Italy
Bruxelles
Three women gather in a basement, around a map of the city of Brussels, to plan something suspicious. They exchange looks of understanding and draw lines and circles on the map in front of them. Just before dawn, they find themselves in the Impasse de la Fidelité where the statue of Jeanneke Pis stands, for forty years locked behind a grid. While one of them stands guard at the street entrance, the others fumble to open the big padlock that keeps Jeanneke-Pis locked up. Finally, the lock breaks. At dawn, in front of Polaert's belvedere, Jeanneke-Pis will be freed, finally be able to see the whole city in front of her.
The Jeanneke-Pis depicts a little girl with her hair pulled back in two pigtails, crouching in the act of urinating. Small in size, just 50 cm, it was made in 1985 in order to balance the weight of the male representation of the famous Manneken-Pis sculpture, and to symbolise fidelity between lovers. It is located right in front of one of the city's best known pubs, situated in the Impasse de la Fidelité, a cul-de-sac just 600 metres north of the Manneken-Pis. It is a place you never pass by by chance because it is located in the maze of narrow streets that nestles behind the Stock Exchange. The sculpture, never illuminated by artificial light and barely reached by natural light, is located in a small niche carved into the wall, closed by a gate secured by three padlocks placed at different heights. The aim of the film is to show how even the symbolic representations of bodies in urban space return different rights to the city at the intersection of gender differences.