UPCOMING CULTURE EVENTS
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CULTIVATING PEACE FROM WITHIN
Building the Human Capacities for a More Cohesive Europe
Peace Forum Launch / Tue 22nd Sept / 5-7 pm
*Hosted event
For registrations: Register here
*Google form is hosted on another website
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The Brussels Peace Salon is a new convening platform for intercultural dialogue exploring how holistic education, healing, ecology, leadership, and community practice contribute to lasting peace. In addition to keynote presentations, the event will incorporate small-group workshops and experiential exercises.
The platform will also serve as a space for networking and relationship-building among peace-building allies in a convivial setting.
*Hosted events are events we are happy to support, but are not responsible for the content.
Book Launch / Wed 23rd Sept / 6pm - 8pm
*Doors open at 5.30pm*
*Hosted event, en français
Les Juifs, les Arabes, ma famille et moi by Pierre Hazan is a deeply personal yet political narrative tracing two centuries of Jewish-Arab coexistence through the story of the author's own family.
Writing as a member of the last generation of Jews born in Arab lands, Hazan traces this history through four figures: his ancestor Moshe, a rabbi who journeyed from Jerusalem to Europe and back before siding with the Arab world against European colonial powers; his great-uncle Daoud, a revolutionary and co-founder of Egypt's first independence party who was sentenced to death by the British yet remained a Zionist; his maternal grandfather Maurice, whose Arab, Jewish, and British identities collided as the Middle East grew turbulent in the 1940s; and his father, Elie, who tried to delay an irreversible exile after the 1956 Suez Crisis, as Jews across the Arab world were uprooted following the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Weaving family history with broader historical currents, the book is both an elegy for a largely vanished world of Jewish-Arab coexistence and a fragile note of hope that such coexistence might be reimagined.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pierre Hazan is the former Diplomatic Correspondent for Libération (Paris) and Le Temps (Geneva), specializing in humanitarian action and international justice, and has closely observed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Middle East. A Fellow at Harvard Law School (2005) and the United States Institute of Peace (2006), he has authored several books, including Justice in a Time of War and Judging War, Judging History (Stanford University Press, 2010), and served as a U.N. expert on cultural rights in 2013.
MEDIA NETWORK DRINKS For journalists, editors & creators
Social | Tues 29th Sept | 7-9pm
Co-hosted by Brussels Media Women Introductory Talk Julie Majerczak, Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Join Brussels Media Women and Full Circle for a conversation with Julie Majerczak from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on the growing challenges to press freedom and the impact of disinformation on journalism in the EU and beyond.
As journalists and media professionals navigate increasing political pressure, online manipulation, and attacks on independent reporting, this event will explore how press freedom is being affected and what can be done to protect reliable, independent journalism.
It will also be an opportunity to meet others working in media, exchange experiences, and discuss the issues shaping our profession.
ABOUT:
Julie Majerczak is the Reporters Without Borders Representative to the European Institutions. She has represented the international press freedom NGO at the EU level since May 2016. Before joining RSF, Julie was a journalist for 16 years. She moved to Brussels in 2002 to report on EU affairs for the French daily newspaper Libération for which she worked for ten years. She also reported for the French daily newspaper Le Parisien, RTL radio and the online media outlets Contexte. Born in Paris, she has a Master in Law and is a graduate of Sciences Po Paris.
Brussels Media Women is a community for women working in media and journalism in Brussels. They organise informal drinks, events, and networking opportunities where members can meet, exchange experiences, and support each other.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/42542036/
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Open to all journalists editors & creators | Booking required
Bar open
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ADDITIONAL INFO
ACCESS
Bar & snacks
The Nights Are Quiet in Teheran by Shida Bazyar
Culture | Thurs 15th Oct | 7:00-8:30 pm
Monthly meet up to discuss a great read, along with drinks & good company.
*Doors open at 6.30pm. The book club begins at 7pm.
