At a school-trip in Berlin last year I thought a lot about the imagination of space, and space as something abstract and dysfunctional. For me it was our trip to the New Jewish museum that really made me see how lack of space can create something within oneself. I’m referring to the spaces they called Voids.
The Void is something that fascinated me in many levels. It could be like a dream of time, or space in time, and the Void would be the ultimate re-creational space. I would consider the Void to be a Powerfield[1], where there’s only your body in the space. Your own experience and interpretation of the space will be a unique perception, and differ from everyone else.
In the New Jewish Museum they had a lot of Voids, and some that you could not be a part of and walk in to. I found it interesting and peculiar to observe a void, and a nothingness from afar. For me it got important to investigate the Void even further, and try to understand what it was really all about. After we had been down to the Voided Void, a chamber in the basement, I would start seeing “voids” everywhere. Emptiness surrounding us everywhere, spaces, structures and models with nothingness.
For my first space I chose the Void chamber at the New Jewish Museum. It had a heavy door, and it was basically pitch black except from a tiny little light shimmer in the corner ceiling. It was so dark and empty. You’d feel so small, so tiny. The space created a gap, a form of emptiness between the people in the space. Everybody was alone, and you knew that everybody had different kind of feelings towards this space. Voices and static sounds outside the space made me think about the Void, when you’re stuck between death and afterlife. We were in Nowhereland. The Void. The Nothing. All empty. Just ourselves and our minds.
My second space would be the garden tunnel they had outside the New Jewish Museum. You could walk true the tunnel of Void to get to another kind of emptiness. These relations between spaces I found interesting. Even though the tunnel was not considered a “void” officially, I could see the Void within it. The tunnel could symbolize a free fall, or a walk into the light. The descendant to eternal death.
In the Void time does not exist. The Void is described by many, religions, philosophers, designers, artists and painters. You could find different kinds of references to the Void in several forms of contemporary art. Everybody has different ways of describing the Void. It could be the wasteland between realities, another universe, a nothing or a space we can’t even start to describe. A no space if we’d like. Even though there is a lot of different opinions about what the Void really is, it could still be seen as something universal, as many interpret the Void as a nothing place. In the Void the normal rules of time and space do not apply. The Void could be thought of something that exist outside of all of that, it is a “nowhere” outside of what we find to be real.
The third space I chose was the dome at The Deutscher Bundestag. I felt a different kind of Void towards this place. It made me think about lost souls in the void, struggling with their thoughts, not wanting to live, and not wanting to die. In the game League of Legends, the Void is described as a place between dimensions, and between worlds. The unknown, or the outside. A timeless place. People were floating in the void, unaware of time and space.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Gugenheim building that opened in 1959, he grandly portrayed the notion of the Void, leaving the center of the building tantalizingly empty. In 2010 the Gugenheim celebrated this with a special exhibition featuring the Void from different artists[2]. Like those examples the Void has been an inspiration for many different artist, exhibitions and movies.
My feelings about the Voids I’ve felt sums up with this: “While breathing in and out you feel the movement of emptiness inside you and the emptiness is you. At this moment you see the only things which are absent in the room are the impossible ways of existence” (2013)[3].
The Void is the absence of absolutely everything.
[1] Goldburg, RoseLee, “Space as Praxis”, Reprint from 1975.
[2] http://www.gugenheim.org/void
[3] «The Void» (Audiovisual installation) St. Petersburg, Russia. Loft Project ETAGI Gallery, May 2013. Produced by TUNDRA
No Name Zero 