Oddities & Rarities 2025

Official page: Orpheus Instituut Buy a ticket

Art has the power to take us 
beyond the boundaries of this world 
and lead us to fundamental questions.

The past is not a fixed reality, but a landscape shaped by memory, imagination and desire. For the Romantics of the nineteenth century, history was never merely a record of facts, but a domain where reason clashed with emotion, science with mystery, and reality coexisted alongside fantasy.

The second edition of Oddities & Rarities aims to transcend the artificial boundaries between art forms, historical periods, reality and fiction. Through the eyes of the Romantics, the festival explores their fascination with the sublime and the inexplicable, translated into sound, word, image, light, and even the supernatural.

From 28 to 30 November 2025, Le Vecchie Musiche will present seven exceptional performances, complemented by two afternoon lectures by researchers Hannah Welslau (spiritualism) and Pauline Lebbe (symbolism in music). Together with partners such as the Orpheus Institute, the Labo XIX-XX research group of the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp and ARIA (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts), the festival invites the public to explore the tensions and connections between intuition and reason, dream and reality, magic and modernity — and thus discover new perspectives on the Romantic imagination and its legacy today.