Discovered this Sunday, March 21 at the entrance to Thionville: a false sign installed at one of the city’s entrances, Chaussée d’Europe. Placed under the four flowers, officially rewarding the effort made by the municipality in the revegetation of its perimeter, it carries a message at the very least negative, “City of boredom”, written in capital letters. And to force the line even more, the panel is adorned with four skulls, suggesting that boredom would even be fatal. In these times of Covid and restrictions, the burden seems a little easy. To tell the truth, one does not see very well what its author, the collective “Georges Cinq”, made up of twenty Lorraine artists, intends to denounce. Certainly Thionville will never be Las Vegas or Paris, but neither is it a cultural, sporting or associative desert. The message was much more understandable last week in Metz, which had seen itself affixed with a sign “City monitored”, with four drawings of surveillance cameras, in reference to the security policy instilled by the new mayor.
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A role of agitator
“One of the members of our group lives in Thionville and had the idea for this panel”, justifies one of the members. “He relied on his feelings as a young thirty-something who struggles to find (even outside Covid), a collective energy in this city. He told us that this had nothing to do with the facilities or the cultural proposals, but rather with the dormitory aspect of Luxembourg and the inhabitants’ disinterest in collective initiatives. Skulls are the most obvious logo that seemed to represent boredom, ”continues this member of the collective. “We hope to play with our collective a small role of agitator, of distorting mirror, like Banksy, but locally and organically. If that makes you react, so much the better! The municipality of Thionville, through its technical services, has indeed shown responsiveness. This Monday morning, the offending panel had already been removed.
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