As part of the implementation of a new policy in the town of Ferrière-la-Grande around the exercise of local democracy, artconnexion was asked to commission a permanent work as part of the New Patrons programme. In order to accompany this project, the town of Ferrière-la-Grande and artconnexion decided to entrust a creative residency to the artist Élise Leclercq. The videos produced during the residency were then presented in an exhibition at idem+arts, an exhibition space in Maubeuge.

Today, the railway line still divides the town of Ferrière-la-Grande, even though there have been no trains passing through for a long time. It is part of the “rurban” landscape and a historical artery of the workers' development around the metallurgy industry.

During her residency, Élise Leclercq proposed a visual and sound rereading of the spaces that the railway line crosses by making individual and collective video micro-fictions. The micro-fictions that Élise Leclercq has been making for several years are not spectacular actions, they unfold through the micro-gestures proposed by the people she meets, which are specific gestures of resistance to a given environment. Her videos question the utopian dimension of our lives through the symbolic power of the acts that people associate with a public space.

Other encounters also led her to the site of the former Miroux factory in the heart of the city, as well as to the site of the Four à chaux and the Uranie factory. The texts of Luc Bérimont, a poet and writer who spent his childhood in Ferrière-la-Grande and whose entire work is marked by the memory of this childhood, echo the videos.