deBuren

© Sander Buyck

Authors Thomas Gunzig, Caroline Lamarche, Pascal Verbeken, Davide Longo and Erik Lindner resided in Charleroi for citybooks. On the 26th of April, they will return to the city to present their citybooks texts and their translations during an evening of literary festivities. After the presentation, under the guidance of moderator Françoise Baré (RTBF), Gunzig, Lamarche and Verbeken will discuss their experiences of the Wallonian city.

The writers each stayed in Charleroi for two weeks and, inspired by their residencies, each wrote a citybook: a story or a series of poems. The results are very diverse: the Italian author Davide Longo, for example, wrote a dialogue in which a woman fetches up memories of a writer than once lived in Charleroi, while Caroline Lamarche records a quest to find a person from her past in diary-like fragments. Erik Lindner wrote ten intensely concentrated poems, and Thomas Gunzig, with plenty of black humour, recounts how a forgotten toothbrush leads him around some of the city’s least pretty sites. Pascal Verbeken was the fifth author to stay in Charleroi. His citybook is newly finished, and will be presented as a premiere at the Musée on the same evening.

Sander Buyck’s photos will feature as part of a large-scale citybooks photography exhibition in the museum in 2013, and will be on show during summer 2012 during a group exhibition in de Markten in Brussels.

Organisation: deBuren, citybooks Charleroi in collaboration with the Musée de la Photographie and the city counsel of Charleroi. With the support of the EACEA.