This work is the first step in www.terre-d-accueil.eu, a project in a serie that I would like to continue to develop as an in-situ work in several cities in Europe, together with its inhabitants. I started it in Thiers in France, in conjunction with an exhibition in the art center “Le Creux de l´Enfer” to which I was invited in March 2010. What interests me with working with different cities (small and big) in Europe is to explore, in a very objective way, the extent to which working activity (industry, service etc) has been attracting foreign labor in the past, and how the population was modified and which traces it has left today in terms of soil of immigration and how all this is continuing today with the lack of labor in some branches. The projects title was at first quite ironical but I discovered little by little that the people interviewed where rather well integrated and welcomed to the society. With this first part of the project, Thiers- terre d´accueil, I contacted some of Thiers´ inhabitants, who were not born in France and who have chosen to live in Thiers or have landed there by coincidence. Instead of doing interviews or a reportage / documentary that would pose direct questions related to the subject (“When and how did you come to Thiers?”), I proceeded more indirectly in order to bring out something universal and that could be compared to people in many other small towns in Europe or in the world. I asked these people questions based on what I had earlier discussed with them or according to their interests or occupations. I also asked them to give me something visual, anything (sketches for the architect, postcards, photos, newspaper articles or anything that they could relate to the project). And finally I asked them to tell me or to write a very short story or anecdote, real or fictional or both, that had a relation to the city of Thiers. The different topics appear during the collaboration and during the progression of the work, in accordance with the place and with the inhabitants. Especially I wanted to highlight definitions of the realities of the people of the city (the political, social, cultural realities, etc.). This is what is interesting for people outside those cities. The project is made on the spot, with the participants, but it is also an almost daily contact over a period by mail and telephone. The final work exists as an archive of the collected elements that can be shown in an exhibition and it also exists on the Internet for several reasons. First of all, on the Net, the project will continue to exist geographically and in time, after exposure. Secondly there may be an exchange of comments on the forum site, during and after the exhibition. Since this is a project that involves people and a particular city, I thought it was important, during the first year, that the work continued to live and that other inhabitants of the city who may have had comments or additions could be able to participate in this way on an online forum. Here is the text from the Creux de l’Enfer exhibition by the art critic Jill Gasparina: “Thiers, terre d´accueil ("Thiers haven") is a project that takes the final form of a website. This is an in situ project and yet releasable to infinity. What defines the identity of a city and its inhabitants? Anne-Sophie Bosc interviewed for this project a dozen people in the town of Thiers. The different interviews were conducted without protocol, but the artist has asked each of these people to deliver stories and pictures. These inhabitants were not born in Thiers and arrived there by different ways. They all have different paths. The question for the artist is to “make us think about the question of what makes us install somewhere, for example at Thiers.” The website refers to these anecdotes and stories that trace a social, political and cultural portrait of the city. This is an introduction to the city, which is intended for visitors but also for the artist herself: “It’s my way of discovering a town without being a tourist,” she says. Thiers terre d´accueil is both a more subjective and more fragmented alternative to the official Tourist Office discourses. Far from a strictly documentary or sociological work, Anne-Sophie Bosc wanted to offer something between fiction and reality, a mixture of images, drawings, collages, texts, stories, myths. By erasing the signs of the real, the artist wants to make this city the starting point of a bigger question about the social reality of small European towns. The comings and goings between reality and fiction, the specific relation to the city and its generic treatment expand the different readings of the project. A discussion forum will allow extending the dialogue begun by the artist with the locals and possibly extending to the entire community of people in the town of Thiers. Terre d´accueil is the first episode of a series of other works related to cities in Europe. “