Les Belges Histoires | Michel de Launoit and the MIMA - A museum gateway to culture

07.06.2022

Michel de Launoit was already very involved in Belgian cultural entrepreneurship, both in television and music, and in 2013 dreamed of a museum dedicated to urban culture. A curious, self-taught and enthusiastic entrepreneur, he embarked on this project with his wife Florence, as well as with Alice van den Abeele and Raphaël Cruyt of the A.L.I.C.E. gallery.

Together they founded MIMA, the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art, dedicated to urban art and culture 2.0. Located in Molenbeek in the former Belle-Vue breweries, it is the first museum in the world to celebrate urban arts and this culture that until now could only be expressed in the streets and on social media.

Since it opened in 2016, MIMA has questioned anthropomorphism, normality, civil disobedience and even light and shadow in cinema... There are so many delightful exhibitions, gateways to culture 2.0 that visitors, especially but not only the younger ones, push open with pleasure and curiosity, because they allow them to gain perspective on what makes their culture and that we sometimes discredit. Popular is not a pejorative term, and MIMA invites its visitors, whether neophytes or initiates, to be curious. "A museum is freedom of thought, freedom of vision, it is an aesthetic, philosophical and intellectual adventure... It is such a gift to have a passion that if I can pass it on to someone else, it will be wonderful."

"It is not because we are in a small country that we have to think small", Michel de Launoit insists, "Today with social media we have the tools to go around the world: MIMA is the proof of this".