A small garden city with a poetic name, along the N90 in Belgium, between the towns of Mons and Binche; built almost in the middle of nowhere, just a hundred years ago, to house the staff of a coal mine. The scenes of the documentary 'Misère au Borinage' which Joris Ivens and Henri Storck filmed here in 1933 bear witness to the fact that the village of Levant de Mons is certainly one of the symbolic places of the region's turbulent industrial and social history.
But what remains, a century later, of the site of the colliery and of the original architecture of the garden city? And who are the inhabitants of Le Levant de Mons today? Eddie Bonesire took an interest in the history of the place and visited it some fifteen times between 2019 and 2022. Here is a glimpse of what he found...
This project was partly funded by Hainaut Culture (culture.hainaut.be) and by asbl Famille d'Accueil Odile Henri (faoh.be)
→ The book 'Au Levant de Mons' (of which several double pages are shown below) was published by Berlin Brussels Art Projects in November 2022 (See 'Publications')
