Blog

Brussels, 06.12.24

One year has passed, I am so excited to share the new adventures of this research project on street poetry!

The contribution “Poetry Bombing: from the Streets to Social-Madia” co-authored with Prof. Dr. Ann Peeters has been finally published; you can find all the relevant information in the “publications” section of this website.

In the same “publications” section you can also find a new publication on the research journal Urban Matters written in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Ann Peeters entitled “Street Poetry: The Lyrical and Societal Voice of the City”.

Besides all this wonderful news, something even more wonderful just happened!

I had the chance to do a second research in stay in London, after the one of last Summer at University College of London, this time for a last rush round for collecting street poems (yeah, the crowdsourcing will close at the end of February!).

It has been such an inspiring stay and I am so grateful for this opportunity. First of all, I would like to thank the VUB students who came with me and helped me out in this poetic treasure hunt in the streets of London. Secondly, I would like to thank the following artists: The Misfortune Teller, WRD SMTH, Trusty Scribe and Angry Dan who so kindly found the time to meet me and talk about their works. A further thank to the National Poetry Library for being the most welcoming and inspiring headquarters of this research stay, the Feminist Library for their kind help and the Exiled Writers Ink collective for the interest shown in my research.

I am looking forward to diving in the data which has been collected during this research stay, and slowly but steadily unveil what poems the walls of London share with its passers-by!

Brussels, 06.12.23

What a period! November has been so rich in activities and inspirational encounters.

First of all, the contribution “Poetry Bombing: from the Streets to Social-Madia” co-authored with Prof. Dr. Ann Peeters has been sent and we are waiting for the first review any time soon!

Another, excellent news: I have finally received from VUB’s Ethical Committee the approval for undergoing the interview process. This is really exciting news! I am looking forward to interview the poets and the artists who contribute to the spread of street poetry around Europe.

However the most inspiring activities took place between the 23rd and 24th of November.

On the 23rd I had the chance to attend a creative writing workshop by the professor, author and poet Patrick McGuinness. The writing workshop was really a breath of fresh air during the grey November afternoon. We experimented with narrative voices and we were asked to write a story, a poem or an extract based on Hopper’s paintings. For me, it was a first time challenging myself with prose and at the end I found it really catchy! Who knows? Maybe one day I will write a novel!

On the 24th our study group CLIC organized its annual study day, this year entitled “BRUSSELS IN THE LITERARY AND ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE”. The program was incredibly rich and quite captivating.

Arvi Sepp (CLIC Chair, VUB), Daniel Acke (VUB) and Elisabeth Bekers (VUB) opened the day with a warm welcome and introduction.

Michael Rosenfeld (VUB) made an exhilarating and clever introduction to the keynote speaker Patrick McGuinness who delivered a fascinating lecture about the poetic strength and imaginary of the city of Brussels. From Odilon-Jean Perier to today’s street poetry, under the rain or near a train, poetry seems to take its place in the streets of Brussels.

The first panel focused on “The Politics of Brussels in Literature” (moderator Daniel Acke, VUB) and hosted the talks “How Different or Similar Can Brussels be Painted in Francophone and Anglophone African novels – A Short Exploration” by Karen Ferreira-Meyer (University of Eswatini/University of the Free State, South Africa), “The Brussels bubble? Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt [The Capital] and The Political Imagination of Europe” by Inge Arteel (VUB) and Mathias Meert (VUB) and “‘She Had Not Yet Done With Me.’ Brussels in the sentimental imagination” by Thomas Rommel (Freie Universität Berlin).

The second panel concentrated on “Intermedial Artistic Approaches to Brussels” (moderator Diana Castilleja, VUB) and contained the Janine Hauthal (VUB)’s talk “Brussels in Contemporary Music Videos by Warsky, Stromae, Damso and Angèle” and the presentation “Brussels, Talk to Me: The Phenomenon of Street Poetry in Belgium’s Capital” that Ann Peeters (VUB) and I have co-authored. Our talk was a real success and it felt great to be able to share part of my preliminary results on street poetry in Brussels!

