EXCAVATION

2018

Fiber reinforced concrete, silicate paint and HD video

Excavation is a sitespecific work placed in the courtyard of the Florentinum business and shopping complex in Prague. It consist of 3 unique concrete sculptures, and a 6 min HD videowork presented in the lobby and on the screen of a viewing window to the construction site of the coming Central Business District Praha. The 3 sculptures and the video work have the archeological pits in a nearby excavation site as their departure point.

 
Next to the court yard a large project which will have an extensive impact on the surrounding urban area is being developed, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Like all developments in Pragues historical area, this area just within the old city wall of the new city of Prague had to be excavated. The view into the excavation was a rare view of many layers of the city at once, the shapes of the excavations pits, the walls of the old houses and the current city with its older and newer developments. This view into the ground is now gone and the sculptures and the film recalls a fragment of this very particular urban moment, the manifest history of the city just under our feet and its fleeting and temporary character.
 
The digging on the archeological site leaves holes and shapes largely defined by the decisions somebody took hundreds of years ago to build a wall, make a separation between houses, use a particular spot as a garbage pit. When dug out organically shaped negative spaces emerge, curved and amorpheus with a strong sculptural language. These holes in the landscape are the basis of the sculptural work. The sculptures are casts of these shapes, fiber concrete shells of the actual holes in the ground. These sculptures are a collection of documents that mark specific moments in time, with the casts documenting this rare moment of digging through time.
 
The silent film consist of a slow succession of highly abstract images of the shapes and colours of the excavation site and some of the artefacts.

Traces of Time
VICE VERSA: Our Earth is Their Moon, Our Moon is Their Earth
m3 / Art in Space

08.06. – 30.09.2018
 

Film excerpt