Søren Engsted

“La Belle Epoque” is an intervention in the residential outskirts of Charleroi. This area of the formerly industrial Belgian city presents itself as the bleak man-made environment developed by a dysfunctional post-capitalist modernity. Accumulated objects – owned by the municipality for the urban infrastructure - are abandoned and amassed in the public sphere. Among these almost-staged assemblages, I discovered a number of large plastic plant basins. I piled up eleven of them to create a 7-meter high column which I painted in gold with the only two spray-cans of that kind I could manage to find in local shops in order to camouflage it among examples of celebrated modernist sculpture like Costantin Brancusi`s “Endless Column” (1938).