a milieu where artists and creative individuals from all disciplines can interact and work together while presenting art, design, creativity & general wellness in creative ways.
BELLHAUS × FSAI × Wilma-Emilia Kuosa
Introducing The Poetry Club — a collaboration between BELLHAUS Atelier & Galerie, the Finnish Southern Africa Cooperation Institute, and our inaugural resident artist.
Namibia and Finland have been in conversation for more than a century and a half — a quiet, deep-rooted friendship of shared language, teachers and ideas. Every so often it finds a new form. This winter, it has found one at BELLHAUS.
We are proud to welcome our inaugural resident artist, Wilma-Emilia Kuosa — a Helsinki-born poet, choreographer and jazz-dance artist — and to launch, together with the Finnish Southern Africa Cooperation Institute (FSAI), a new monthly gathering: The Poetry Club.
Wilma-Emilia is an artist who refuses tidy borders. Trained in France as a jazz-dance specialist and honoured by the French Ministry of Culture as an Artiste de Haut Niveau, she braids dance, spoken word, song and video into single works that give voice to the unheard. Her poetry novels — The Anatomy of a Titanium Heart (2020) and Cage Opera (2022), the latter also a touring stage work — write toward tenderness, shame, and the places where words can't quite reach. She arrived in Windhoek this July, and she has been writing ever since.
Her art belongs here, because BELLHAUS was never meant to be a hushed white-cube gallery. We are a working gallery— part studio, part gathering place — built on the belief that art is at its best when it's part of how we live: around a table, among artists and kin, with good food and natural things close at hand. Brought to us through FSAI's Writers, Artists and Scientists Residency Programme, this is the beginning of a full collaboration across poetry and jazz dance, page and stage.
The Poetry Club gathers each month to explore a different angle on poetry over a shared supper — no expertise required, no pretence welcome, only curiosity and the pleasure of words spoken aloud.
Our first evening is Wednesday, 19 August. Bring your favourite poem (in English for this first night), and we'll share it together — you may read it yourself, or Wilma-Emilia will perform it for you. Thereafter, we meet every third Wednesday of the month.
An old friendship is about to find a new voice. There's a place for you at the table.
Portrait of Wilma-Emilia Kuosa by Jean-Claude Néron.
