project47

Some ideas I’ve had about Greenwich Tunnel:

Having visited Greenwich Tunnel before as an underground commuter, I somewhat knew the space without experiencing it. These are some thoughts I have had since leaving the tunnel on Friday.

-          The aural quality of the space is quite overbearing. The sound echoes throughout and I think this idea was cemented in my mind by the artist Sue Cohen who spoke of her work within the tunnel.

 Sue Cohen If Walls Had Ears (2006)

-          I was also reminded of a piece by Via Lewandowsky ‘Gallery of the Missing’.  It is a glass sculpture that uses voices to describe works of art that are ‘missing’. You wear headphones and move along the glass wall and intersect the sound of different stories/descriptions. It is through movement that the audience gives the potential for the voices to be heard. I think this piece may also have questions of space; the space in which the audience moves, the empty space in front of the sculpture.

 Via Lewandowsky Gallery of the Missing

-          This idea of ‘empty space’ led me to ideas of the missing part of the tunnel, the part that was bombed and remade.  It just made me think of this space as ‘empty shelves’ – as though implicitly showing what was lost during the Blitz, and an event that decimated London. This is in contrast to the explicit representation of loss in Berlin – the book burning memorial in Bebelplatz, also using the metaphor of empty shelves.  I think the emptiness of these ‘shelves’ also expresses the transitory nature of the audience/commuters in the tunnel , much like in rented or temporary accommodation we tend not to leave our possessions. I think this space within the tunnel perhaps also alludes to ideas of a cabinet of curiosities, precisely in its lack of collection??