‘The pages … pulse with solidarities and betrayal, with heartache and humor.” ― the judges of The International Booker Prize 2026
Set across four decades, from 1979 to 2009, this is a polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran. It is about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.
1979. Behzad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.
1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behzad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.
1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.
2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down.
Shida Bazyar studied writing in Germany, and worked in youth education for many years. Born in 1988, she is the author of the novels The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and Sisters in Arms. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran has won the Blogger Literary Award, Ulla Hahn Prize, and Uwe Johnson Prize. The English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
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Bar open with snacks
PIANO QUARTETS
Brussels Muzieque
Music / Sun 18 Oct / 7pm
Join Brussels Muzieque for an evening of Romantic piano-quartet masterpieces.
The ensemble brings together four artists of the Brussels chamber scene: Lithuanian pianist Monika Dars, laureate of the Joseph Darche Piano Prize and chamber-music teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Mons; Kazakh violinist Meruert Karmenova, a sought-after soloist across Europe and recently appointed concertmaster in Antwerp; Polish violist Monika Młynarczyk, co-principal viola of La Monnaie / De Munt; and cellist Eduardo Tonietto, founder and artistic director of Brussels Muzieque, active internationally as a chamber musician.
Their programme spans the early and high Romantic style: Gustav Mahler’s youthful Piano Quartet, already charged with symphonic imagination; the lyrical Andante from Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60; and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47, performed in full — a cornerstone of the repertoire, rich in dialogue and warmth
*Dinner available after the concert, please book in advance
ACCES
Bar & snacks & light food
Gypsy-Jazz: Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois
Music / Thurs 22nd Oct / 8pm
*Doors & bar open 7pm. Concert starts at 8pm.
Back by popular demand, Brighton based gypsy-jazz trio Django Chutney are coming back to blow away our Full Circle audience — and this time they're sharing the stage with Trio Qu'a Trois, with the two bands taking it in turns throughout the night.
Their combination part vocal harmonies, huge repertoire that draws from so many eras and genres of the 20th century, virtuoso guitar show-offs, and ridiculous sense of fun and musical adventure has helped them secure fans in the jazz world and across the spectrum alike - all ages and all musical tasted will find something to enjoy in Django Chutney & Trio Qu'a Trois hugely entertaining and energetic performances.
Drawing from Chutney's repertoire, along with more modern tunes, 20's blues, and the very-possible chance of some Black Sabbath, Django Chutney steamroller the audience with a forceful jazz-guitar sound that amazes and delights in equal measure.
Trading sets across the evening, Trio Qu'a Trois bring their own distinct flavour to the Full Circle stage - a trio built around guitar, helicon, saxophone and banjo, blending gypsy-jazz swing with a playfully unconventional instrumentation that sets them apart.
THE BAND "Django Chutney"
Jed Cutler – Guitar & Vocals
Tom Bailey – Double Bass & Vocals
Ben Mack – Guitar & Vocals
THE BAND "Trio Qu'a Trois"
Gilles Kremer – Guitar & Helicon
Augustin Dive (Gus) – Saxophone
Philippe Quewet (Max) – Banjo & Double bass
Find them on:
WHEELCHAIR
Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran
Culture | Sat 14th Nov | 4 - 5:30 pm
NEW! A regular non-fiction book club focused on how individuals and communities navigate, survive, and resist unjust systems.
*Doors open at 3.30pm. The book club begins at 4pm.
‘the most urgent and necessary book of our times, for our times' ― Michael Morpurgo
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish writer, political thinker and journalist. Her work appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, La Stampa, Der Spiegel and Le Monde Diplomatique among other prominent international media outlets. During her twenty-year career as a journalist, and before she lost her job due to political oppression, she was twice recognized as Turkey’s most read political columnist. She has lived in Lebanon, Tunisia and France, and was a visiting fellow at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. Her books, both fiction and non-fiction, have been published and translated in several countries. She is on the advisory board of Progressive International and Democracy Next.
