Maison Gertrude

What if we considered care homes for what they truly are: places where life continues, spaces of care and vital experimentation, both for residents and for staff, artists, and even the wider public.

It is in this spirit that the Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, together with artist Mohamed El Khatib, aims to create an art centre within the Résidence Sainte-Gertrude, a care home run by the City of Brussels. 

In 2021, Mohamed El Khatib began research on love after the age of 65 for his upcoming creation La Vie secrète des vieux, co-produced by the Théâtre National. The project involves collecting testimonies from elderly people from diverse social backgrounds in order to build a plural narrative reflecting the variety of love experiences and a renewed perspective on sexuality. During this research, he met residents of the Blés d’Or nursing home in Chambéry. A conversation with the director led him to question how a lasting connection between art and everyday life could be established within such institutions. This is where the idea of creating permanent art centres in care homes emerged.

Care homes are often perceived as places of decline, “end-of-life” spaces where the focus is on finishing life rather than continuing to live it fully. Conversely, art centres are sometimes seen as austere and lifeless spaces, defined by the artworks they display.

The aim is not to insert art into a care home, but rather to reveal it, as it is already there. The challenge is aesthetic, social and political. Art should not be limited to cultural outings but become part of everyday life. Nursing homes, often neglected, should also be reintegrated into the fabric of normal life. Mohamed El Khatib shares Christian Boltanski’s belief that, after the age of 60, everyone should have their own museum, and that thousands of micro-museums should exist, collectively forming the memory of the world. This project includes residents’ lives in various forms: text, video, photography, drawing, collage, performance…

The aim is to allow forms of life and artistic experimentation to emerge from the residents themselves, and to value them as ways of being in the world once again. Creating a museum outside institutional walls is perhaps the best way to generate unexpected encounters between individuals and artworks, inventing new forms of exhibition, sharing and friction between people who would not normally meet. The artistic work with residents focuses on reclaiming their personal histories through their objects. Artists inscribe these singular life trajectories into a collective history, to explore together different ways of feeling alive.

Maison Gertrude
A project by Mohamed El Khatib with the residents and staff of the Résidence Sainte-Gertrude, and the CPAS of the City of Brussels.
With the support of the City of Brussels, the CPAS of the City of Brussels and the French Community Commission.
In collaboration with Centrale for Contemporary Art, the Design Museum Brussels, the Musée Art & Marges and BPS22.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of the European Art Explora Prize – Académie des beaux-arts.
With the support of the Embassy of France in Belgium and the French Institute, within the framework of EXTRA, a programme supporting contemporary French creation, as well as the National Lottery and Cyclup.