Five major themes will be addressed. Nature, sometimes contained, sometimes conquering: a tree that survives between two walls, a field that approaches houses, a countryside that slides towards the city and a city that, too, seeks its green breath
Men and women at work recall, by their gestures, the vitality of a city in motion: smoking industries, small shops, hawkers from another time. These images tell the work, but also the places that have been dedicated to it, sometimes disappeared, sometimes metamorphosed.
Mobility, on the other hand, draws its lines through the ages. The old tram, bridges, bicycles, cars of yesterday and today show us how our ways of circulating shape the city.
Leisure, on the other hand, reveals how citizens take over—or lose—their place in public space: ball courts become parking lots, terraces expand, popular festivals and fairgrounds... places of encounters, sharing, sometimes nostalgia.
And then there are the young people and their place in the city. Dedicated spaces, schools, balls, skate park: so many clues about how the city welcomes, frames or frees its future.
By bringing these photographic traces into dialogue with the painted and drawn works from the collections of the MuFIm, the new scenography highlights a fact: our public space is never frozen. He is constantly reinventing himself, at the pace of uses, needs, and dreams. Perhaps it is also an opportunity to open a door to some utopias: a softer, more playful city... or simply more human.
With the collaboration of the Archives de la Ville de Tournai and L'Association Archives iconographiques du Tournaisis.