In Uccle’s most affluent streets, grand houses hold memories behind tall hedges.
Renée Lorie has been exploring this landscape since September 2024, carrying a camera and an invitation: to share coffee or tea, talk about what brings happiness, and ask what abundance means.
From this approach emerged I thought we would eat with golden spoons, a photographic series created during an eight-month residency at GC Het Huys.
The project grew from an idea that Ilse Joliet, of GC Het Huys, had held onto for fifteen years: developing a participatory project in wealthy neighbourhoods. In the summer of 2024, that intention began to take shape with Lorie, whose artistic practice Joliet had followed since 2020. After several conversations and attempts, they wrote to affluent residents of Uccle. They walked the streets and placed more than a hundred invitations in mailboxes. Responses were scarce.
This difficulty in establishing contact runs through the work. Joliet explains that, although they knew the project would not be easy, they had not anticipated such a profound distance between themselves and the privileged class. She also recalls the warm encounters and images that emerged when some doors opened. Her hope is that the work will encourage further conversation about growing inequality and indifference.
For Lorie, the journey is populated as much by thoughts and preconceptions about wealth as by trees, gardens, and façades. As she walks, she wonders who is allowed into the world of those who possess it. In her text, the houses appear as islands in a wordless conversation: from outside, the photographer imagines the lives unfolding behind the greenery, but she needs a response to come closer.
Silence leaves those questions open. Lorie considers different reasons for the lack of response: shyness, a shortage of time, family concerns, or personal projects. She does not present them as certainties. They form part of a search in which she also acknowledges her own routines and her hope of starting a chance conversation with someone who recognises her on the street.
When an invitation arrives, access still has its limits. Some participants prefer the camera to record small gestures and objects: the handle of a teapot, a strip of light on a garden chair, a hand reaching towards the table, sugar beside the coffee, or a few chocolate biscuits. They ask that their eyes, smiles, and the figures they present to the outside world remain unseen.
These requests lead Lorie to question identity and recognition. Her camera searches for the person in what they agree to share. The conversations are not without tension either: the photographer recounts how calling the recipients of her letters rich provokes resistance in some cases. The word can be received as a judgement of their assets or as a demand to assume responsibility for inequality.
The responses she does receive offer different ways of understanding wealth. One places the threshold for being rich between twenty and twenty-five million euros. Others connect abundance with belonging to a loving, supportive family, with health, with a balance between companionship and solitude, or with the freedom to travel and leave whenever one wishes.
The encounters also reveal varied life paths. The account includes a person involved in art collecting and banking who welcomes a family fleeing Ukraine; a successful artist who wishes to rest among the greenery; someone who leads a network of pavilions for young people in care; and a young woman who, having ended up living in a grand house, is curious about how she will be portrayed.
Between unanswered letters and shared encounters, I thought we would eat with golden spoons brings together a search for contact. Lorie’s camera remains in her lap, ready to preserve the memory of those who allow her inside. [Official Website]
