Today 23 May 2008 the “Athletes Alley”, the huge sculpture of Olivier Strebelle in the Olympic Forest Park will be officially unveiled by the Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht.
The whole event is being followed by a large contingent of Belgian journalists. Seems they are being fed strange stories by the “ASBL Strebelle in Beijing”. Seems some people in Brussels suffer from memory loss.
Indeed, the new story is that Strebelle was awarded the sculpture “by winning two tenders”. Hmmm. Cool. Problem is, he didn’t. He joined the first tender years ago and results were never announced.
Later in 2006 another tender was launched to select “Olympic artwork”. We told Olivier Strebelle not to participate for many reasons and he never did. Hundreds and hundreds of sculptures were submitted and hundreds were shortlisted by a jury. No Strebelle. See a picture taken in Wangfujing Street in July 2006 when the shortlisted pieces were shown to the public. The scale models then traveled all over China, “to consult the public”. As for now, no decision on any choice was made public.
Sun Bin in Wangfujing Street, July 2006
So, what is the real story? Well, we lobbied and negotiated for four years with the Beijing officials. Substantial modifications were made to the original design till the Chinese art lovers felt happy. The City then officially agreed to accept the donation of the statue and officially appointed me as the representative as recognition of our hard work.
Oh well, some people probably did not like that and our names disappeared from their website and publications. Of course they kept us as far as possible from the journalists so they could dish up their own story without being disturbed.
The Strebelle project has been an interesting experience. It is already used in my seminars as an example of how to do successful lobbying in China, without greasing the hands of officials to get a project approved.
For Strebelle’s sculpture, getting the approval from Beijing seemed mission impossible. The statue is the only foreign artwork approved in the huge Olympic Park while many other countries and artists tried so hard too.
And no tender. Just through the hard work of Sun Bin and myself.
The “ASBL” is even shooting a movie about it. Don’t count on seeing much of us in it.
Much more to follow on the real story but have a look at previous entries on Strebelle on this blog.
And let’s see what happens later today…