One season, one drawing

This season, Les Brigittines is launching a series of collaborations with comic strip artists. What better than the comic strip, the pop medium par excellence, to give visual expression to the spirit we want our arts centre to radiate? And is Brussels not known as the capital of the comic strip?
So from now on, we will invite a comic strip artist to create a visual for each season. Whether well-known or not, inspired by conversations, by the programme or by their own imagination, each artist will have carte blanche to create their own vision of Les Brigittines.
For this first edition, we asked Thierry Van Hasselt, Brussels author and publisher and co-founder of Frémok, one of Belgium's most interesting independent publishing houses.

Thierry Van Hasselt, born in 1969 in Ixelles, is an author, scenographer, visual artist and publisher. He studied comic strip art at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels, where he met Olivier Deprez. Together, they founded the publishing house Fréon in 1994, which would later be renamed Frémok, in collaboration with Amok Editions. 
His first book, Gloria Lopez (1999), an obsessive investigation into the whereabouts of a ‘virtuous Justine’, earned him much critical acclaim. Karine Pontiès, dancer and choreographer with the Dame de pic company, then approached him with a proposal for a joint creation in the form of a book, Brutalis (2002), and a performance. 

In 2010, Thierry Van Hasselt was closely involved in Frémok's collaboration with S, a contemporary arts centre in Vielsalm, where he met Marcel Schmitz, one of the artists in residence at the time. Their collaboration culminated in Vivre à FranDisco (2016), a comic strip in which he brings to life the cardboard and tape city that Schmitz built day after day. FranDisco subsequently travelled as an installation to prestigious venues, including the Vasarely Foundation, the Palais du Facteur Cheval, the Agnès B. gallery and the Cartoon Museum in Basel.

In 2021, when the city no longer appealed to him and Marcel Schmitz had discovered a new planet, Thierry Van Hasselt launched Planète 2 with him. Four issues of this magazine were published, accompanied by an exhibition at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, in which he explored the ‘planet of lovers’ alongside a galaxy of innovative artists.
Taking an interest in FranDisco’s Saint Nicholas and the original legend of the patron saint of children, Thierry Van Hasselt then embarked on a 160-page short story, La Véritable histoire de Saint-Nicolas (2023), in which the saint mutates and invites all the children he meets to rise up in rebellion. Winner of the Prima Bula prize and co-winner of the Bulles d'Humanité prize awarded by the newspaper l'Humanité, La Véritable histoire de Saint-Nicolas has been selected for the official programme of the 2024 Angoulême Festival.