Between the lower town and slag heaps – Charleroi
Like a wound that won’t heal, between the lower town and the slag heaps lies an urban area that hesitates between resilience and abandonment, uncertain of its future.
With their noses in the ring, with no other choice than to put up with this motorway belt which strangles them, the resigned inhabitants make do unless they have left for other, more lenient horizons.
Strings of workers’ houses offering themselves to the winter sun or stuck under the shadow of the pillars coexist with a few surviving bourgeois islets which are putting up resistance.
Elsewhere, there are only downed shutters, tagged metal curtains, abandoned businesses, dealerships of which only scraps of faded posters glorifying the automobile remain.
Few visible inhabitants in this ghost town. A door that slams, a curtain that falls, a cat that stretches in the sun, a chair that invites introspection. And from time to time a stone thrown to chase away the intruder.
By taking the time to walk through these streets and neighborhoods, a whole poetry of banality emerges.
Marie-Anne Pauwels
