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Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016

“Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016. L’Exposition” by the Italian photographer Giovanni Marinelli is organised on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Marcinelle tragedy.

Giovanni Marinelli, Memories, Marcinelle, 2016

“Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016. L’Exposition” by the Italian photographer Giovanni Marinelli is organised by the Zeitegeist Art Exhibit Group at Le Bois du Cazier on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Marcinelle tragedy. Giovanni Marinelli tells a tale which began in the post-war period, a story of immigration, work, mines which seemed to lead to the bowels of the earth, and of the coal which dirtied hands and, above all, lungs.

Marinelli presents a sentiment, a legacy which remains attached to the walls of the black brick houses, a colour which is perhaps too similar to the coal to allow the forgetting of a difficult but perhaps constructive twentieth century. He isolates a number of symbols, breaking a narration which, sixty years on, has to be reconstructed, re-thought, and studied with the right historical distance.

Giovanni_Marinelli, Places, Marcinelle, 2016

Marinelli’s work does not stop at a simple evoking or a simple memory, but becomes a comparative study between the present and the recent past. A complex journey which began in 1946 following the Italy-Belgium agreement which provided for an exchange of coal for labour.

8 October – 4 December 2016
Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016. L’Exposition
Le Bois du Cazier
Rue du Cazier 80, Marcinelle, Belgium

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Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016

“Marcinelle: 1956 – 2016. L’Exposition” by the Italian photographer Giovanni Marinelli is organised on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Marcinelle tragedy.

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