Sat 18.10.25 —
Sun 26.10.25
One Day I Will Make The Onion Cry
Barbara Raes / Beyond the Spoken, Victoria Deluxe & ntgent
NL EN
Catching tears with socks on
“I’ve been crying for years but I’ve just shed my last tear,” says the woman. “My last tear for the floods.” Her name is Nancy. On 14 July 2021, the water was three metres high in her house, right next to the river Vesder in the Walloon province of Liège. When the river burst its banks relentlessly five years ago, it caused the worst climate disaster in Belgian history.
Dozens of people died, hundreds of homes were rendered uninhabitable, and thousands were left traumatised. “C’est pire que la guerre,” said a 90-year-old woman surveying the damage in the streets of Verviers. She’d already seen photos but refused to believe they were real.
Nancy found herself homeless from one day to the next. Luckily, she was able to stay at her partner’s house – a man she had only been with for three months. The forced move, amidst so much misery, grief and administrative hassle, put the relationship under immense strain. “But we’re still in love,” says Nancy proudly.
Nancy works at Source-O-Rama, the tourist information centre in the commune of Chaudfontaine which served as a crisis centre during the disaster. Artist Barbara Raes has just arrived at the centre with ‘Mémoires des Eaux’, an adapted version of a ritual she devised in 2023 in Ghent, where she runs the city theatre NTGent. Over the coming weeks, Raes will welcome a total of 125 flood victims, one by one, to her magnificent cabin. After Chaudfontaine, the ritual travels to Limbourg, Verviers, Angleur and Eupen.
The cabin is shaped like a teardrop, or an onion if you wish; it amazes and soothes. It is a lovely place to be inside. There are cushions, there is carpet, there is warm light, and there is Barbara, who guides the participants through the ritual with calm and craftmanship. The starting point of each conversation is ‘solastalgia’, the sadness one might feel upon realising that our planet is in a state of advanced decay. Or, more broadly: mourning something that still exists.
“The floods here have caused enormous material damage but they have also caused collective trauma,” says Raes. Participants are given a choice: the whole ritual can be carried out in silence, there is the option to write only, or a conversation can follow. “Almost everyone who has taken part so far, including in Ghent, has chosen the latter. There is such a great need to talk, especially here along the Vesder. Five years on, you can still feel the sadness, the anger, the fear. I want to create space for those emotions. Space for what lies within.”
The floods of 2021 have caused so much material damage in this region but the collective trauma is as enormous
It hardly matters who you talk to in and around the tourist centre; everyone who lives nearby has been affected by the disaster. The harpist who is helping to accompany the ritual today tells the story of her godfather, who lost both his mother and his sister. Their house was swept away. The project leader at local theatre house Théâtre de Liège, the organiser of ‘Mémoires des Eaux’, managed to save her cherished book collection by the skin of her teeth, but had to leave her home shortly afterwards and spent seven months living with her two young children in a friend’s attic. Thanks to the heroic efforts of a local insurer, she was able to receive compensation relatively quickly and rebuild her life. Many others were not so fortunate.
The victims’ anger is directed primarily at the government and certain insurers. Help arrived too late, or not at all; this inaction added an extra layer to the trauma. Unfortunately, a person can also drown in a quagmire of agencies, red tape and bureaucracy. “But the responsibility extends beyond that,” says Raes. “The climate crisis was a direct cause of this disaster.” A crisis that is still not taken fully seriously by many policymakers and companies. “That’s why, for the ritual, I’m starting from solastalgia – call it the outermost layer of the onion.”
Layer by layer, the conversation within the cabin grows deeper. Raes draws ever closer to the trauma, at the participants’ own pace. Tears are usually shed. One of them is harvested by Raes using a pipette and a small bottle. The harvested tear is given a name and added to an ever growing archive. In this way, invisible, isolated grief is shared and brought to light.
From the 15th of July onwards, the 125 tears of the victims of the climate disaster that took part in the ritual will form the centrepiece of a new memorial to be erected at a junction in the city of Liège. In the information centre in Chaudfontaine, there is a photograph of that very same crossroads. The road is invisible; the railway bridge in the backgound rises barely a few metres above the water, on which people are paddling in inflatable canoes, searching for the missing or on their way to rescue distraught victims.
The commune of Chaudfontaine owes its identity to the water, to the spring that feeds the local thermal baths as well as the famous drinking water company. That same water wreaked such devastation in the summer of 2021. Water gives, and water takes.
At the start of the ritual, Raes washes the participants’ hands in a beautiful ceramic bowl. Gently and with care, "like a nurse". The symbolism is crystal clear: here, where you are now, you are being looked after. You don’t need to fill in any forms; you don’t need to prove any damage. Here, where you are now, you are being listened to. Here, where you are now, there is a place for you. A place as big as you want it to be.
