Francesca Comune
A look at the invisible mechanisms of transnational trade in Brussels
BEHIND THE CURTAIN is a visual and territorial survey conducted in the district of Cureghem in Brussels, one of the largest European centres for the trade of used vehicles to West Africa. At the crossroads of documentary photography, socio-anthropological research and installation practice, the project aims to reveal opaque networks, coded gestures, invisible signs that shape a territory marked by globalization, colonial heritage, and powerful informal economies. This project was born from a multi-month immersion in a complex space, crossed by material and intangible flows: decayed warehouses, improvised concessions, DIY thresholds, chalk numbers on windshields, telephone calls passed at any time to conclude sales to thousands of kilometers away. Through this sensitive mapping, BEHIND THE CURTAIN highlights the spatial, cultural and symbolic tensions of a changing neighbourhood.
An omnipresent but out-of-court trade
For more than two decades, the Cureghem district has become a hub of vehicle trade for Benin, Togo, Ghana and Nigeria. Yet this sector remains surprisingly absent from the city's official representations. It takes place almost entirely remotely, often between men, via telephone networks. There is a coded visual and gesture language, made of wall markings, painted symbols, shared gestures. Few exchanges go through conventional digital platforms: opacity is a strategy as much as a constraint. This trade is largely dominated by a handful of actors — mostly Lebanese or Belgo-Lebanese — that control a significant portion of the flow. The port of Antwerp annually exports about 250,000 used vehicles to West Africa, making Belgium a key player in this economic geography, where the old colonial roads cross contemporary capitalist logics.
A hybrid methodology located
The project is based on a photographic corpus that has been formed since 2024, enriched with ethnographic observations and visual materials collected on the ground. This is a careful but non-intrusive look, aware of power dynamics and position asymmetries. Francesca takes its full place in this context: that of a white woman, who is alien to the cultural and economic environment she observes, which gives the project an essential reflexive and critical dimension. The images produced do not aim to “ illustrate” a reality, but to activate latent narratives. The project mobilizes a variety of formats: documentary photographs, commercial signs details, fragments of recovered objects, hybrid photomontages mixing real elements and visual fictions. These plastic devices question the very materiality of the image in a context where the information circulates in a fragmented, encrypted way, sometimes unreadable for the outside look.
Between art, research and visual criticism
BEHIND THE CURTAIN is part of a tradition of critical artistic research that crosses the history of urban representation — from the shadows evoked by Pline the Ancien to the mechanized reproduction analyzed by Walter Benjamin, to the images generated by machines for other machines described by Trevor Paglen. Here, the image is not proof, but interface: it acts as a threshold, as a moving archive, as a fragment of a territory whose organizational logics escape the classic reading grids. The project questions the role of the image in the construction of urban narratives in the era of platforms, algorithmic control and the globalization of infrastructure. He asks this question: what can an image reveal when what it shows is precisely done to stay invisible?
An installation thought as floating space-time
The BEHIND THE CURTAIN exhibition does not offer linear narration or comprehensive mapping. It builds a space of perception made of visual frictions, silences, micro-repetitions. The installation articles large formats, retro-lit prints, objects built in references to the form presented in the neighborhood. , to invite the spectator to experience a form of perceptive displacement. It operates as a fragmented urban scene, where each item – glass tag, gesture typology, logistic entanglement – becomes revealer of a wider system.
Partners and support
This project was made possible thanks to the support of the King Baudouin Foundation, as part of the Roger De Conynck (Fonds) initiative.
Francesca Comune is a visual artist of Italian origin, born in Naples in 1997 and currently based in Brussels. After several years in Milan in the fashion industry, especially in the publishing sector, she began photography studies at the ARBA-ESA (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels).
Winner of the Conynck Roger Award in 2021 and the Plomb Tour Award in 2023, she obtained a Master in Fine Arts, Visual and Space Arts at the ARBA-ESA. Today, she continues the development of her artistic practice, while conducting projects around new forms of pedagogy in schools of art and collaborations between artistic and social fields.
His artistic approach extends to photography, theoretical research, writing, installation and publishing. Each project takes the form of a site-specific survey, exploring latent tensions, uses, mutations and dynamics specific to a given location. It is particularly interested in transition environments, marked by instability, production and consumption flows, and invisible forms of power.
An anchored in in situ research, his practice examines how space is built, inhabited, transformed and sometimes contested, especially in Western urban contexts. By combining a conceptual approach with material experimentation, it works between image and object, exploring meaning slips through forms and supports.
Each invested territory becomes a space analysis field where historical traces, stories built, physical interventions cross. Francesca considers the city as a stratified document, from which it collects fragments — architectural remains, debris, archival images — to propose a plastic and critical rereading.
Its installations function as temporal, open, unfinished constructions in perpetual evolution. Rather than aim for a final form, they highlight the transformation of materials and the multiplicity of readings.
At the heart of his practice lies the act of “re-cadrer” (re-frame) : challenge dominant spatial logics, propose new sensitive perspectives on our environments, embracing ambiguity, instability and complexity. His works did not deliver closed speeches, but presented themselves as open visual frameworks, inviting reflection, interpretation and critical engagement with the structures that shape our living spaces.