote little and his collected works barely achieve the length of one novella.

More than 50 years after his death, reviewers and bloggers in the United States are now enthusing about these strange poetic stories featuring melancholy eccentrics struggling to live meaningful lives in a conformist society.

The first sentence of the first story – The Freeloader – sets the tone for everything that follows. “Except for the man who thought Sarphatistraat was the most beautiful place in Europe, I’ve never met anyone more peculiar than the freeloader.”

The same might be said about the author, born Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh in 1882. He worked in Amsterdam as a businessman, but took long walks in the countryside and dreamed of joining a utopian commune.

He wrote stories in his spare time, adopting the name Nescio (Latin for “I do not know”) to disguise his identity. He was certainly a peculiar writer, as this slim 160-page volume reveals.

The Brussels city museum on Grote Markt is organising an exhibition focusing on the Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys. The exhibition is based on photographs taken in Brussels in 1947 and 1958, which come from a vast collection of negatives presented to the Rotterdam Photography Museum after Oorthuys’ death in 1975.

Born in Leiden in 1908, Casparus (or Cas) Oorthuys was the son of a Dutch minister. He studied architecture in Haarlem and developed radical ideals, including Communism, vegetarianism and pacificism.

Working class life
His career as a photographer started in the 1930s when he began photographing working class life. When war broke out, he was briefly interned, but later worked for the resistance as a clandestine photographer. After the war, he worked on a range of photo reportages and illustrated books.

Postwar Brussels
His photographs of Brussels, all black-and-white, capture the energy and optimism of the postwar years. Oorthuys was drawn to the neon-lit boulevards, the crowds on Brouckèreplein (photo) and the gleaming new Sabena terminal next to Central Station.

A Belgian video filmed “on a square where nothing really happens” has become a YouTube sensation. The film – created by the advertising agency Duval-Guillaume – shows local people puzzled by a striped post with a red button on top placed in the middle of a quiet square. An arrow points to the button with the instruction “Push to add drama.”

When one woman plucks up the courage to push the button, all hell breaks loose. An ambulance pulls up, a man on a stretcher falls out of the back and a woman in a red bikini flashes past on a motorbike. The two-minute clip builds up a frenzied pace like a Hollywood action film. “Your daily dose of drama,” reads the message at the end.

The film was created to promote the launch of the digital TV station TNT. It has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and posted on three million Facebook pages, making it the second biggest advertising hit on YouTube. It has also been mentioned in the Financial Times, CNN and the Huffington Post.

So where is the square where nothing really happens? It turns out to be the main square in Aarschot, a small Flemish town east of Brussels where, at last, something exciting has happened.