Dear Colleagues,
Dear Students,
I am delighted to announce that the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles is now part of a unique alliance between La Cambre, INSAS and the ULB.
On 21 May, we established the Alliance for Transmission and Links between Arts and Sciences, or ATLAS – Brussels School of Arts, which aims to foster dialogue between our artistic and scientific communities and wider society.
The links between our institutions are not new – indeed, they go back a long way – but we are now making them official and visible.
With the launch of ATLAS, we wish to highlight the complementarity of our skills, knowledge and practices, and to affirm our shared values and ambitions: the desire to create a space conducive to interdisciplinary exchange; the desire to train students who are specialised in their field whilst being encouraged to develop cross-disciplinary approaches; the desire to foster more encounters between artistic and scientific research; and the desire to encourage the sharing and pooling of different kinds of experiences, diverse approaches, practices, methods or knowledge.
These interdisciplinary encounters and these cross-pollinations of practices are precisely what our four institutions now wish to organise, support and foster, in the firm belief that this approach contributes to the development of a humanist society that seeks to avoid isolation, polarisation and compartmentalisation, and instead presents itself as open to the world and to others, open to the convergence of science and the arts, and open to all possibilities, including those we cannot yet imagine today.
This alliance is, in a sense, a response to our times: we wish to bring together scientists and artists around teaching, research and societal issues. The main missions of ATLAS are as follows: teaching, research, student services and international relations.
ATLAS thus symbolises our desire to create, in the heart of Brussels, an Alliance between a university and three WBE higher arts schools that provide training across all key artistic fields: namely, music, theatre and spoken word arts, dance, plastic, visual and spatial arts, and performing arts and dissemination and communication techniques.
You can follow the project’s progress on this website: atlas-bsa.eu
And here is the video presentation of our Alliance: https://www.ulb.be/fr/partenaires-et-reseaux/atlas
I would like to conclude by thanking FLUTElab Bxl, a recorder ensemble led by our colleagues Nathalie Houtman and Laura Pok, for their magnificent performance at the ATLAS launch ceremony.
Kind regards,
Olivia Wahnon de Oliveira
Director – Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles