Islands within the Net   (de|en)  
About Subsurface Observatories and Ground Stations

Solo Exhibition

Peter Behrbohm

Flottmann-Hallen Herne
May 25 - July 7 2024

The urban landscapes are scattered with grey boxes, ventilation pipes and barred openings. Is this all infrastructure? Or have pirate islands long been growing like mushrooms on an inscrutable underground under the guise of public services?

While the region was once characterised by underground activities, it has become quiet between coal seams and ventilation shafts. Where once the underground was excavated at great expense and brought to light, today alongside the listed industrial plants the only reminder of the interwoven underground systems are inconspicuous ventillation pipes on supermarket car parks. Are they the only connection points to a world to which we no longer have access? Perhaps some of the manhole covers, bollards, electricity boxes, advertising pillars, exhaust pipes, transformer houses and transmission masts have long belonged together, are merely camouflaged feelers, snorkels or access points to a parallel world that merely pretends to fulfil an important purpose.

For the exhibition at Flottmann-Hallen, an immersive narrative examines infrastructural fragments of distant neighbourhoods as part of a subversive network. In model-like scenarios, everyday street furniture is suddenly beginning to take on a strange life of its own sending cryptic messages through the æther. Based on the precise surveying of both urban spaces and the electromagnetic spectrum that permeates it, the interventions are understood as prototypical mistakes and pirate islands in an over-functionalised world, which will be implanted back into everyday life at undisclosed locations after the exhibition's closing. Only coded call signs placed in the streetscape will provide information of how to reach the stations.

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