If you leave Belgium, you disappear from its radar. In Germany it’s the other way around, if you haven’t been abroad, you don’t count. Once I met the curator of a Belgian museum who was going to put up an exhibition about a Belgian avant-gardist of the 1920s I had written about in my PhD. We had a very nice conversation and he told me he wanted me to write for the catalogue. I was excited. A year later the catalogue appeared without a contribution of me. When I inquired if there had been a problem, the curator told me he had decided to work with people who live locally. I guess he meant I wasn’t able to bring by coffee and croissant in the morning? This is typically Belgian, and probably also the reason why you never heard about the Belgian avant-garde, except for René Magritte (you might even think he's French?).