Geven Oefenen is a collection of notes that read à donner (to give away). These have been retrieved by Achilles Mussche from various objects left in the streets of Brussels. Achilles addresses the collection as an ongoing conversation (exchange of letters) with the people of Brussels, by copying each note in watercolour.




Achilles Mussche
Geven Oefenen (Excercising Giving)
 Watercolor on paper (framed)
variable sizes
from 2021 onwards
Achilles Mussche (b. 1957, Anderlecht) is a graphist and typographer based in Anderlecht, Brussels. He has spent more than three decades working as a signpainter, restoring and reproducing commercial façades across Brussels, Flanders, and northern France.

Through his former workshop, Letterzetter Mussche, he collaborated with municipalities, archives, and private collectors to document and salvage vernacular lettering marked for demolition.

Mussche describes himself as a wandering graphist. He approaches lettering as a typographic object and as a mode of address—an obsolete but intimate form of (long-distance) conversation. In recent years, he has collected handwritten à donner notes found on the street, copying them in watercolor. The copies function less as archives than as replies, extending a dialogue with anonymous writers of his beloved city, and by extension with the city itself.


The gift must be considered a loss and thus as a partial destruction: the desire to destroy being in part carried over onto the beneficiary. In the unconscious forms, such as psychoanalysis describes them, it symbolizes excretion, which itself is tied to death, in accordance with the fundamental connection of anal eroticism and sadism (Bataille, 1970, I,310).



M. MAUSS-THE GIFT