Belgium is always seductively surreal. Running into Greenpeace a mile from a Leopold II monument.
A Belgian company, DEME, seeks to gazify the bottom of the ocean to extract nickel, manganese, cobalt.
Walking through the Belgian dunes we were stopped by Greenpeace and invited into an installation recreating the bottom of the ocean (see video). They told us how DEME is ready to have massive impact on the ecoystem to enrich itself. Several European countries like Norway have already decided against this. The Belgian government is all for it.

About a mile from the Greenpeace installation you can see a huge monument dedicated to King Leopold the second, infamous for his Congo side project.

And there are bunkers and French fries stands and waffles and kebab places and go-carts and an Afghan selling ice cream and the most multicultural and freely accessible beach with dedicated life guards everywhere. And a circus. And a feriss wheel. And everything is named after a painter James Ensor famous for painting masks to expose people’s deadness.

And your head becomes this storm, how does this world keep creating beauty and horror at about the same pace?