‘This is Us. This is Brussels.’ explores the ‘us’ between Brussels residents, during the Molenbeek for Brussels Spring Assembly.

With ‘Heritage Conversations’ on the streets of Molenbeek and ‘This is Us. This is Brussels. Talks.’ with speakers from civil society, academics and the public, we deepened our understanding of a number of experiences, cultural heritage expressions and traditions or places that a lot of Brussels residents have in common. We discovered these after analysing our first 200 interviews, conducted by 90 heritage agents.

‘ This is Us. This is Brussels.’ starts with the question ‘What if Brussels were 1,000 people?’ and, based on this data, builds a ‘human archive’ with the stories of 1,000 people in order to make visible the Brussels and its inhabitants of the 2020s: a super-diverse, young, multi-layered and complex city in the heart of Europe. The project aims to discover and create new alliances and find the ‘we’ in their stories.

Based on this statistical picture of 1,000 Brussels residents, we started looking for real people who correspond to each profile in terms of place of residence, gender, age, origin and nationality. At the same time, we permanently monitor less visible characteristics that we discover through the interviews, such as socio-economic background. The first 200 contributions from Brussels residents have been collected by a very diverse team of ‘heritage brokers’ and made accessible in the project’s ‘human archive’.

Find out at http://www.thisisus.brussels or on instagram

It was time to engage with the ‘we’ in these lives, visions of the city, heritage stories and desired futures in Molenbeek through ‘Heritage Conversations’ and ‘This is Us. This is Brussels.Talks.’

We began our ‘Heritage Conversations’ using the ‘This is Us. This is Brussels.’ mobile on the streets of Molenbeek.

We also organised three ‘This is Us. This is Brussels. Talks.’ These are dialogues that delved deeper into the ‘us’ of Homesickness, Football and Returned to Brussels.

Sarah Brunori’s photos totally capture the atmosphere of these beautiful moments!