Le plat pays qui est un peu le mien is a long-term documentary project made during the years I lived in Belgium. The title borrows from Jacques Brel’s love letter to his flat country — but adds the qualifier “a little bit mine,” because belonging was always partial, always negotiated.

The work portrays the people and landscapes of a country I came to know intimately without ever fully becoming part of. Butchers and bus riders, pub regulars and market vendors, children on concrete ledges and workers in reflective vests — each photograph is a small encounter, a moment of mutual recognition between a foreigner with a camera and the person in front of it.

Belgium revealed itself to me in contrasts: the warmth of its interiors against the grey of its skies, the formality of its institutions against the informality of its street life, the quiet of its flat countryside against the density of its cities. I was drawn to the spaces where these tensions were visible — friteries at the edge of villages, canal towpaths near cooling towers, ornamental grasses catching the last light on a suburban terrace.

The project is shot in both color and black-and-white, mixing 35mm and medium format. The shift between the two is intuitive rather than systematic — some encounters demanded the directness of black-and-white, while others needed the warmth and specificity that only color can hold.

What remains is a portrait of a place that shaped me profoundly, made by someone who was always, in some sense, just passing through.

Artist Statement

Belgium taught me that belonging does not require permanence. Over the years I spent there, I photographed the people and places that made the country partly mine -- always partly, never fully. This incompleteness became the subject itself.

A butcher in a white t-shirt holding a round cut of meat in a commercial kitchen
Elderly people gathered around a table in a bright, minimalist cafeteria seen through a soft-focus foreground
Black-and-white photograph of teenagers sitting by a graffiti-covered wall next to a parked scooter
Long-exposure black-and-white photograph of a person in a wheelchair watching a blurred figure in fishnet stockings at an indoor venue
Portrait of a woman with dark hair and heavy makeup wearing a plaid blazer, looking directly at the camera
Black-and-white photograph of a mechanical puppet or automaton figure slumped among stage machinery and props
Black-and-white portrait of a young woman standing on public transport, holding a pole, gazing to the side
Black-and-white portrait of two men standing in front of a garage stacked with piles of chairs and furniture
Black-and-white photograph of scattered books and papers spilling from boxes onto cobblestones
Portrait of a worker in an orange high-visibility jacket standing on a path between apartment buildings
Black-and-white portrait of a couple leaning against a brick building entrance, both wearing dark sweaters
Ornamental grasses backlit by warm late-afternoon sunlight on a brick-paved terrace
Two women on a sidewalk in front of a blue metal shutter, one smiling and leaning against the wall, the other walking past
An elderly couple on a city bus, the woman blowing a bubble with chewing gum while the man holds a paper
A mother and two young daughters seated on a city bus, the children looking down thoughtfully
Black-and-white portrait of a young woman with curly hair standing by an ice cream sign on a Belgian street corner
Two young girls playing on a concrete ledge outside an apartment building, one walking and the other sitting with toys
Black-and-white photograph of a Belgian village parking area with a friterie trailer and brick houses under an overcast sky
A white caravan parked on a green field next to a leafless pruned tree, with industrial buildings in the background
Flat Belgian countryside with a stream, green fields, and a faded billboard by a wooden fence under a blue sky
Black-and-white photograph of a person standing on a canal towpath near moored barges, with a cooling tower in the background
Black-and-white portrait of a truck driver in overalls and sunglasses leaning against the wheel of his truck
Black-and-white portrait of an elderly woman smiling in a pub booth, a pint glass and cigarette in front of her
A whole pig carcass hanging from a hook in a small butchery workroom
A nude model seated on a chair in a painter's studio, with a canvas showing broad red brushstrokes in the foreground
Two people harvesting plants in a lush garden under a bright sky, one wearing a straw hat

Ordina Stampa