"There is no peace without liberation": Inside the world of Marios Bellas
LATEST NEWSCULTUREOPINION
Marios Bellas released his first album ‘Honger’ (‘Hunger’). He sells physical vinyl records, and he donates 50% of the profit to support the victims of the Gaza conflict.
When asked if Marios ever takes a break from his creative work to devote time to his personal needs, he answers without hesitation, even before the question is finished.
Do you separate your art from the rest of your life?
Cost of being heard
Marios Bellas playing in Hannibal. KVS production, directed by Junior Mthombeni and Michael de Cock. Photo from Bellas personal archive.
"Wow… How much time do we have? That’s a hard one… Just go inside. Question everything about yourself and the world around you. Be honest — is this really what I want, and is it good for the people around me? Consider that everyone else has just as complex a reality as you do, and is just as human. If you can see that, it means everyone deserves the same freedom, the same treatment. Whatever you do — teacher, doctor, supermarket worker, artist — you have a responsibility to your community, whether that's your family, your city, or the whole world. Life gets better when you think beyond your own individual life. And the people around you don't need to be the same as you for that to be true."
Marios Bellas giving interview at the park of Josapath in Brussels.
Photo by Aistis Pučinskas.
Rebellious Marios Bellas doesn't separate his art from politics and he'd tell you, pretty directly, that he doesn't think it's possible to. The Greek-Dutch rapper, actor, and theatre director has spent the past decade in Brussels, where he began his journey between solo music, collaborative theatre with the collective theater group SOCHA, and a hip-hop ritual practice he developed with his own piece Vier Muren. His work is constant and restless by design: one project pulls from Dutch hip-hop, the next one from traditional folk music of Greece, Armenia, and Kurdistan, made alongside two friends whose families have a collective history in the former Ottoman Empire.
That rebelliousness runs into something more pointed when the conversation turns to Gaza. Bellas released his debut album, Honger ("Hunger"), five months into a genocide — a timing that unsettled him enough that he decided the release needed to double as a fundraiser. Because streaming, he quickly discovered, pays almost nothing, he began pressing vinyl instead, sending half the profits to a 15-year-old aid volunteer he connected with online, who now uses the money for cash relief so families in Gaza can buy what they actually need at markets rather than rely on donated goods.
We sat down with him in the beautiful park of Josapath in Brussels to talk about where his politics and his art actually meet. What is everyday life like for someone with such a broad artistic range? The ethics or lack thereof of music streaming, and what he thinks the defining struggle of the moment is.
No separation between work and life
The shift came in a very unusual way: a workshop on integrating trance states into performance. Corine Sombrun, a shaman initiated in the Mongolian tradition and now teaching and researching trance states with and to artists, scholars and scientists through Europe, inspired him to find another approach to making theatre. In trance states, he found himself in spaces of ‘not-knowing’ and so, instead of transmitting opinions, the focus shifted to bringing people in that state of mind. Bellas describes the experience as a liberating state where intellectual agreement stops being the main gear, and opening up to something new becomes the main goal. That idea became the seed of his graduation piece, a death ritual made during COVID, when there was nowhere to mourn collectively. It later grew into Vier Muren, which fuses ritual, hip-hop, and activism into a single form.
"No, because it feels weird to me. The separation would mean that art and life are something different — and it's probably even impossible. When I'm walking in the street and I see something crazy, which happens every five seconds in Brussels, immediately a sentence comes up about it, and I write it down. I have this notes app, and it goes back years and years. If I type 'freedom,' I've got four notes from this year alone about it. It becomes an archive of every memory, every moment you pass through. It's impossible for me to separate it."
That instinct to treat a simple walk down the street and a lyric creation in his head as the same act — traces back to how he got into music in the first place. He grew up on American/Dutch hip-hop, part of a scene that predates the internet. Marios was telling that in The Netherlands 90s kids to get a fresh taste of American hip-hop culture they were trading records, doing graffiti, buying records form the people or street markets because there was no other way to find them. It was a time before streaming and the commercialisation of hiphop and if you wanted to find new music, you had to roam the internet or get it from friends. Hiphop became his gateway into soul, jazz, funk and other genres, but mostly into revolutionary thought. During his years at the theatre academy he kept it out of his theatre work entirely because hip-hop, he says, was placed as something less than "high art."He didn't bring the two together until he graduated and, in his words, decided "fuck it, this is also who I am."
