The BELvue museum (next to the Royal Palace in Brussels) will be presenting a new exhibition on the life and work of animation filmmaker Raoul Servais in the autumn. Preparations for the event, with cartoonist François Schuiten as curator, are underway.
The organisers - the King Baudouin Foundation and Raoul Servais Collection - are preparing a new travelling exhibition which will premiere in Brussels on 24 September 2021.
François Schuiten, who will be designing the exhibition, is world-famous as an illustrator, but he is also uniquely familiar with the universe of "Taxandria", Servais' only full-length film (a mix of ordinary film images and animation) from 1994. Schuiten thought up the appearance of the bizarre city-state where time stands still, and drew this out in the sets for the film. As the person responsible for the graphic concept and for the sets of "Taxandria", he was Raoul's right-hand man in the realisation of the film.
At the end of 2019 Raoul Servais donated a large part of his archive to the King Baudouin Foundation. This includes graphic works, documentation material, 'cels' of his films (coloured drawings on transparent celluloid sheets, which were once widely used in the production of cartoons), painted sets, photographs, posters and other material. In total, the donation comprises more than 200 items.
The King Baudouin Foundation wants to preserve Servais' patrimony for posterity, but also make it accessible to the public, and the planned exhibition in BELvue is in line with the latter concern.
The exhibition will be available to other locations from spring 2022.