Schueberfouer: A Temporary City of Lights
Each summer, Luxembourg’s Schueberfouer transforms the Glacis into a vast, glowing fairground. These photographs explore the spectacle as both urban transformation and cultural imagination, where Europe meets the dreamlike glow of American cinema.
Each year, the Schueberfouer remakes the Glacis into something quite extraordinary. What is normally a flat, open expanse at the edge of Luxembourg’s city centre becomes, for three weeks, a dense landscape of steel towers, neon corridors, and moving crowds. It is a classic example of what Michel de Certeau described as the “practice of space”: the way people temporarily inhabit and reconfigure the city through collective rituals.
The sheer scale of the fair is striking. Its vertical structures dominate the skyline, visible far beyond the boundaries of the site, while its rhythms, the noise, the lights, the flow of visitors, spill out into the surrounding streets. In this sense the Schueberfouer is not just a fairground, but a seasonal city layered on top of Luxembourg itself, a reminder that urban space is never fixed but constantly reshaped by culture and imagination.
Through these photographs I wanted to capture that transformation: the familiar turned unfamiliar, the static turned kinetic. At times, wandering among the rides feels less like Luxembourg and more like stepping onto the set of an American film—the exaggerated lights, the endless energy, the sense that the night could go on forever. It is a geography as much imagined as real, stitched together from pop culture and lived experience, and the fairground becomes the stage where the two briefly overlap.
