Dit is geen appel.

Good and evil and everything in between is the subject of investigation by the participants and the artists for this installation. The students of the Spermalie Hotel and Tourism School were involved in choosing the apple as a symbol of faith in the broadest sense: from fertility, eternal beauty, knowledge and wisdom to the temptation to sin and commit evil. The images that the artists made together with the students reflect the transience and temptations of life. Apples slowly appear, are processed and transformed – until they explode and vanish. We hear a poetic text constructed from words and sentences from interviews conducted with the students. In this unusual artwork, the highs and lows of life are examined up close and with honesty.

Moreover, a very special apple snack will be made and distributed by the students of Hotel and Tourism School Spermalie every day between 14:00 and 18:00.

Theme

At the start of this project, the artists were haunted by three words: faith, heritage and food. As you make your way to the Spermalie Hotel and Tourism School, which is almost in the heart of Bruges, you pass one church after another. It is a route that shows what an important role religion has played in Bruges down through the centuries. In the school itself, food and cooking are the main subjects. The artists, therefore, approached their conversations about faith with the young people from the perspective of food. Eating together and sharing food: they have always been central within faiths. You also see this in the endless still lifes—mainly of bowls of fruit—in Bruges’ museums. But what do the students think of this, and what do they believe in these days? The apple emerged from all this as a particularly powerful symbol in the history of religion. The apple stands for knowledge but also for fertility and sin. This installation draws its inspiration from this idea: by processing apples, we explore how transience, temptation and sin manifest themselves in our lives today.