Renée Lorie placed more than one hundred invitations in the mailboxes of Uccle's wealthiest residents and received only a handful of replies. The resulting series, I thought we would eat with golden spoons, turns that silence into its central subject — a photographic meditation on who is allowed through the hedges of privilege, and on what remains invisible even when a door opens.

Lorie began walking Uccle's most affluent streets in September 2024, carrying a camera and a proposition: share a coffee or a tea, talk about what brings happiness, and try to define what abundance means. The work emerged from an eight-month residency at GC Het Huys, the Brussels community centre that anchored the project institutionally.

Where did the project come from?

The idea predates the photographs by fifteen years. Ilse Joliet of GC Het Huys had long wanted to develop a participatory project in wealthy neighbourhoods. In the summer of 2024, that intention took shape with Lorie, whose artistic practice Joliet had followed since 2020. After several conversations and false starts, the two wrote to affluent residents and walked the streets distributing invitations door to door.

Joliet explains that, although they knew the project would not be easy, they had not anticipated such a profound distance between themselves and the privileged class. She also recalls the warm encounters and images that emerged when some doors did open. Her hope is that the work will encourage further conversation about growing inequality and indifference.

How does privilege look through the lens?

For Lorie, the journey is populated as much by thoughts and preconceptions about wealth as by trees, gardens and façades. As she walks, she wonders who is allowed into the world of those who possess it. In her accompanying text, the houses appear as islands in a wordless conversation: from outside, the photographer imagines the lives unfolding behind the greenery, but she needs a response to come closer.

Silence leaves those questions open. Lorie weighs different reasons for the lack of response — shyness, a shortage of time, family concerns, personal projects — without presenting any as certainties. They form part of a search in which she also acknowledges her own routines and her hope of starting a chance conversation with someone who recognises her on the street.

When an invitation succeeds, access still has limits. Some participants let the camera record only small gestures and objects: the handle of a teapot, a strip of light on a garden chair, a hand reaching towards the table, sugar beside the coffee, a few chocolate biscuits. They ask that their eyes, their smiles and the figures they present to the outside world remain unseen.

These requests push Lorie toward questions of identity and recognition. Her camera searches for the person in what they agree to share. The conversations carry tension too: calling the recipients of her letters rich provokes resistance in some cases, she recounts, because the word lands as a judgement of their assets or as a demand to assume responsibility for inequality.

What did the answers reveal?

The responses she does receive diverge sharply. One participant sets the threshold for being rich between twenty and twenty-five million euros. Others connect abundance with belonging to a loving, supportive family, with health, with a balance between companionship and solitude, or with the freedom to travel and leave whenever one wishes.

The encounters also reveal varied life paths:

• a person involved in art collecting and banking who welcomes a family fleeing Ukraine;
• a successful artist who wishes to rest among the greenery;
• someone who leads a network of pavilions for young people in care;
• a young woman who, having ended up living in a grand house, is curious about how she will be portrayed.

What holds the series together?

Between unanswered letters and shared encounters, I thought we would eat with golden spoons sustains a search for contact rather than a verdict. Lorie's camera remains in her lap, ready to preserve the memory of those who allow her inside — a method that makes restraint itself the operative gesture of the work.

With Joliet hoping the series will provoke wider discussion of inequality and indifference, the project now stands as an open question aimed at its audience as much as at Uccle's closed gates: who, finally, agrees to be seen?