I’ve always lived just a few kilometers from the Belgian border. Countless hours on my road bike took me through the borderlands, I hiked the Ardennes with friends just a short drive away, and for years, we spent weekends at Belgian festivals. Crossing the border, you instantly know you’re in Belgium. Not because of the roads, but because Belgium is unmistakably Belgium. It’s fantastic in its ugliness—honest, unpolished, familiar, old, and unapologetically itself. What’s broken can stay broken. What isn’t beautiful doesn’t pretend to be. The Netherlands polishes; Belgium simply is. In Belgica, I try to capture its essence—why I recognize it in an instant but struggle to define what I truly see. Belgica is an ongoing and probably never ending project.
