A strange building, the first Trinkhall was built here in 1881, under the orders of a now-forgotten architect: Alexandre Renier, who had studied in Paris and taught for some time at the Liège Fine Arts Academy. This is where he acquired an uncompromising taste for oriental style. In the middle of the Parc d’Avroy, he designed an Arabian Nights-style palace, encased in steel with an oriental design and two prevailing copper towers with Moorish influences.

The furnishings – the tables, chairs, majolica crockery, chandeliers directly copied from a Cairo café and all the ornaments - are in keeping with the architecture. The building was inaugurated on 21 July 1881, during the celebrations of Belgium’s fiftieth anniversary, when the whole town was bedecked with lights and enjoying processions and parties. At the Trinkhall, where people were squeezed into the crowds, the Grivegnée United Workers Ensemble performed, notably, Leutner’s Ouverture triomphale, the first in a long series of countless ensemble or symphony concerts performed indoors or on the bandstand. There were also theatre and music hall shows, fireworks, illusionists, hot air balloonists – the famous Captain Gilbert and his spinning hot air balloon! – singers and acrobats, dioramas and giant cinema screens, walks, games, get-togethers, balls, billiard tournaments. All these activities took place in the city centre, at the Trinkhall or in the park, the beating heart of a more mainstream than middle-class sociability which today is partly forgotten but can now be found in the more modern-day October events. It’s in the archaeology of the place, the location of the museum and, partly, the poetry of a project set in motion by the concept of “arts situés”: through the time and place of its concerts, we want to take the Trinkhall, a tiny dot on the map, to its culmination of incandescence…