03.10.26 - 24.01.27
dans la salle
Charles Paulicevich. NOUS, la réserve
Between 2019 and 2025, Charles Paulicevich travelled extensively through various sectors of the Belgian working class – factories, quarries, construction sites, warehouses – drawing on the FGTB trade union network to negotiate, one by one, access to these sites and to meet the workers. But his project does not stop at the factory. Weddings, christenings, parties, demonstrations: the same faces, outside the workplace. These 130 images reveal the world of work as it is, without artifice or complacency. Dignified individuals, often invisible, rarely counted, whose imagination nevertheless transcends their circumstances. Taken together, these images constitute a record of our times — and, by implication, sketch out the horizon of a coming together.
The title NOUS, la réserve is reminiscent of the Marxist theory of this invisible reserve, always there, always on standby. A workforce held in abeyance, preserved by capitalism, ready to be called upon or cast aside as economic tides ebb and flow. But through Charles Paulicevich’s lens, this phantom legion rises up. It is no longer that anonymous silence, that faceless crowd. It becomes a collective ‘We’, a community of faces, bodies and stories that resists being rendered invisible.
Charles Paulicevich is a documentary photographer. A graduate of ENSAV La Cambre (Master’s in Photography, 2009) and holder of a teaching qualification in visual arts (ARTS2, Mons, 2017), he has been teaching photography at the Agnès Varda School in Brussels since 2009. His work explores human and social landscapes — from the street to workplaces, from urban fringes to collective gatherings. He has exhibited in Belgium, France and internationally.
A project by the Centrale Générale FGTB / Algemene Centrale ABVV (ACCG)
In collaboration with the Agnès Varda School
