People are depressive, try to escape or drop out. Is this the way we want to go on?
Dan Pink, the visionary speechwriter of Al Gore, the former US vice president and maker of the award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, wrote in his bestseller A whole New Mind that the era of technicians and statisticians is over and that the 21st century will be marked by six new aptitudes: empathy, inventiveness, game, design, symphony and meaning.
Doel, a small, 700-year old village in the Flemish polder on the left bank of the river Scheldt, north of the city/port of Antwerp, will be demolished now that the economic context has changed, the growth model is increasingly being questioned and mentalities are changing.
From the early 1970s on, the Port Authority ignored farmers' and villagers' protests and started to expropriate houses in several polder villages. Hereby they were sacrificing local rural communities and heritage (farms, villages and landscape) to industrial and economic interests.
Why must a historically valuable village like Doel disappear and why can our political leaders not review their narrow economic approach and open their minds to imaginative solutions that will benefit society as a whole?
KunstDoel is performing a new way of protesting against this "murder". Eva van Tulden responsible of this association has devoted her life to welcome artists, poets and writers who show that culture and tradition must be preserved.
This village with a heart that is still throbbing and a population that would love to stay won't be suffocated?
We strongly believe that this village with a tremendous aesthetic power deserves a future, if only the authorities were willing to have a visionary mind and make a relatively small infrastructural investment: a village in and for the port and the city, "not against", a village allowing the port authority to show its genuine concern for society and culture in an authentic, warm-hearted way.
The old village is no more and will never come back, but art and culture could give Doel a new destiny and future. There is no doubt about that, but: MAY POETRY SAVE DOEL?



Tomorrow's energy comes from today's ideas
Enel extends the date to join the international “WinDesign” contest to August 30, 2025. A unique opportunity to imagine the new design of wind turbines.