After Ruth Lasters, all city poets are now also resigning in Antwerp: “Scraping project subsidies was the last straw” | Antwerp

After Ruth Lasters, the four remaining city poets of Antwerp also resign. The decision of the city council to cancel cultural project subsidies was decisive. VRT reports this on Saturday morning.

Since the beginning of this year, Antwerp has had not one, but five city poets. On the first day of the school year, Ruth Lasters threw in the towel because the city council had refused one of her poems. Ransom was a critical poem about the unequal treatment of children and young people in vocational education.

After her resignation, the remaining city poets – Yannick Dangre, Lotte Dodion, Lies Van Gasse and the duo Prose-K – consulted with the city council. “To see whether the city poet can take up the critical space it used to have,” says Lotte Dodion.

There were talks with aldermen of culture Nabilla Ait Daoud (N-VA) and her cabinet and the writers’ organization PEN Vlaanderen tried to mediate. The intention was to come to a licensing agreement with concrete agreements for the city poets, but after two months there is still no agreement.

All city poets are now resigning together, a decision that also has to do with the broader cultural climate in Antwerp, in particular the scrapping of cultural project subsidies. The poets are particularly concerned about the lack of interest and support from the city council.

The relationship between the sector and the city is very skewed. The cultural field also blames the city for the loss of the Book Fair, the Cultuurmarkt, the difficult situation in which Toneelhuis found itself this year, the deletion of Lasters’ urban poem, the failure to index structural cultural subsidies and the complete cancellation of project subsidies. The latter in particular has been causing bad blood for weeks and has led to various actions and protests.