It was in 1966 that the artists Roger Raveel, Etienne Elias, Raoul De Keyser and Reinier Lucassen made the murals in the underground corridors of the castle in Beervelde. This project set a standard in the Belgian art world and formed the basis of a new figurative movement: the New Vision. This group, plus Antoon de Clerck and Roland Jooris, launched a second initiative in March 1969: an art happening in the Dulcia knitting factory in Zottegem. Anton Herbert formulated the objectives of this project as follows: ‘No artistic feeling of superiority of the work of art vis-à-vis the changing world, but an attempt to engage it in an ongoing relation with reality. No exhibition of what the gentlemen painters created, no hanging in museums any more, but a spontaneous elaboration of the potential that industrial spaces offer painting’. Dulcia art is about integration.
The preparations went far from smoothly – the artists involved proved to differ in their views of the happening – and the initiative met with a mixed reception in the press.
In Memory of Dulcia, a small-scale reproduction of the column several metres high with which Raveel decorated the Dulcia knitting factory in 1969, is a distant echo of this historical three-day event.