Passageway

The door

Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.

Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.

Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.

Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.

At least
there’ll be
a draught.

(Miroslav Holub)

Passageway is a site-responsive installation for a room. The room is extended through a projected video image employing the tromp l’oeil technique. It extends and transforms into other interiors and exteriors: a tunnel, a staircase, a green alley. Passageway plays on the threshold between the actual and the imagined space, adopting elements of a three-dimensional space into its two-dimensionality, blending real with fictional and implying the visitor as a part of the work. It invites the visitor to linger on a border, in a hybrid space, to accept – for a moment – a merger of reality and fiction as a whole.

‘It is only because of our ability to ‘see the world through a double lens’ that we can conceive of both the natural world and culture as being different than what they are in reality. Because we can distinguish between the real world and an imagined, or fictional ‘reality’, change and innovation are within the realm of human possibility. Regardless of whether such change means progression or regression, our ability to oscillate between non-fiction and fiction is crucial in imagining other worlds, in being creative, in presenting different models of society or in addressing ecological issues.’ (Pascal Gielen, Institutional Attitudes, p.12)

Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.
(Merleau-Ponty)