The last panel was an artistic one and it entailed readings and conversations with authors, translators and publishers. We were simply delighted by the bilingual reading of Gone to the Dogs (Madame)/De Perros (Madame) by Alecia McKenzie (author) and Emilia María Durán Almarza (translator to Spanish) and Patrick McGuinness reading performance. In this panel I had the absolute pleasure to share the floor with two amazing poets and friends Timotéo Sergoï and David Giannoni. Over this interview we tackled many interesting points about the link between street poetry, edition and Brussels. It was raining questions! All the participants seemed to have a sparkling exchange.

I would like to warmly thank all the organizers and all the participants for such a creative and inspiring moment of research.

Last but not the least, on the 27th of November I had the opportunity to attend the lecture by Prof. Jo Angouri (University of Warwick)  “Multilingual Education: a Utopia or Moment in European Education” followed by an inspiring discussion about multilingual education and inclusion in contemporary European society with Jan Danckaert (Rector Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Sven Gatz (Brussels Minister of multilingualism, Finances, Budget, Civil service and Education in Dutch), Ann Peeters (Professor in Linguistics and Literary Studies at VUB) and Wim Vandenbussche (Professor in Linguistics at VUB).

And now, what about December? For the moment some interesting things are going on in the Poetry section, go and have a look!

Brussels, 09.10.23

Here it comes a short summary of the last activities… it has been a while!

After our last update in May a good part of the focus has been on the collection of data: the corpora for Brussels and Rome start to be really satisfying.

Something to look forward to: I have recently sent out an application for ethical approval, therefore we all cross fingers that I will be soon able to start the interview process. I am genuinely looking forward to meeting and interviewing the artists! I am sure this will provide very inspiring insights on the phenomenon of street poetry.

Without a doubt, one of the most exciting activities of the past few months has been the research stay in London. This summer, I had the opportunity to attend the summer school ‘Public Art, Graffiti and the Right to the City’ at the prestigious UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON. The course was truly inspirational; having the opportunity to move away from literary criticism and delve into aspects of architecture, art history and communication gave me the drive to be more creative in my research and consider angles of analysis that I had not considered before. The weeks spent at UCL were really a breath of fresh air, necessary to regain the right motivation and passion. It’s amazing how sometimes approaching the same topic from a different perspective makes you see everything from a more creative side!

Even more exciting was being able to finally start the collection of street poems in London, yes finally the London corpus is starting to take shape! It was a really good opportunity to explore the street art scene in London as well as the poetry scene. In fact, I had a lot of luck: I had the chance to attend several meetings at the Southbank Centre where the International Poetry Festival was taking place as well as one of the capital’s hottest open mics, that of Flo Vortex.
Finally, I am really happy to have also launched the crowdsourcing in this city: here, I would like to take a moment to thank all the people who are participating in this project by sending street poems and spreading the word about the crowdsourcing (a special wink to the very kind staff of the National Poetry Library in London, People’s Museum Somers Town and FloVortex: thank you for your help!).

And now back in Brussels, there is no shortage of news and various things are boiling in the pot! Let’s get ready for new articles, new encounters and new poetic experiences. One among many, I will soon have the pleasure to present on November 24 together with my supervisor Prof. Dr. A. Peeters some research results on the Brussels area with a talk entitled “Brussels, Talk to Me: The Phenomenon of Street Poetry in Belgium’s Capital”.

More information coming soon !

Brussels, 16.05.2023

The moment for a catch up is finally arrived and I have exciting news to share.

In the last few months I have finalised the organisation of the poems in Rome; the collection of data is still ongoing but now there is a consistent corpus ready for being selected and analysed.

The improvement of the crowdsourcing through stickers and flyers is finally giving its first results especially concerning the collection of data in the city of London: I warmly invite all readers to take a look and participate to the crowdsource! Above all, I want to thank you all the people who have been and are collaborating to the poems hunt!

It was also a period of exciting experiences.

In March, I had the chance to meet Dr. Kila van der Starre, author of the inspiring PhD disserartion Poëzie buiten het boek. De circulatie en het gebruik van poëzie (Poetry off the page. The circulation and use of poetry). In her dissertation Dr. Kila van der Starre offers an exhaustive analysis of the different forms of poetry off the page. Poetry as a tatoo, marchandise, poetry on the radio, and among others, she also dedicates one chapter to the phenomenon of street poetry. In the framework of her reseacrh, she has also created with the Interactive Culture Foundation the free smartphone app VERS which offers street poetry tours by bike or foot in the city of Utrecht. I have tried the walking street poetry tour myself and I can highly recommend it, such a poetic and original way to get to know a city!

