To the Bozar this evening to visit an excellent  European landscape photography exhibition entitled Sense of Place. Some 160 photographs, taken by some 40 photographers, provide a composite portrait of Europe, divided between the North (the Channel, the North Sea, the Nordic and Baltic Sea areas), the Centre (East, West , Austria, Hungary) and the South (the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Eastern Mediterranean). There were many beautiful and striking images, from Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Horizons’ to Irene Kung’s carefully-lighted protraits of trees and waves, but if I had to single out just one image to keep, it would be Per Bak Jensen’s extraordinarily lyrical Forest. Like Kung’s work, the photograph seems almost like a painting. Indeed, it reminded me strongly of the work of Léon Spilliaert (picture). Jensen is famous for never manipulating an image, once taken, so the effect is all down to composition, timing, lighting, exposure, the lens and, I suspect a great deal of patience. This exhibition is well worth seeing also because many of the giant images, including Jensen’s, simply don’t work when reproduced in a book or on a poster.

This morning the Secretary General’s team undertook a team-building activity which was great fun, for we began our day in the garden of the La Hulpe home of our colleague, Zoltan Krasznai, who is a bee keeper. Once again, as the photo shows (that’s me on the right, Zoltan on the left) I got up and personal with some bees. In fact, we all did, for Zoltan demonstrated to us how to divide and separate off a colony and how to harvest honey. As he worked, slowly, methodically, meticulously, he taught us about the bees and their behaviour. We looked at a queen and saw the difference between the male and female bees and the normal honeycombs and those for princesses. Zoltan has five hives in his apiary, which is relatively small but, as the sun rose in the sky so the bees became ever more active and impressively noisy. However, for as long as we stayed out of their direct flypaths to and from the hives, they left us alone. Zoltan loaned me a book about bees that I have eagerly started. A bee colony can be regarded as being almost a living organism in its own right, like a coral reef or a sponge, despite being made up of thousands of individuals. Perhaps the most interesting fact I learnt was that until the late eighteenth century the colonies were destroyed when the honey was harvested. It was only with the invention of the moveable comb hive that the colonies could be preserved and that led rapidly on, in the nineteenth century, to the development of breeding programmes and the commercialisation of honey production. To state the obvious, what we were witnessing was one of the most efficient teams in the natural world at work. Great fun – and educational (as this Harvard Business Review article shows)!

This morning the EESC welcomed to its premises a committee that brings together all of those working on internet site content in the European Union’s different institutions. This Interinstitutional Editorial Committee goes under the nippy abbreviation of ‘CEiii’ and it was my pleasure to welcome the committee and its members, from Luxembourg and Strasbourg as well as from Brussels, to the EESC today. I put the stress on the importance of interinstitutional cooperation not just as a desirable forum for synergies but as a moral imperative, above all in a time of scarce resources and a period of austerity. The CEiii is a good example of that imperative at work and so, I argued, was the headquarters building of the EESC and the Committee of the Regions since, as I never tire of pointing out, the two advisory bodies set an excellent example to the other institutions not only by sharing a lot of their resources, including buildings, but by cooperating as closely as they possibly can in order to achieve synergies and economies.

This evening we went back to the Kaaistudio for the third and last instalment of P.A.R.T.S.’s New Works (see my previous post here). An important element in the P.A.R.T.S. course is research and with that comes reflection, starting from the basics, such as what exactly is dance? And what is not? Tonight’s three works took matters to their logical conclusion (a dictionary of dance, wittily acted out by individual members of a large troupe) as well as to their illogical conclusion (vocabulary shorn of movement). As such, the evening was more intellectually challenging but just as much fun and, in places, most amusing.

I am sure readers will be familiar with the invisible gorilla phenomenon. If not, please go here and do the test before reading on. For those already familiar with the phenomenon, here’s what really happened during the penalty shoot out in Kiev earlier this evening. Slow-motion pictures reveal that just as Ashley Young was about to take his penalty a huge wooden Pinocchio puppet lumbered onto the pitch and bent Buffon’s goalpost down so that Young’s shot was blocked. As in the gorilla test, people were concentrating so hard on the ball and the players that they simply failed to see the Pinocchio puppet. The alternative explanation – that England were outplayed for most of the game and were exhausted by the end and that Italy were unlucky not to put away one of their many chances in normal and added time – is frankly just unbelievable.

To the Kaai Theater Studios this evening to watch the P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) annual graduation tour. An international school founded by top Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, P.A.R.T.S. offers a full time four year programme of training and research in contemporary dance. After four years, the students get to create and perform work, and it was such works that we went to see this evening. Two pieces stood out for us. One was a piece, Fragments, by Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker herself (together with pianist Alain Franco) and in which six male students had worked for five weeks in composing and improvising moves. They were clearly having a lot of fun and that exuberance came across to the audience as they glided between individualistic solos and collective patterns. The other was the innovatory ‘Behind the sun’ he repeated ‘where everything is everything else’, created and performed by a Croat, Pavle Heidler, and an Australian, Eleanor Campbell (in the picture). They chanted improvisationally, whilst gradually shifting forms, shapes and positions (with cleverly shifting lighting helping with the overall effect). It was brilliant. Afterwards, at the bar, with De Keersmaeker sat at ease on a table chatting to dancers and members of the audience, we got to talk to the personable Campbell, who told us that rehearsing for improvised pieces takes far more effort than rehearsing for a set piece. What particularly fascinated was the symbiotic way in which she and Heidler followed one another between synchronisation and desynchronisation. Indeed, the piece could only work because of that.

