Idle Tunnel, 2019
HD video projection loop, Athenian slate rock, cement, metallic spray paint
Dimensions variable

 

Idle Tunnel is a video installation that derives from an ongoing research project that looks at the Athenian subway system as a multifaceted infrastructure: a hybrid between an urban development project, an unceasing archaeological excavation and a curious museological mechanism of antiquities and works of contemporary art.

The looping video-projection originates from extensive documentation of photogrammetric digital scans that the artist operated in the totality of the subway system. In Idle Tunnel, the reconstructed 3D models of the Athenian subway trains provide the surface for unfolding a visual research archive dealing with subjects of geological trauma, transmutating biopolitical phenomena within hyper-modernities, literary and philosophical references on the form of the network and the form of the fragment, as well as representations of the mythological underworld through the centuries.

Brought into spatial relation with the projection is a sculpture made of cast Athenian slate, the type of metamorphic rock that was excavated by the tunnel boring machines during the subterranean railway construction. Produced by the means of an improvised rapid-prototyping technique, the sculpture takes its form from a pair of 3D-scanned seats found inside one of the subway trains. As it goes with the projection’s glitched imagery, the sculptural form is likewise distorted through the digital scanning and fabrication process, pointing to an uncanny material and mental landscape, a dialectical state between deep memory and violent accelerations.