In 2019, she published the internationally acclaimed nonfiction book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, about the rise of right-wing populism and how it operates. In 2021-2023 she was a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg, working on a project "A New Vocabulary for 21st Century Progressives. In 2023, she received the El Mundo International Journalism Awards in the Freedom of the Press category for her body of work. Temelkuran was longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction for Nation of Strangers.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
Culture | Thurs 19th Nov | 7:00-8:30 pm
High in the Accursed Mountains, in an Albanian village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been.
She Who Remains - a dark and poetic novel about identity, gender, love, freedom, and societal norms - was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Rene Karabash (born Irena Ivanova) is a Bulgarian poet, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. She has won multiple awards for her work, including several Best Actress awards for her role in the film Godless. Her debut novel, She Who Remains, was awarded the 2019 Elias Canetti Prize, Bulgaria’s most prestigious literary award. It has been translated into over a dozen languages, and a film, adapted by the author, is set to be released in 2026. The English language edition was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026. Karabash is also the author of the collection Omar’s Letters to His Future Wife, and is working on her second novel.
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Get your WEEKEND PASS today and treat yourself for the entire weekend!
Join us for the launch of Connection Art Show
"Connection" is an exhibition about the threads that bind us to one another, to place, to memory, and to the world around us.
Creative expression unlocks and reveals a world of literal, abstract, personal, or political interpretations: Intimacy and relationship, community and belonging, ancestry and heritage, identity and the self, ecology and the body, technology and its paradox of closeness and distance...
Artists in this vernissage invite us to reflect on what it means to be truly connected, offering new ways of seeing, thinking and being through countless forms.
FREE ENTRY
Drinks available from our bar
Ideas Festival / Sat 21st Nov / 6.30pm - 8pm
*Hours might change*
Why do people turn to the past when the future feels unbearable? And why does that turn so often lean authoritarian?
Critical theorist and ‘pyrotechnic thinker’ Dr. Louisa Toxværd Munch has spent her career examining the conditions that let fascism take root – and disconnection is at the heart of it. Nostalgia isn't really about the past, it's what happens when people can no longer imagine a shared future together. Isolation doesn't just make us lonelier, it makes us easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and more susceptible to the manufactured ignorance that authoritarian movements depend on.
Louisa makes the case that the way out is relational, not individual. Critical thinking, resistance cannot be done alone. We build these together - in classrooms, in communities, in (disappearing) third spaces, and in the rooms where people still gather to question power.
GET THE WEEKEND OR DAY PASS
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Louisa Toxvaerd Munch is a Danish critical theorist, writer, and educator whose work examines nostalgia, historical consciousness, and the political conditions enabling the resurgence of the far right. A PhD researcher and teacher at the University of Warwick, she brings critical theory to a broad public audience through writing, lectures, and social media. Drawing on Arendt, hooks, and Freire, she champions education as a democratic safeguard against manufactured ignorance. She is the author of the forthcoming Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (Allen Lane/Penguin), which reframes societal breakdowns as sites of resistance and collective agency.
GOOD READS
Glitch: How to Think in a Time of Monsters (forthcoming, Allen Lane/Penguin).
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
Culture | Thurs 10th Dec | 7:00-8:30 pm
‘Inventive, brilliant, playful, and transporting' ― by Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
A mother and a daughter take off on a road trip after the collapse of a marriage. Their journey begins in Sicily during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, if you got the beginning wrong? The trip soon becomes a quest for origins – not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also further back to a mythical and even geological past.
With her daughter coming into her own and her mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator finds herself confronting the primary questions of life: How do stories shape our children’s imaginations? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
A road novel, a mother-daughter story, a mystery, Beginning Middle End is a shapeshifting novel that offers an exhilarating testament to the power and instability of the stories we hold most dear.
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa and India. She is an acclaimed award-winning author and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College Her previous novel, Lost Children Archive, was an international critical and commercial success. It was a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019, won the Rathbone Folio Prize 2020, the Dublin Award 2021, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Booker Prize 2019 among others. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others.” Her work is published in more than thirty languages.
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