All this week the EESC’s President, Staffan Nilsson, accompanied by a small delegation of EESC members has been actively participating in a series of events in and around the UN’s Rio+20 conference in Rio de Janeiro. (The Committee booked hotel rooms and flights far in advance and so did not fall into the expensive trap of the late bookers.) In addition to the conference itself and all the side events, our members participated in a Board meeting and the General Assembly of the International Association of Economic and Social Councils and Similar Institutions and in an EU-Brazil Round Table meeting. Staffan, in particular, has tirelessly tweeted and posted messages on Facebook, updating his followers about the various events and side events in which he has been involved, including a meeting organised by the EESC in which the European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, participated and a series of bilateral briefings with Commissioner Janez Potocnik. In his speech, Mr Barroso said that ‘The EESC is a very good example of the extent to which civil society and the social partners are involved in the decision making process and its benefits are clear to see.’ As to the substance, Staffan stated: “The road from Rio is as important as the road to Rio. From now on, we are in implementation mode. The EESC will continue to act on the Rio+20 follow-up within the EU and with its non-EU partners, in order to promote, facilitate and enable civil society input into policy- and decision-making processes so that we can really achieve the future we want.” The illustration for this post shows our indefatigible Staffan at one of the last side events, on the theme of intergenerational education for sustainable development.

To the EESC’s Communication Group meeting this afternoon, Chaired by our Vice-President, Anna Maria Darmanin, to listen in on an exchange of news with the European Commission’s new Director-General of Communication, Gregory Paulger. He eloquently described how, in this austerity period, with crisis measures being decided and implemented rapidly, there was a danger that the messenger would be punished for the message. This meant a change of tactics for the European Commission and its communication activities, with less emphasis on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ and more on the ‘why’. I came along because, as a former Head of Communication, I am genuinely interested in how we institutions face up to the common communications challenge. But I confess I also came because I first worked with Gregory in the 1980s, when he was in the Private Office of Jean Dondelinger and for a period after that we were colleagues in the old ‘DG X’ and worked closely together when he was Head of the Private Office of Commissioner Vivianne Reding and I was a Commission Head of Unit pushing through a little programme proposal called Erasmus Mundus… Without Gregory’s help and support, it would never have seen the light of day.

Today I had lunch with my father-in-law at the Fondation Universitaire (that’s him with the red beret on). Jacques Vandamme will celebrate his 89th birthday this autumn and is still going admirably strong. In a long, illustrious life, Jacques has lived through various episodes that I can only read about: the effects on his stockbroker father of the Great Crash (he was six); the Great Depression (he was in his teens); the Second World War (he was in the resistance and joined the British Army at the end); the first attempts at European integration (he was 27 when Schuman made his declaration); the Coal and Steel Community (he worked for the Belgian steel industry); the European Economic Community (as a Commission Head of Unit he helped launched the EU’s competition policy); the far-sighted and prescient 1975 Tindemans Report (Jacques was Tindemans’ chief advisor); and all that before he was fifty! I told Jacques about my Leefdaal discovery (see previous post) and asked him whether he had been at Leuven during the May 1940 bombardments. No, Jacques told me, but he was there as a law student during the 1944 bombardments. A devout man, Jacques told me that this was the most terrifying experience in his life. He and his fellow students had sheltered in the basement of their house as the bombs started to fall. ‘And I can tell you exactly how long the bombing lasted,’ he said, a wry smile on his face; ‘I had time to say two full rosaries…’ For people who have lived through such experiences European integration is not a question of ‘whether’ but ‘how’.

On my way out to Berthem with the dog this morning, I stopped off at Leefdaal’s village church cemetery to pay my respects at two Commonwealth war graves (picture). My better half had told me that they were there. Company Quartermaster Sergeant John Fenwick and Guardsman Charles Albert Vincent Seymour died on 14 May 1940 in a bombardment in nearby Korbeekstraat. Leefdaal is a pleasant, sleepy place and, despite the pill boxes and bunkers out in the surrounding fields, it is difficult to imagine war coming this way. But, thanks to Pathé’s archives, we don’t have to imagine it. At this link there are over four minutes of images of a refugee stream pouring through the village and of burning buildings and of Coldstream Guard Regiment soldiers helping the refugees in various ways. The film was taken on or about 14 May 1940, and I just wonder whether, among all those helpful soldiers, we might just be inadvertently gazing at the last images of John Fenwick and Charles Seymour…