Between 2019 and 2025, Charles Paulicevich travelled through various sectors of the Belgian working world: factories, quarries, building sites, warehouses. He relied on the trade-union network of the FGTB to negotiate access to each site, one by one, and to meet the workers.
The project does not stop at the factory gates. Weddings, christenings, parties, demonstrations: the same faces, outside the workplace. These 130 images show the world of work as it is, without artifice or indulgence. Individuals who are often invisible, rarely counted, whose imagination reaches beyond their condition. Through their accumulation, these images form a document of our time and outline, in negative, the horizon of a coming together.
The title refers to the Marxist theory of the reserve army of labour: a workforce held in suspension, kept in store, called up or cast aside with the economic tides. Here, this reserve becomes a collective “us”, a community of faces, bodies and stories.
- Images
- 130 in the exhibition
- Places
- Factories, quarries, building sites, warehouses, function halls, picket lines
- Commission
- Centrale Générale FGTB / Algemene Centrale ABVV (ACCG)
- Book
- NOUS / WIJ, La Lettre volée, 2023
