After my study I came to live in Maastricht. What I didn't know is that Maastricht was the first real industrial city in the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, profiting of the economic boom of the Walloon cities. Wallonia even became the third largest economic power in the world, after the United States and Great Britain. I turned out to be living on the birthplace of the industrial revolution in mainland Europe. Machines, ships, locomotives and railway tracks were first produced on a large scale here. The work in the mines and the factories attracted workers from Eastern Europe to North Africa. From the 1970s, more and more of them closed. It became a shabby region with an uncomfortable cinematic beauty. With some imagination you could call it the ground zero of the industrial age. At the end of 2015 my journey of discovery through my 'industrial backyard' begins. I became fascinated by the iconic mining mountains in the landscape and the size and grandeur of the complexes in Seraing, Genk, Beringen, Charleroi, Mons and Bergen. The dilapidated factories, broken roads and gray houses are the scenery for a region full of stories. Each ruin wants to tell you something about a glorious past, but it remains a mystery what actually happened. At the same time, a bigger story reveals itself: that everything that exists is in constant transition. A good example of this is the ‘terril’, which literally means: sick earth. For decades they were black, smoking mountains of waste from the mine shafts. Now they are green hills, overgrown with white birch trees. The emphasis in this book lays on the 'human' details in that surreal, post-industrial setting, which add a colorful, contrasting, humorous or poetic element to the environment. For me, Once upon a time is above all a story about the resilience and adaptability of the residents, who try to make the best of their lives in this impoverished environment.