Je Crois aux Nuits – I Believe in the Nights

Pierre Liebaert

2025 – Europe

About this series

Je crois aux Nuits – I Believe in the Nights – explores ritual activity as it marks liminal situations between nature’s winter sleep and the expectant anticipation of its awakening into daylight. Ritual is rooted in the order of nature and in the relationship human beings maintain with the rhythm of the seasons, the lunar cycle, and with the constraints of cold and heat, harvest and collective life, sexuality and death. It is the hyperbolic repetition of the great passages that punctuate every human existence.
For several years, Pierre Liebaert has immersed himself in carnivalesque festivities across Europe. Marked by inversion, excess, and drunkenness, these cathartic rites—where impulses are unleashed—reenact ancestral tensions and signal the passage toward a new cycle or another stage of life. He takes part by deliberately placing himself beyond beauty, comfort, and reassurance, pushing his gaze toward peripheral zones where, out of darkness, what lies at the core of the human emerges.
To fully participate in the rite, one must step into another’s skin, assuming a double status: oneself and an other self. Ritual thus calls for a return to the undifferentiated, to ambivalence, and to primordial chaos. Je crois aux Nuits becomes a mirror—sometimes distorting—of a society inevitably caught in contradictions and in questions about the meaning of what it builds.

Photographer: Pierre Liebaert
Nationality: Belgian
Based in: Belgium
Website: www.pierreliebaert.com
Instagram: @pierre.liebaert

Pierre Liebaert is a Belgian photographer. His series Macquenoise was published by the Belgian publisher Le Caillou Bleu and was recognized by the American website Photo-Eye as one of the 26 best books of 2013.
His projects are often immersive, long-term, and deeply consuming. While primarily photographic, his previous series Free Now is structured as an installation, including a film, images, music, sound recordings, and texts. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Boutographies Festival and the PHmuseum New Generation Prize. The film, shown independently, has been screened at numerous international film festivals. In 2021, the eponymous book, published by L’éditeur du dimanche (Paris), was shortlisted for the Arles Book Prize and was added to the MoMA library in 2023.
For his ongoing project, Je crois aux Nuits, which depicts the carnival cycle, he explores territories where fragile rural traditions still appear. Since 2017, his work has been represented by the Brussels gallery Archiraar. At the end of 2021, Pierre Liebaert was awarded the Fintro Prize in the Visual Storytelling category.