OFF THE MAP

 
[2020-2022]
 

“Off the map” is what you find when you stray from marked trails. This is the journey I took in Charleroi to meet people living in the streets. It was the quest that led me to find these remote places where they live out of sight.

The intention of this series is to make these homeless people visible, to highlight their knowledge and resourcefulness in finding alternative housing solutions but also the difficulties that arise from them. By sleeping in tents on the outskirts of the city, by setting up makeshift camps in parks but also by building treehouses made from recovered materials - like informal architects - they show resilience and reinvent our relationship "city/nature".

Despite Charleroi's industrial past, nature - even if it has sometimes developed artificially thanks to human activity - is very present. Often wild, it serves as a refuge for the homeless who generally beg during the day in popular places in the city and find themselves in these camps or squats on the outskirts of the city in the evening.

This vital imagination for survival is strained by the multiple difficulties in keeping one's habitat upright: the violence from others, from climatic conditions and from the city make it necessary to constantly reinvent oneself and find new answers.