FEATURE

Belgium’s reputation as a hotbed for indie music is being gloriously upheld by its latest export, Milow. But as Nina Lamparski discovers, it can be tricky for the country’s independent artists to find the right path to take them to the top

Who’sbossthe?

Le Botanique

Maison du Peuple

Les Ateliers Claus

Ancienne Belgique

FR C’est qui le boss ? La réputation de la Belgique comme foyer de la création musicale indépendante est largement confirmée par Milow, une de ses dernières gloires de l’exportation. Mais comme le constate Nina Lamparski, le parcours des artistes de la scène rock belge peut s’avérer tortueux. Pas facile d’arriver en droite ligne au sommet

FEATURE

Hot hangouts

Being an indie artist is all about the way that you work… I’m my own manager

NL Wie is de baas?De reputatie van België als broeikas voor muziek in eigen beheer wordt nogmaals bevestigd door het nieuwste exportproduct, Milow. Maar Nina Lamparski ontdekt dat het voor de Belgische onafhankelijke artiesten niet eenvoudig is de juiste weg naar de top te vinden

FEATURE

As a Flemish artist it’s hard to get gigs in Wallonia, and vice versa

Brussels Airlines b.spirit! magazine | May/Jun 09 | 25

l a été emprisonné, il a subi des menaces et les

autorités africaines l’ont mis sur une liste noire.

Mais jusqu’à présent aucun obstacle ne s’est avéré

insurmontable pour empêcher le réalisateur et scénariste belge

Thierry Michel de poursuivre son travail. Par ses reportages,

il contribue inlassablement à donner à la République

Démocratique du Congo ce dont elle a sans doute le plus

besoin en tant que nation post-coloniale et indépendante : une

abondance d’archives audiovisuelles s’attachant à suivre la

chronique mouvementée de son histoire passée et présente.

Dans une région qui a été durant trop longtemps dépourvue de

ses archives historiques, cet homme calme et charismatique a

acquis un statut de quasi légende auprès de la population locale.

Le bar de l’hôtel chic dans lequel nous avons rencontré le

réalisateur à Bruxelles, pour nous entretenir de son dernier

documentaire, Katanga Business, est aux antipodes des étendues

de plaines rouges, des villages poussiéreux et des territoires

exotiques qu’il a explorés avec sa caméra durant plus de 30 ans.

Au cours de sa brillante carrière, T. Michel a fait la lumière

sur l’aide humanitaire armée en Somalie, l’héritage colonial de

sans doute valu sa plus grande renommée est ce portrait du

volets, réalisé après la disgrâce du dirigeant à la suite d’un

long règne de trois décennies, sur un pays alors connu sous le

nom de Zaïre. Diffusée en 1999, cette ‘tragédie shakespearienne’

a largement continué à circuler en RDC sous forme de copies

pirates, c’est en tout cas ce qu’attestent les media locaux.

Toutefois, malgré la nature critique de son travail, Michel

Avec Katanga Business, ce Wallon de 56 ans s’aventure

tournaient plus autour de sujets socio-politiques, ce nouveau

sont en train de se faire les hommes d’affaires européens,

américains et chinois, tous concurrents dans la course aux

contrats qui se chiffrent en plusieurs millions de dollars dans

les mines du Katanga, l’une des provinces les plus riches en

minerais de la RDC.

Le choix de son sujet, comme le dit Michel, a été en partie

Wallonie, autrefois un important nœud industriel de la

production du charbon et de l’acier, qui se bat aujourd’hui

contre le chômage et la paupérisation.

la culture des travailleurs et j’ai acquis une forte conscience

et j’ai développé une fascination pour les paysages rudes et les

visages des gens marqués par des rides profondes, par les

années de labeur sous terre. Une autre chose m’a également

marqué, c’est le déclin d’un monde avec la fermeture des

À la différence de Charleroi, les mines du Katanga

Le réalisateur belge Thierry Michel a la réputation de centrer son objectif sur des sujets de controverse en Afrique. Lors d’une interview sur son dernier documentaire, il a expliqué à Nina Lamparski dans quelle mesure l’activité minière non réglementée au Congo est en train de connaître une révolution

L’homme du peuple

24 | Brussels Airlines b.spirit! magazine | May/Jun 09

e has been jailed, threatened and blacklisted by

African authorities for his work. Yet, to date, no obstacle

has proven big enough to stop Belgian director and

writer Thierry Michel from contributing to what the Democratic

Republic of Congo possibly needs most as a post-colonial,

independent nation: an extensive audiovisual archive chronicling

the country’s turbulent past and present. In a region that for too

long has been devoid of historical archives, this quiet,

charismatic man holds near-legendary status among locals.

The fancy Brussels hotel bar where we meet to discuss

Michel’s latest documentary, Katanga Business, is a far cry

from the red plains, dusty villages and exotic territories he has

explored with his camera for more than 30 years.

