Absences Felt and Unfelt Charles Esche Museums are places where a society tells stories to itself. Art museums in particular, because they attempt to materialise the imagination, touch on about how a place wants to be seen and why it deserves to be significant among the cultures of the world. New York’s Museum of Modern Art; London’s Tates Britain and Modern; the National Gallery Singapore; the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (to name only a few) – all reflect their host nation or city’s unique contribution to the world as seen from inside that location. Understanding this, it is perhaps unsurprising that Brussels has no national museum of contemporary art. The Belgian state is not a nation and its myths of origin and identity are fraught and divided, as well as less institutionalised than other European countries. The city museums that do exist are somewhat archaic structures that owe their existence to royal patronage rather than to the drive for national identity formation sponsored by an emerging bourgeoisie. There are important Flemish and Walloon equivalents of course, but they are not to be found in the capital city, and there is little contact between the institutions or official incentive for coordinating their activities across the country. Indeed, there was a time in the 1970s and 80s when the Van Abbemuseum was, slightly jokingly, considered as the displaced Flemish museum of modern art, though never the Belgian one. Today, the absence of the museum of modern and contemporary art is seen not in terms of completing an unfinished national narrative or establishing a sense of what art might contribute to what Brussels might be or become as an urban imaginary, but as a gap in the necessary touristic infrastructure of a major European destination. This is the reason, presumably, why importing an outpost of Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou as the missing contemporary art institution is seen as the perfect political solution. It avoids having to confront the lack of a contemporary national mythology that an independent Brussels institution would have to face, while providing the formal needs and investment opportunities that are considered vital to the future success of Brussels as a top destination. So, Brussels continues to deal with the absence of a museum that might offer it a way to understand itself anew in the face of changing ideas of Europe, the nation state, participating communities and the various different publics that form the ground on which any museum stands. While it is not within the remit of this text to speculate on what kind of institution that imagined autochthonic Brussels museum might be, I hope it is useful to explain how the Van Abbemuseum, once a significant player within the Flemish cultural ecology, has developed in the past decade as a way to think about what choices a museum in a particular location can and perhaps must make in the twenty-first century. To do so, I have to start with a story of the Van Abbemuseum as an example of a European organisation that was, at the turn of this century, almost entirely orientated towards a western European, modern, white and largely male, heterosexual narrative, and how that changed as the challenges of economic globalisation and cultural pluralism were faced. In this story, which cannot avoid being subjective, I am particularly interested in how a constructed narrative transforms into a description of reality and eventually into a dogma, and how to wind back the dogma so that it becomes just one way of looking at history or one choice among others. At the start of my directorship in 2004 the geography and ideology of the collection had changed little since my predecessor, but one, Rudi Fuchs, so eloquently described it in 1982 in his preface to the catalogue for Documenta 7 as stretching