Laurent Liefooghe Architectuur

. . . hence the utopian dream of the total rationality, transparency and controllability of an urban environment unleashed a historical dynamism that is manifested in the perpetual transformation of all realms of urban life: the quest for utopia forces the city into a permanent process of surpassing and destroying itself - which is why the city has become the natural venue for revolutions, upheavals, constant new beginnings, fleeting fashion and incessantly changing lifestyles.
(Boris Groys, The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction)

Border Square is about the creation of a monument ‘ex negativo’, an urban vacuum in Brussels right in the heart of unified Europe. The title refers to a fictitious rectangular square in the center of the European Neighborhood that cuts right trough the institutional buildings of the EU.
With this installation Laurent Liefooghe reacts on the dystopian effects of big scale political and architectural constructions and the dark side of monumentality: rigidity, order, obstruction, exclusion of life, etc.
A story is told about how the desolate square gradually becomes part of an urban-political dynamic, but attempts at the same time to define a contemporary concept of monumentality. The sand socle Laurent Liefooghe conceived of for Network looks like an incision into an infinite surface, seeming to refer to the paradoxical relation between utopian thinking and the image of the desert. Visitors are invited to take their shoe’s off and to set foot on the warm sandy base. (NETWERK)