In the course of his award-winning career, he has put the

spotlight on armed humanitarian aid in Somalia, Africa’s

colonial heritage and the socio-cultural role of the Congo River.

Most famously perhaps, Michel is the author of an intimate

H Thierry Michel’s latest film is set in Katanga, one of DRC’s most mineral-rich provinces

Belgian film-maker Thierry Michel is renowned for focusing his camera on controversial topics in Africa. Talking about his latest documentary, he tells Nina Lamparski why the Congo’s unregulated mining business is undergoing a revolution

I

Unlike in Charleroi, the mines of Katanga continue to thrive.

From cobalt and copper to diamonds and radium, the south-

eastern region is a veritable investor’s paradise. However,

despite these vast natural resources, widespread corruption and

fraud, alongside a lack of organisation and limited investment,

have kept the people extremely poor, its infrastructures basic

and its public services very limited.

sank into corruption and drove the business to the brink of

trade was privatised again, junior companies popped up and,

Asian multinationals use industrial mining methods and bring

in their own workers, and the informal, artisanal sector where

miners excavate and dig for minerals with their hands in a

totally unregulated setting.

from competing continents and emerging economies, as well as

there are also enormous environmental damages because

the big manufacturing plants deforest large chunks of land,

Katanga Business

actors involved in the region’s drama as everyone tries to get

family mine employs around 80,000

workers; Paul Fortin, a Canadian hired

by the World Bank and the

Congolese government to

and Chinese state interests

represented by Mr Min, nicknamed

reference to the investment deal

he strikes with Fortin. But Katanga’s

Manpeopleof thefollowing his fall from grace after a three-decade long reign of

the country that was then known as Zaire. Released in 1999,

circulate widely around DRC, according to local media reports.

But despite the critical nature of his work, Michel says his

With Katanga Business, the 56-year-old Walloon ventures

more on socio-political topics, this new documentary looks

European, American and Chinese businesses as they compete

for multimillion dollar mining contracts in Katanga, one of the

most mineral-rich provinces in DRC.

his upbringing in the Walloon city of Charleroi, a once-important

industrial hub for coal and steel production that now struggles

with unemployment and impoverishment.

I acquired a fascination for the raw landscape and people’s faces

marked by deep wrinkles and years spent working underground.

The other thing that marked me was to see the decline of a

Left: Large chunks of land are stripped of trees to make way for mines; Right: Paul Fortin and Mr Min are big players in DRC’s mining sector

Moïse Katumbi Chapwe is seen as a local hero when it comes to regulating the mining trade

Katanga now faces a real chance to revolutionise the way the mining business is run

THIERRY MICHEL | GREEN n

Katanga Business portrays the struggle and inequality faced by local miners

26 | Brussels Airlines b.spirit! magazine | May/Jun 09

continuent à tourner. Du cobalt au cuivre et des diamants

au radium, le sud-est de la région représente un véritable

de richesses naturelles n’a réussi qu’à déboucher sur la

corruption et la fraude généralisées, allant de concert avec un

manque d’organisation et des investissements limités. Résultat

: la population vit toujours dans un état d’extrême pauvreté,

les infrastructures sont rudimentaires et les services publics

particulièrement réduits.

rapidement basculé dans la corruption et conduit l’entreprise

assisté à l’arrivée de nouvelles jeunes compagnies et, fait

illicitement des minerais bruts. Vous avez donc d’un côté le

asiatiques utilisent leurs méthodes d’exploitation et apportent

leur propre main d’œuvre, et de l’autre, le secteur informel,

artisanal où les mineurs excavent et creusent à la main, dans

un milieu totalement non régulé.

Une bataille est en train d’être livrée ici entre les grosses

compagnies multinationales, entre continents concurrents

et les économies émergeantes, sur fond également de guerre

générés par la terre de leurs ancêtres, et dont tout le monde

environnementaux suite à la déforestation par les grosses

industries de pans entiers de terrain, bien que cela soit un

Katanga Business

Parmi ces derniers, on recense le patriarche industriel belge

travailleurs ; Paul Fortin, un Canadien engagé par la Banque

Mondiale et le gouvernement congolais qui tente de sauver

en référence à l’accord d’investissement conclu avec Fortin.

Mais le réel espoir du Katanga se dessine sous la forme du

gouverneur de la province, également le héros local, Moïse Katumbi

Chapwe, en fonction depuis février 2007. À peine âgé de 45 ans,

ce politicien charismatique, qui est aussi propriétaire du club local

de football TP Mazembe, incarne une nouvelle génération de

gouvernance, de celle qui pourrait aider la région à s’émanciper

dans le contexte de cette révolution industrielle en cours.