From activism to activity
'Vier Muren' ('Four Walls') is a contemporary, immersive hip-hop theater ritual created by Marios Bellas himself where, as he said, teather and music comes together. Photo from Bellas personal archive.
A still from Bellass music video 'Diep Gaan' where Marios reflects the artist's desire to plunge completely into his creative work, gaining strengt inside of yourself despite all the criticism and emotitonal battles. Photo from Bellas personal archive.
Before hip-hop and theatre collaboration, Bellas spent time deep in direct action activism, even getting arrested for what he calls "artivism" actions. He describes leaving that world quite disappointed, not with the cause, but with the form.
Was there a moment you realized music alone couldn't carry what you wanted to say — that you needed theatre, too?
"Activism is a lot about being right. You have an idea, and everyone has to have that idea too. It's an agenda. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's strict, and it doesn't always convince people, especially if you copy-paste that attitude in making theatre. I could make a theatre piece about feminism, or racism, or climate change, and the people who came would already be convinced. They'd nod along, go home, sleep, carry on with their lives. I thought — what am I actually doing?"
However Marios is very careful to draw a distinction when the conversation turns to how that change might actually happen
You've said you're not a pacifist. What do you mean by that?
"There is no peace without liberation"
Nowhere does Bellas sound more frustrated than when the conversation turns to the streaming platforms that carry his music to most of the people who hear it.
You've been vocal about where streaming revenue actually goes. Do you think artists talk about that enough?
"No, and it's genuinely a grim situation. Artists get exploited — Spotify pays something like 0.0001 EU per stream. Tidal pays roughly ten times that, which helps a little. But you look into it, and Spotify's leadership has put serious money into AI and defense-related investments, and that should be talked about far more than it is.
I actually considered pulling everything off Spotify. But when you dig in, Apple Music, Amazon Music, even Tidal — which is partly owned by BlackRock — all have some connection to weapons production or exploitation somewhere down the chain, including in Congo. The only genuinely clean platform I've found is Bandcamp, but almost nobody's on there except musicians and hardcore music nerds.
A philosopher friend of mine once told me it's good to be hypocritical. Either you're cynical — you say the world's fucked anyway, so nothing you do matters, and that lets you off the hook. Or you're hypocritical: you accept you're part of a broken system, you'll make mistakes, but you push against it anyway. People tell me, 'you say you're ethical but you're still on Spotify.' Yeah. Indeed. But if I leave entirely, I stop reaching anyone, and the message doesn't go anywhere with me."
Bellas didn't mince his words when asked to name the single biggest issue facing the world right now — though he quickly noticed that it's not the only problem this modern world has.
If you had to name the biggest issue of our time, what would it be?
"We're living in a transition — the old world is dying, and we don't know exactly where it's going. Technological change, AI, climate change getting worse while we talk about it less, because there's always a next crisis — COVID, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran. It's a kind of shock doctrine: people never get the chance to make a proper analysis of anything, because the next emergency is already arriving.
Underneath it, for me, is this: a very small number of people control an unimaginable amount of wealth. Nobody needs that much money. The shift we actually need is from an economy built around what can be extracted to one built around what people need — not just financially, but in terms of well-being. Child mortality, access to healthcare, food that isn't poisoned, housing. And I don't see how you get there without a genuinely revolutionary approach, because the people holding that power aren't going to hand it over voluntarily."
Closing message
Every interview in this series ends with the same question, which I pose to every subject: if you had the world's attention for a moment, what would you say? Bellas takes a big breath and loudly breathes out before answering.
"I'd love for it to be flower power — let's just end it, have peace. But there's no peace without liberation. There's a line from Kwame Ture, the revolutionary from the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s/70’s: peace is the word of the oppressor, you can have injustice and have peace. You see it constantly — a ceasefire gets announced, and it just means 'you stop firing, not me.' The agreement doesn't mean anything if one side still isn't free. For example, today we might hear Trump say, ‘We’ve signed a peace treaty with Iran,’ and the very next day we might see him strike at Iran’s infrastructure again. That's why the phrase is 'no justice, no peace' — not the other way around."
