Save M HKA: A Roundtable – Responses from Hicham Khalidi

I work in the Netherlands but live in Belgium, and I’ve been professionally active in Belgium for about twelve years now. I’ve sat on many committees, worked at STUK in Leuven, and have been part of the Venice Biennale jury for both Belgium and the Netherlands. I also curated the Dutch Pavilion in 2024. All of this gives me a sense of where decisions like these reverberate, and of the repercussions for those of us on the ground. Politicians often don’t. They simply don’t register the impact – but for us, the effects are immediate. The loss of A.PASS as it existed in Brussels, for instance, and the complete disappearance of HISK (Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten) in Flanders, has had a tremendous effect. People often don’t realise that these systems were built up over decades – twenty, thirty years of labour, relationships, and accumulated knowledge. They’re not just organisations; they’re part of ecosystems that should be handled with care.