à une réelle chance de révolutionner la façon dont l’activité

minière est gérée, en établissant des règles et des normes de

Katanga Business vient juste d’être diffusé sur les écrans

et déjà Michel travaille à son prochain projet, un tour d’Asie,

avaient à nouveau fermé les frontières aux visiteurs étrangers,

Een man van het volkTerwijl anderen omstreden onderwerpen verbloemen, blijft

documentairefilmmaker Thierry Michel graven om de waarheid bloot

te leggen. Zo wierp hij zijn licht op gewapende humanitaire hulp in

Somalië, de koloniale erfenis van Afrika en de socioculturele rol van

de Congorivier. Hij is ook de regisseur van een intiem portret van

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu nadat die uit de gratie raakte in het land dat

toen nog Zaïre werd genoemd. Van de in 1999 uitgegeven film

zouden in de Democratische Republiek Congo heel wat illegale

kopieën circuleren.

uitdagen en confronteren. Ik ben geboeid door de manier waarop de

Zijn nieuwe documentaire Katanga Business bestudeert de

Europese, Amerikaanse en Chinese bedrijven die wedijveren om een

mijnbouwcontract in Katanga, een van de meest mineraalrijke

concurrerende continenten en opkomende economische machten,

maar ook een sociale oorlog voor Afrikanen die nu moeten toezien

hoe iedereen behalve zij meedelen in de winsten uit het land van

Maar er is hoop voor Katanga, en dan wel in de vorm van

gouverneur Moïse Katumbi Chapwe. Deze charismatische politicus

belichaamt een nieuwe generatie leiders die de streek kunnen

krijgt nu een mooie kans om verandering te brengen in de manier

Michel is ondertussen druk bezig met een nieuw project, een reis

doorheen Azië en ook Tibet. Wanneer we hem vertellen dat China

maar weer eens heeft besloten de grenzen te sluiten voor

Brussels Airlines

flies to Kinshasa

as well as 13

other African

destinations. For

more information

on flights or

to book, visit

brusselsairlines.com

Fly me there

true hope comes in the shape of the province’s governor and

2007. Barely 45, this charismatic politician, who also owns the

local football club, TP Mazembe, embodies a new generation of

leadership, one that could help the region to emancipate itself

on the back of the current industrial revolution.

to revolutionise the way in which the mining business is run,

to establish rules and norms to regulate the trade, and to help

While Katanga Business has only just hit the screens in

Belgium, Michel is already busy working on his next project,

a tour across Asia, including Tibet. When told that Chinese

46 sixty minutes

THE BULLETIN March 2010

Who are you?I’m a jack of all trades in a sense. My

father wanted to have a civil engineer in the family, so I did mathematics and then studied civil engineering at university. A!er failing the same year twice, I met my wife who is an engineer. I married her and thereby solved the problem of having an engineer in the family. It has provided me with a civil engineer’s mind though, I think. A!er that, I studied advertising at Saint-Luc

and launched my own agency during the four-year course. Funnily enough, some of my classmates did their intern-ship at my own company. It was all very surreal because I was also doing my military service at the same time. My captain would hand me faxes received from my ad agency while I’d be cut-ting out newspaper articles about the Belgian army. I wish I’d "lmed that time back then – it would’ve made a hilarious movie.

47

So far I’ve followed you. Now, what exactly is Addictlab?

It started as a magazine back in 1997, but to understand the concept we need to look at what I was doing at the time. I was still running my own advertis-ing agency and my clients included Belgian clothing retailer Superconfex and Korean car company Daewoo. I learnt that in order to be good at cre-ating advertising campaigns, you had to look beyond the actual product. Say you’re making a commercial for Daewoo and the basic script idea is a woman getting out of bed and into her car. In order to make this ad, you need to understand women, what type of hair does she have and what clothes is she wearing. You need to understand architecture because you have to select a house that suits the woman’s personality and "ts the car. You need to understand art because there will be a painting hanging above the bed in the commercial and it once again re#ects the woman who in turn re#ects the choice of her car. It’s all very subliminal. Importantly, in order to create a coherent story you have to reach across di$erent disciplines, something that many ad agencies don’t do. Plus, as an agency, you tend to be very limited in your movement. It’s reactive: you get a brie"ng but you can’t comment on the actual product. %at’s when I began to think about the Addictlab concept: I wanted to create a creative hub that was proactive and research things and topics without relying on a client’s brief.

