As previously mentioned, last Christmas I got F a book about the craziest places of Belgium, liberally scattered around the kingdom, and not that many of them within easy reach. I did find one not too far away: the Post-Industrial Pagodas.
These 36 towers were built in 1999, from industrial cable spools, by singer, actor and artist Julos Beaucarne, to channel positive energy into the new millennium. They embodied a poem he had written in the early 1990s, for his album Tours, Temples & Pagodes Post-Industriels:
| Le constructeur de pagodes veut toucher le ciel Planter des antennes immenses pour capter les messages Qui viennent du fin fond de la nuit et du bout du jour Il veut que le voyageur s’arrête et regarde soudain se déplier tous les plis de son âme | The pagoda builder wants to touch the sky Plant huge antennas to capture messages Which come from the depths of the night and the end of the day He wants the traveler to stop and suddenly watch all the creases of his soul unfold |
| Il veut pénétrer la matière même de l’univers Il veut faire signe à toutes les planètes, à toutes les galaxies Il veut lancer des messages, jeter des ponts entre tous les êtres, entre tout le vivant Le constructeur de pagodes, de temples et de tours médite sur la verticalité | He wants to penetrate the very matter of the universe He wants to signal to all the planets, to all the galaxies He wants to send messages, build bridges between all beings, between all living things The builder of pagodas, temples and towers meditates on verticality |
| Il récupère les matériaux usés dont plus personne ne veut Il les empile à la manière des enfants Petit Poucet, il sème sur son passage des repères géants Et ce faisant, il signe éperdument le paysage post-industriel | He recovers used materials that no one wants anymore He stacks them like children do Like Hop-o’-My-Thumb, he sows giant landmarks along his path And in doing so, he indelibly marks the post-industrial landscape |
As the years wore on, the pagodas became increasingly dilapidated, as was always the artist’s intention.
The site of the pagodas is the farm of Wahenge, which has a pleasant but coincidental euphony with Stonehenge, near Beauvechain which is mainly famous for its air base.
It’s not too far off my route to and from the girls in Tienen, so I went to look for it last weekend, and was astonished to discover that the Post-Industrial Pagodas had simply vanished.
It turned out that there was a simple explanation. In January 2021, eight months before Beaucarne’s death, he agreed with the landowner and the municipality that they would simply burn down the pagodas, leaving only a patch of scorched grass. One mysterious capsule and one surviving spool mark the scene.
But apart from that, the Post-Industrial Pagodas are marked by their absence. Consider yourselves duly informed.