Renaissance. Scenes of Industrial Reconversion in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Coalfield, the artist Jorge Ribalta presents a photographic analysis of the epochal transition from industry to culture and leisure economies. Ribalta’s book is organised around eight groups of a varying numbers of photographs and sheds a light on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region’s place in the European history of the capitalist nation-state. In this first ‘Author’s Corner’ blog post Ribalta explains more about his project ‘Renaissance’.

Co-edited with Leuven University Press, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and Galerie Casa sin fin, Madrid, this book extends the research work on the former North Mining Basin that Jorge Ribalta conducted between 2014 and 2015 at the CRP / and which was the subject of an exhibition of the same name in December 2015.