One person’s trash is another visionary person’s community art project. In this clever and beautiful repurposing of old CDs, Ignatov Architects has created Mirror Culture, a shimmery entrance to the public park in Varna, Bulgaria. A bunch of used CDs never looked so good.
“It was my fascination with the play of light on fish scales and on liquid surfaces that made me think of a flexible mirror,” architect Borislav Ignatov told Slate. “I realised that the optical discs use the same principles of refraction and separation of light as fish scales and I decided to use them for the purpose.”
Aside from just looking pretty, Mirror Culture is also a public art project bringing the community together. The 6,000 CDs were gathered from the city’s residents, and 128 volunteers helped attach them to the custom knitted fishing net stretching across the park’s entrance. Each little disk of Mirror Culture contains some fragment of the lives of the city’s residents reflecting into the sky.
Mirror Culture was installed last summer. It’s since been taken down — and 500 of the CDs sold as souvenirs — but the rest of the disks remain in storage to be strung up again in a different form next summer. [Ignatov Architects via Slate]
Images via Ignatov Architects