Aha. What was the next step?I wanted to put together a magazine

that re#ected this proactive way of researching, where the pages showed the work in progress and also marked the beginning of the creative proc-ess, not the end product. My idea was that the editorial board should not be locked up behind closed doors in a stu$y o&ce but out in the real world. I didn’t want there to be a distance between the editors and the reader. So I simply opened the doors and said

Re-renaissance manIs it an arts collective, an ad agency or a creative think tank? An

independent organisation or a money-making brand machine? Nina

Lamparski asks Addictlab founder Jan Van Mol what exactly his

visionary company does

THE SMART ISSUE

Art imitating life: a truck built out of cardboard by Kasi Custom Rides, three Addictlab members from Soweto, South Africa. !eir work will be shown at the Miart fair in Milan and at the artbygeneva fair in Geneva. Visit www.sowetolab.com for more info

48 sixty minutes

THE BULLETIN March 2010

‘Let’s research!’ I invited friends work-ing in advertising and as art directors to contribute to the "rst Addict maga-zine. %e research areas could focus on anything from movies to love or what-ever. My friends then brought their photographer friends who in turn brought stylists; the stylists brought fashion designers; and so on. Because of the open-source concept of this magazine, it started to develop its own identity and dynamic.”

And then?In the late 1990s I decided to sell

my agency and instead began to do customised Addict projects for com-panies. We were approached by brands like Lee Cooper, Nike and Diesel who wanted to feature in the magazine and reach our readership. But they initially misunderstood our concept. When I told Nike that I wasn’t interested in having an ad in the magazine, they were like, “Wait, what did you say?” So I went to London for a face-to-face meeting and to explain how Addict worked. %ey would tell us about their

latest collection. In return for a fee, we would then bring people together from our database to create a whole experience around the concept and "nd a language that would work with the magazine’s vision. Instead of an ad, you would see for example a project done with some fashion designer on page 15 and a project done with Nike on page 16. %ere is nothing sublimi-nal about it: if there’s a brand involved, we’ll tell you about it in the content page. It’s very transparent.

Can you tell me a bit more about the creative process?

Nike wanted to create something for the 2004 Olympic Games in London. %e company was sponsoring a sprint champion so we created an indoor track on canvas and she was running on the canvas while wearing red Nikes. %e only think you see is the steps on the canvas. We recreated what she was doing as an athlete and turned it into an art piece.”

Cool. But the magazine wasn’t enough for you, was it?

I felt that it wasn’t going far enough. For me the visual stopping power of the images weren’t the end process – it’s what hides behind them. So I decided to not only use magazines as an output but also launch exhibitions and "nd so-called lab members to physically come to the space and display their projects. You as the reader suddenly have di$er-ent tools to grasp a creative idea. You can see it in the magazine, but you can also come to the exhibition open-ing, talk to the designer, have a cup of co$ee with them, touch the fabric... This all added different aspects to the story. But it was a very challeng-ing moment: how do you go from being a magazine publisher to a crea-tive laboratory without leaning too much towards fashion or design or advertising?

What’s the business model?We’re consultants not an agency. We

have an equal partnership with brands. We create a bridge between companies

or cities needing innovation and 4000 creative minds or lab members around the world, from Brussels to Soweto. We mostly create lab topics for research ourselves but sometimes they’re com-missioned, like the ‘broom lab’. Let’s face it – I would’ve never come up with that myself. A company wanted us to do research on the next generation of household cleaning products. %e key for conceptual thinking is that you need people who have nothing to do with the project as such. If you design a broom and you want to think out of the box conceptually, you need people who know how to clean, you don’t need people who know how to design a broom.

Who owns the ideas?On the one hand, we o&cially hire

people from our database to work on a commissioned project. Ideas gener-ated during these brainstorming ses-sions obviously belong to the client. But at the same time I will put up the brie"ng online without giving the company’s name or any further detail. People send in their ideas, which get stored in a confidential database. During the business meeting I present the client with two separate propos-als: those they have paid for and those they haven’t paid for. I make them sign an agreement that they are not allowed to use any ideas sent in via the website without directly talking to the owner.

No wonder you’re featured in our Smart section. Sadly we’re running out of time. Can you quickly share your favoured project?

When I was in Soweto, three guys sent me an email saying, “We believe you can be the gateway to our suc-cess”. %ere was an image attached of a car made out of cardboard. %ese guys are trained car designers who use cardboard and their hands to create replicas. It blew my mind. But what do you do with that kind of knowledge? I’ll bringing it to art fairs in Milan and Geneva. %e cars are being shipped as we speak.”

THE SMART ISSUE

In shortJan Van Mol was born in Belgium,

lived in South Africa and currently

resides in Geneva. In 1997, the

former advertising executive launched

Addict magazine, which quickly

grew into today’s Addictlab concept.

!e huge global database is made

up of 4000 creative talents – from

fashion designers, photographers and

scientists, to sculptors, cooks and

graphic artists – who, through ad-hoc

interdisciplinary collaborations, help

brand companies, NGOs, cities and

even government departments. !e

results of their commissioned and

independent works are displayed at

art fairs, galleries, as well as in Addict

books and magazines.

www.addictlab.com