BRAFA 2026: Living Inside the Long Now

Contemporary culture no longer advances in straight lines. It circles, returns, overlaps. We live inside what feels like a long now, a moment where centuries coexist in the same room, the same city, the same frame of mind. The Renaissance resurfaces through digital hands. Brutalist forms soften into spaces of care. Ancient symbols drift through contemporary life with quiet familiarity. The present is less obsessed with the new than with what endures.

This condition becomes visible at BRAFA, where time is not arranged chronologically but spatially. Walking its aisles is less about moving forward than about moving across. Flemish painting converses with modern design. Sacred objects share air with radical form. Brussels, in winter, becomes a meeting point for centuries that refuse to stay in their assigned pasts. BRAFA does not stage history as nostalgia, but as something active, tactile, and alert.

The renewed attraction to objects, places, and ideas that carry time within them speaks to a deeper cultural need. In art, the desire is no longer for rupture alone, but for depth. Works that feel lived with rather than looked at. Provenance becomes tactile. Patina reassures rather than weighs down. Spaces that allow eras and geographies to meet without hierarchy offer a sense of continuity in a fractured world.

Music follows a similar instinct. Global sound today is both ancestral and synthetic. Rhythms migrate across continents and software, voices stretch and blur, intimacy is engineered yet still felt. What matters less is genre than atmosphere. Listening becomes spatial, almost architectural. Music is no longer consumed only for momentum, but for grounding.

Cinema, too, has slowed its pulse. The films that linger are not always the loudest, but the most permeable. They leave room for silence, for texture, for bodies inhabiting space without explanation. The camera observes rather than insists. Narrative loosens. Watching becomes a form of dwelling.

Architecture and interiors reveal the same longing. After years of frictionless minimalism, texture returns. Stone, wood, fabric, shadow. Spaces are shaped to hold rather than impress. Exhibitions aspire to feel domestic, while homes borrow the intelligence of galleries. The boundary between refuge and display dissolves.

Beneath all of this lies a quiet cultural recalibration. Progress is no longer imagined as speed, but as alignment. With history. With material. With place. Culture today is not about escape, but about learning how to stay. How to inhabit what already exists and make it resonate again.

This is not a retreat into the past. It is a refinement of attention. A liberated mind does not discard history. It edits it, listens to it, and chooses what to carry forward.

BRAFA 2026
25 January – 1 February 2026
Brussels Expo, Halls 3, 4 and 8
Place de Belgique 1, 1020 Brussels
www.brafa.art