Another inspriring experience that I attended was the international conference “Audioliterary Poetry between Performance and Mediatization” at the University of Hamburg. The conference took place from the 11th to the 13rd of May in the suggestive location of the Warburg Haus in Hamburg. The Warburg Haus is an historical building from 1925 known nowadays as the Aby-Warburg-Foundation. The first day, I particpated to the first panel “Media Transgressions: Transcriptive Movements of Performed Poetry” with the contributions of Ass.-Prof. Dr. Julia Lajta-Novak (Universität Wien), Annegret Märten (King’s College, London/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Dr. Johannes Ullmaier (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz) and Katharina Mevissen (Freie Universität Berlin). In the evening we all had the chance to see the poetic and sound performance of the artist Kinga Toth in the Thalia Theater. The second day hosted two panels: “Techno-Poetic Environments: Digital Processing and Posthuman Orality” with Prof. Jessica Pressman (San Diego State University), Dr. Shalini Sengupta (Universität Wien), Prof. Magali Nachtergael (Université Bordeaux-Montaigne) and Vadim Keylin, PhD (Universität Hamburg). The third panel of the conference, “Performative Embodiments: Multisensory Poetry Performances” hosted the talks of Dr. Nataliya Gorbina (Universität Konstanz) and Clara Cosima Wolff (Universität Hamburg). During the last day I had the chance to share my contribution “Poetry Bombing: from Streets to Social Media” in the fourth and last panel “Poetic Activism: New Networks and the Public” togheter with contributions of Julia Lückl, (Universität Wien) and PD Dr. Martina Pfeiler (Universität Wien).

It was an honour and pleasure to share my research interests with such an amazing and highly prepared group of people. I would like to thank Claudia Benthien, Kira Henkel, Anna Hofman, Magdalena Korecka, Marc Matter, Antje Schmidt and Clara Cosima Wolff for organizing such inspiring event. I would also like to thank all the participants for their presence, their feedback and comments: I came back to Brussels in a very poetic mood!

Brussels, 02.09.2022

This summer has been intense in terms of new study experiences.

A first challenging experience was the attendance to the Summer School “Digital Humanities: Genetic editing, from manuscripts to born-digital writing processes”. This study experience took place between the week from the 27th of June to the 1st of July at the University of Antwerp. Over this week I had the chance to familiarise with the digital editorial processes and to gain an exhaustive theoretical knowledge as much as hands-on practice of XML and TEI writing practices. Generally speaking, it was a fruitful study experience that gave me the possibility to comprehend more into detail how digital editions works; it also made me wonder about the possibility of creating a digital edition of my street poetry’s corpus, however for the moment, I will keep this option in mind for future project’s developments.

A second, challenging as much as inspiring experience was the participation at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology” at the University of Leipzig. The Summer School in Leipzig took place over the first two weeks of August and it offered ten different workshops, six lectures, two teaser sections, three poster presentations and one poster presentation section. It also included a panel discussion as much as a diversified cultural programme dedicated to the city of Leipzig as much as to DH methodologies. Over these two weeks I attended the workshop “Distant Reading in R: from Text Analysis to Mapping” under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Simone Rebora and Prof. Dr. Giovanni Vitali. I found the concept of distant reading extremely interesting and pertinent for my research. Over the first week I had the chance to take my first steps in R gaining background theories and practicing exercises on the three most common methods used in distant reading applied to Text Analysis: sentiment analysis, top modelling and stylometry. Personally, I was particularly fascinated by the practice and theory of sentiment analysis and I am currently considering the pros and cons of applying such method to my research. The second week was dedicated to data visualisation methods as graphs, networks and mapping. This last week was extremely interesting and inspiring for the further developments of my project; we had the possibility to have hands-on practice on programs as Gephi, QGIS and of course R. I feel that this study experience was the natural continuation of the path started in Poitiers last May and I am looking forward to start practicing more and more these new methods. I also had the chance to present my project over the project presentation section, and I would like to thank again all the fellow students, colleagues and experts who gave me the possibility to illustrate my project and to receive feedbacks.

