Georgette Berger and her future husband René Magritte met as teenagers in 1913 at the annual Charleroi fair. I can't find any info about that fair but it was probably similar to some degree to the world's fair held in Ghent that same year, which they probably both also attended. "Civilized society" still had "human zoo" exhibits back then... Georgette and René didn't see each other again until after the war when they met (I think by chance, not planned) in the Botanic Garden in Brussels in 1920.
Here are some photos I took of a man at the Botanic Garden in Brussels in 2018. He was pretending to conduct a symphony with two yellow umbrellas. I imagined he was waiting for someone he hadn't met in person before, like a blind date, and he told that person that he'd be holding two yellow umbrellas, one for him and one for them, since there was a chance of rain.
And this is a photograph of a dramatic flower I took right after I took the far-away pics of the man and his two yellow umbrellas.
I then sat down on a wet bench to eat a pear that a grocery store clerk gave to me for free without exchanging words, just polite smiles, which made me feel better because I was unhinged by being alone in a European city, not knowing the language and feeling very shy about communicating with store clerks, which is already hard for me in my own town in my own first language.
Recently I came across this archive of Women in Concrete Poetry. I was very excited by Punctuation Poems by Nye Ffarrabas (formerly Bici Forbes and Bici Forbes Hendricks). She has so many former names as part of her artist name which itself seems to be a kind of concrete poem.
...obsessively tidy...like her handwriting...it was a strategy for not attracting attention, for hiding, for not mixing with the others, or simply keeping her distance.
...her scorn for everything was an aesthete's scorn.
...she was more interested in ideas than in human beings.
...people tell me I have beautiful, interesting handwriting. They don't know how hard I worked at it.