The first impression I had of Lìege was premature as often happens. Time and patience are the tools needed to build up a well-founded opinion on every topic, and when this topic is complex as a city, the research could dive extraordinarily deep, as far as where the first settlement of people was.
In the beginning, according to the themes we were focusing on, I started to investigate the focal points I found meaningful in the environment of Lìege. The first substantial theme in the city is certainly the river and, consequently, the flow of the water with it. Therefore, the stream of water, as the flowing of time, marks people’s days, it gives a pace to the life of the inhabitants. Indeed, the movement and reflectivity of water are proudly arising in the heart of the urban fabric, dictating the rules of people’s choreography. Heraclitus said:” No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”[2]. That river divides and joins the city at the same time. Instead, the fragments of the past spread in the city captured my attention in a much more subtle way, all these small details which tell a story from a different era were hidden by the grey atmosphere in which my ‘first impression’ was wrapped. Statues, railings, wood-framed windows and consumed steps, every old brick corner and each blackened chimney were waiting to reveal the script of the city. At that point, I was tirelessly looking for a trait of Liege that could be the starting point of my research, a feature that characterizes the environment in a unique way. Lately, observing the montage of the city and the way the buildings are assembled together, I suddenly realized that in almost every view of Liege, there is the presence of an empty brick wall. And no matter where you will turn your head, another ‘waiting’ wall will materialize in the overbearing skyline.
Furthermore, once I had this topic in my mind, I started questioning and researching those walls. Why are they standing there? Why are they so fascinating? What are they trying to tell? One thing is certain, they are framing the void left by time. Therefore, little by little, I started shifting my focus from the masses to the voids, and every time I went back to Liege I discovered new features of that emptiness. The more I thought about the walls the more I looked at these voids as a chance to improve the experience of the surroundings, so as to make the empty gaps the tool to read the city. Certainly, the ideas storming in my mind were crowded and diverse. But the questions were clear:” How to let the people change their perspectives of Liege?” and “How to switch the focus from the ordinary points of view to new undiscovered details?”
Italo Calvino said:” “The city, however, does not tell its story, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”[1]
Therefore, I built up my intention to develop a tool with which the people could read the lines of Liege’s hands. The turning point happened when I went to Liege with a small mirror in my backpack. I was already thinking about reflection as a way to make the emptiness ‘even more empty’ for a few days when I decided to go on the site and try by myself how reflective surfaces can work in a city. Hence, it is during that visit that my brain connected all the points of my previous research, and everything I was previously focusing on, kept coming back and showing up in that small round mirror. Indeed, with reflections, I’m able to display the city itself on those ‘waiting’ walls, the city that everyone knows and nobody looks at. Able to show the same city, yes, but from a different point of view. New perspectives, bricks and corners that would never be shown otherwise. Thus, once landed on the idea of reflection as a tool for my purposes, I started thinking about how to develop an intervention that could let me reach the aim to rethink the relationship between the water, the reflections and the city itself. A temporary space where the city meets itself through reflectiveness and movement. Finally, after deeper research, the concept brought me to the final idea: a metal structure, clinging to the empty wall and fully coated with rhomboidal movable mirrors. The final visual impact of the wall would be similar to the standard rain coatings for brick walls which are often present in Liege, but the ultimate effect will be totally different as the reflective surface of the movable mirrors will display a different view of the city at every look. Moreover, the moving reflection will resemble the stream of the river, the wind might let them organically ‘flow’ as water, or sharply tilt them. Every time in a different combination, the mirrors will show each moment a new image, which, however, is always made by fragments of Liege itself. Lastly, it will be a place meant to change people's perspective on their environment, an intervention that works as an interactive tool given to the inhabitants in order to let them discover new corners of their city in a reflective playground.