Lastly, I would like to stress one more time how rich it was this experience and how thankful I am for having the possibility to attend this last edition of the European Summer University in Digital Humanities: it is a rare opportunity to have such a welcoming, warming and high level study environment. Future steps for the month of September are to keep collecting poems through work field and crowdsourcing, organising poems collected and analysed in Brussels, and first and foremost to keep mapping!

Brussels, 8.06.2022

I am very excited to finally share this first post about my PhD research!  

The project “Street poetry and political engagement in contemporary Western Europe” is finally taking its first steps into the real world!  

Before going into detail about what has been the research in these last few months, I would like to thank Livia Ribichini for creating this amazing website. Indeed, the website is the starting point not only for the vulgarisation of my work but also, and most importantly, for collecting new poems, receiving research hints and poetic inspiration. Without this digital platform, a considerable part of the project could not be developed; I sincerely hope to reach more and more curious readers with the time. I would also like to thank all the people who have already started to participate in crowdsourcing; thank you so much for your contributions, I cannot stress enough how your participation can positively affect the course of this project. 

During this last period, the research has been focused on the city of Brussels. More than 70 poems have been collected in the Belgian capital. The analysis of this first portion of the corpus is already stunning for its variety: 

  • Six different languages have been detected: French, Dutch, English, Italian, Arabic and Portuguese. 
  • Different examples of diversified multilingualism: external multilingualism Dutch-French, English-French and one example of internal multilingualism with the blending of Italian and the roman dialect. 
  • Most of the poems have been collected in the neighbourhoods of Ixelles and Bruxelles Ville, followed by Saint-Gilles, Etterbeek, Scharbeek, Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode, Watermael and Molenbeek. I count on finding more street poems in other neighbourhoods for the future, nonetheless these geo-spatial data already offer a lot for the geo-critical analysis, especially concerning the tension between central and peripheral areas. 
  • All the expected street art related techniques have been used: small graffiti is the most used technique followed by sticker, spray stencil, poster and installation, the latter only detected on the VUB campus for the moment. At the present time, I couldn’t find any poetic murales. 
  • Four cases of intertextuality related to the influence of the French poetic tradition have been found: Boris Vian, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and Jacques Prevert. 
  • Many authors and collectives have participated in the spreading of street poetry in Brussels: Timoteo Sergoï and Petite Poissonne with one exhibition each (in Sprimont at the ‘Salon du Livre engagé’ and in the ‘Theater La Balsamine’ in Brussels), Accìon Poetica and the students at VUB on the university campus, La rue aux lettres, les 7 pechées du capitalisme, Er Pinto, La Dactylo and many other artists are to be identified! At the present moment, most of the compositions are still anonymous and they may stay so. 

You can find all this information about street poetry in Brussels on the map provided on this site. If you want more details or wish to share some news do not hesitate to get in contact through the email addresses in the contact section. 

The future steps of the research will consist in collecting poems, updating the map, and starting to go through the literary and geo-spatial analysis. In order to progress on the first analytical step, I have listed a thematic structure connected to two macro groups:  

  1. social injustice entailing consumerism, feminism, pandemic, oppression, freedom, and communication as themes 
  1. meta-artistic merging broader themes such as empathy, love, art, and existence. 

Of course, these two categories do not have to be seen as absolute, but they can share contaminations and eventually even overlap.  

For the geo-spatial analysis, a big step forward has been taken after attending the EnExDi Winter School at the University of Poitiers in France. Under the expert guidance of an excellent team of researchers and experts in Digital Humanities I have received an inspiring overview of the DH’s world. The application of these tools would represent an incredible support to my project not only for the geo-spatial study but also for all the other analytical sections of the research. For the moment, I have decided to focus my energies on the field of data visualization and in the process of mapping. 

Thanks to the amazing tutoring of Prof. Dr. Giovanni Vitali, I have started this adventure in the world of mapping, a critical concept as much as a technique to localise items and ideas. I am positive that I will continue to train myself in this field and I am sure that my research will benefit from this study approach. 

I would like to finish my post by thanking all the participants of the EnExDi Winter School for the inspirational vibes shared this past week. It was a pleasure to get to know all of you and I am looking forward to reading more about your projects! 

There is also some exciting news in the POETRY section! Do not hesitate to have a look!