Text by Irene Dominioni
Illustration and photo from project website: www.the-mirror-project.org
On a screen, a young woman is portrayed in close-up, indistinct background. Her name is Hanna, she is 22 years old and she is half Kurdish and half Arabic from Iraq. She is being interviewed for an activity called “The Mirror Project”, but nobody else is in the room, just her and her reflection.
“Tell us about a difficult situation you were in”, asks the paper that she is holding in her hand. “Uhm…” she sighs. “I had a difficult childhood, it’s hard to be raised without a father in our society. Also, when I was 5 I saw a dog eating a dead body in the street, and that shocked me. Now I have grown up and I have seen many dead bodies”.
The interview goes on with a few simple, but straightforward questions: tell us about the important things in your life, what is your current situation and how do you feel about it. Hanna answers to every question calmly, but with a firm tone. Sometimes, her eyes get watery as she speaks. At the end, the last paper states “Look into the mirror and imagine your future”. She stares, letting the viewer on the other side imagine what she is thinking – dreams, fears, possibilities.
“The Mirror Project” is a creation of Kevin McElvaney, a German photographer who has worked, among others, for Vice, Wired, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera and the BBC. The project was developed in December 2016 and it entails 11 interviews carried out in various regions of Iraq, this country being chosen with the intent of showing different sides of life there other than war. The setting is very simple, a space in a church, a tent in a refugee camp or a room in a military base, lights and a chair. The only necessary condition is for the interviewee to be alone. Personal questions are asked, and some people have a hard time looking directly at themselves. “Even if you ask simple things, it’s quite unique that they look in the mirror and talk to themselves, literally. The mirror is a psychological element somehow” Kevin tells Orange Magazine during the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum.
The final moment and the question about imagining one’s future is what accounts best for the capacity to deliver emotions through simple observation of expressions and eye movements. The idea draws on a theory by the psychologist Arthur Aron, who believed that an eye contact of 4 minutes between strangers would establish a connection and fundamentally change the way people look at each other.
At the Global Media Forum, Kevin is showcasing the project, and also replicating the experiment live with the participants that stop by, as they go back and forth in the corridor, between the rooms where the panels take place. “The questions asked are similar and the technique is the same” he tells Orange Magazine, “but it taps into the themes of the Forum, identity and diversity”.
About 20 people have taken part into the experiment here at the Deutsche Welle building in Bonn. “The good thing about this project is that you can adapt the idea to other places. It would be interesting to do the interviews with the same people a few years later, or maybe in other crisis areas. Sometimes people don’t feel comfortable or are too shy to do it” Kevin says, “but if they do eventually, they are usually happy of having had the opportunity to experience something like this. Even though the questions are simple, you dig deep at the same time. So if the question “who are you” is relatively simple and people normally answer by saying their name and age, asking an open question like “what are you?” can be more challenging and people could answer by stating what their profession is, or by saying “a mother”, for example”.
“When I was a child, I wanted to be a hero”, says Hanna from the screen. Maybe it’s because of her eyes, wide and kind, or because of the way she puts her dark and wavy hair behind her ear. Perhaps it’s the smile or the way she raises her eyebrows while she speaks. Maybe it was just a matter of minutes, like Arthur Aron says. But, at the end, you feel that Hanna is one of those good people that you would always want to have around. She has become a friend. “I don’t have superpowers, that’s true, but it’s enough when I can make people happy”, she ends. She is not aware of it, but, somewhere far away, she has touched an interlocutor that she cannot even see. And delivered a message: that as long as we look into each other’s eyes, accepting and enjoying what makes us all different – and yet all humans – will always be possible.
