Reciprocity Design Triennale Liège 2018: Face A – Face B @ Design Station

With his two faces the Roman God Janus was able to look in two different directions at once, a skill he traditionally employed as a gatekeeper, as a guardian of transitions, observing the past while always having his view firmly on the future; but a skill which is also helpful in understanding design processes, allowing as it does one to see simultaneously both the finished article, and the research, experimentation and design philosophy that lead to it.

Presenting works by eight Liège based studios which juxtapose the finished product with the development process, the exhibition Face A – Face B at Design Station Liège allows just such a Janus perspective.

LuForm 6 – LuForm Meets RECIPROCITY @ the Ludwig Forum Aachen

The 6th edition of LuForm Aachen is being staged, as the title succinctly implies, in conjunction with the Reciprocity Design Triennale, an event nominally based in the Belgian city of Liège but which, and as with LuForm, integrates creatives and creative institutions from across the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion. And therefore a most logical and natural cooperation

As an exhibition LuForm 6 also reflects one of the principle themes of Reciprocity 2018: fragility.

Whereby, if the exhibitions in Liège primarily discuss practical considerations on fragility, then the presentation in Aachen is much more concerned with speculative, theoretical, abstract, artistic considerations on the same.

Reciprocity Design Triennale Liège 2018: Fragilitas @ La Boverie

Fragility is in many regards the natural state of all systems and organisms.

Something the Second Law of Thermodynamics tends to support.

Given this inherent fragility, the secret to existence is largely a perpetual struggle to prevent fragility becoming the defining condition of a system/organism, in keeping the fragility in the background: something our organic and non-organic systems have developed very clever and astute methods for achieving, so much so that we normally are unaware of fragility, although it is always present.

Which, arguably, is the reason we find such strong, contradictory, emotions in fragility: for example, on the one hand the beauty we find in fragility, on the our other how our, and our environment’s, fragility can elicit fear and despondency.

Considerations on, and responses to, our, and our environment’s, fragility are one the central themes of the 2018 Reciprocity Design Triennale Liège.