Invited by the town of Hoeilaart and with the support of the Flemish Heritage Fund we create this special document: a CD and a 32 pages booklet. Through photography, text, music, and sound we log a unique and peculiar culture: the grape cultivation under glass in Hoeilaart, a small village just below Brussels. Step with us inside the greenhouse, inside the confined world of the greenhouse workers.

Serrism is: a musical illustration - by Christina Vantzou, sound registrations - by Lieven Martens, a long poetic text - by Jan Matthé, analogue photographs - by Christophe Piette, and design - by Jeroen Wille.

Serrism is the cultivation of grapes under glass in Hoeilaart. A culture that has been growing for 150 years, give or take. Its fruit: table grapes, once feasted on in faraway places such as Russia, the British isles and America. This culture brought architecture, wealth, beauty contests, fame, a coded row of values per parameter, a people. And silence! Serrism happens under glass. Lots of it. In Hoeilaart – the glass village – were once more than 13,000 greenhouses. 13,000 enclosed worlds for the table grape to live, leave and die. Ostinato. Today, only a fraction of these greenhouses are still erect. Under the sympathetic rule of a unique variety: the serrist, world- builder under a glass bell. This publication is about what it means to listen like glass. To listen to glass. To live as a grape. A matter of selection.