New exhibition : "Au charbon !"
From 21 June 2025 to 25 May 2026
“Thus were formed those immense coal fields, which excessive consumption must exhaust, however, in less than three centuries, if the industrial world does not see to it.”
Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne, 1864.
In the era of the post-carbon energy transition, the Mining History Centre, in collaboration with the CID Grand Hornu, presents the exhibition Au charbon!, which brings together more than forty works by designers, architects and visual artists from France, Belgium, Sweden, Argentina and Japan.
These artists have taken up the theme of coal, one of humanity’s main sources of energy, the combustion of which is responsible for a large proportion of the planet’s CO2 emissions, to express through design a damning assessment, but also reasons for hope.
Coal is a combustible sedimentary rock rich in carbon, formed from the partial decomposition of plant organic matter, and is the raw material for the exhibition’s narrative. The other coal, produced by the carbonisation of wood, long the only source of energy in the proto-industrial era, is also at the heart of the exhibition.
Designers, architects and artists are questioning these combustible materials that form the memory of the land and its people, and experimenting with the circular transformation of resources. They are inventing new approaches to production, from non-invasive extraction to the sensitive treatment of materials in order to understand and reduce their impact on the environment.
The Au charbon! exhibition is conceived as a cross-disciplinary conversation that links memories and techniques from the past with the need for solutions to the present emergency. Here, the creative act is both narrator and actor in an ecosystem made up of gestures, values and know-how, which delves into the memory of the biosphere, man and nature. Coal becomes a resource for generating polyphonic and sustainable narratives.
The Au charbon! exhibition will be on show from 21 June 2025 to 25 May 2026 and will be accompanied by a series of cultural events, which can be found at www.chm-lewarde.com.
