Aeolus

(2001) Site-specific Installation with four video projections and one 16mm film loop

Solo show at Aldwych Underground Station (disused), London, June 2001.

Footage from Berlin 2001, projected into former advertising spaces and in the lift of the underground station.

The images are of a temporary groundwater management system in Berlin, consisting of an extensive and highly visible network of large diameter pipes painted pink.

This system ran through, across and over many urban sites in Berlin for 8 years to facilitate the development of Potsdamer Square.

It is rare that such a system acquires visibility and the bold, jovial pink colour is suggestive of a specific quality of the city. As Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities:

(...) It is pointless trying to decide whether (the city) is to be classified amongst the happy cities or the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give form to desire, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it." (Thin Cities 2, in Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage 1997, p35)

If one follows one of those pipes to where it leads one arrives, sooner or later, at the Spree, the river which traverses Berlin, and into where the water is pumped, bursting out of its pipes in 3min cycles in exuberant and orgiastic bursts.

Also installed within the tube station are:

Neither here so below as in tomorrow, video 2001, 2' 30"

Dancing Dollies, video 1996, 2min