Colour and Shape Heist-Goor

The municipality of Heist-op-den-Berg slided forward its church village Heist-Goor as a location for an artistic intervention in public space. Heist-Goor had become a so called ‘sleeping village’, where public services are drastically reduced and where people hardly connect with public place. Moreover locals had revealed the environment of the primary school and the church as a place with a distinct character that needed some upgrading.

Mount Murals (Ruth Segers), organiser of embodied collective art trajectories for reviving or  awakening feelings of attachment to place, created the Colour and Shape Heist-Goor trajectory (August 2019 to November 2020). At various well-known locations in the village, the dining space of the local bakery, the rehearsing space of the local brass band and the refectory of the local primary school, the following workshops were organised: 1. The ‘Idiosyncratic Machine’ workshop by Kristof Van Gestel. This workshop  was enriched with emotional links to local (persons’) places as embedded in the objects that started off the creative process,  2. Public Silk Screen Printing Workshop ‘Gezeever’, 3. Implementation workshop at three locations in between primary school and church: two walls of the electricity supply house in the school’s front yard, the side façade of the café next to the school, and the space along the pedestrian crossing between school and church were upgraded. All workshops were open to everybody with a certain affinity with the church village. Each workshop provided a joint result, whereby each participant recognised their own contribution.

In this small community of about 1500 postboxes, having 70 individual participants in a new artistic venture is an accomplishment. An important part of the impetus of taking part was the prospect of (grand)parents to share in a creative way their sense of belonging with their offspring, and in doing so embellish a characteristic place in the village which simultaneously signifies their shared belonging.