Conversation in English with subtitles available in English, Dutch and French.

Olivia Laing (1977) is a widely acclaimed writer and critic from the UK. She’s the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her first novel Crudo was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018. Laing’s writing about art & culture appears in the Guardian and Financial Times among many other publications. Her collected essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, are out now.

"Art has a vast ability to envision different futures. It's a place where you can think about dystopias, but you can also think about utopias, about the kind of world you want to inhabit. You can begin to move towards building it. It has so many different forces."

"Art is something that speaks to every person. You don't need to have an education to understand it, though that might enhance or enrich understandings. But it's so patronizing to think that it's a sport for the elite. It absolutely isn't. It's for all of us."