Sébastien Cuvelier

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A Golden Distance2022-2025
“Whether we like it or not, the United States haunts our minds. Few countries have captured our imaginations as much as the US has, projecting its image to the point of saturating our screens, stories and memories. However, by exporting dreams, America has become unrecognizable. The gap between how we perceived it and what it has become is wider than ever. This dizzying distance feeds our obsession. We talk about it as if its destiny were our own and as if the world were reduced to a single continent.”

— Sophie Soukias, essay (transl.)

This project stems from a historical encounter in 1944, when an American soldier, Normand, found shelter with my great-grandparents during the Battle of the Bulge. This led to a transatlantic correspondence spanning 80 years.

Over the last few years, my inquiry shifted to Normand’s youngest son, Michael — an outwardly kind figure whose polarizing social media posts offer a microcosmic lens on present-day political discourse in the United States, shaped by cultural anxiety and nationalism.

By revisiting this family archive, the project explores the entanglement of personal memory and collective narrative. It asks how a gesture of wartime solidarity, once emblematic of transnational empathy, now echoes in a geopolitical climate increasingly shaped by social, political, and ideological divides.

Exhibition
L’Enfant Sauvage, Brussels, Sep-Oct 2025