OFLUXO

The exhibition “A Room With A Cue” is an experiment. Together with a group of artists, Vanessa Bosch and Sarai Rose Duke explore the use of a liminal space.

Underpasses are liminal spaces

“When I enter, I physically remove myself from the outside world above, the natural light. I’m underground, but I’m not either. I move in and through different levels. When leaving I return to the light.” A liminal zone can be described as a threshold between two defined spaces. We approach underpasses with a certain trepidation.

Cue of reality

In places where physical windows are absent or the view is heavily dominated by artifacts, the view from a window plays an important role in people’s physical and psychological well-being. The real skylights in a liminal space lead to an expanded rapture due to their limited vision. The three monocular depth cues, movement parallax, blur and occlusion are hardly present and thus the creation of a window-like “see-through experience” is prevented.
Only Movement Parallax gives the greatest effect.
The view from the skylights falls on the cables of the line network. Similar to underpasses, the power grid represents man’s ability to innovate and also the limits of his possible extensions.

Liminality in the physical world

The underpass is a passage and connection between two places. An underpass is usually not the goal.
Liminal spaces are spaces of change and innovation, spaces in which everything seems possible and which are constantly changing. The liminal state is not a fixed but a fluctuating state of suspension.

Rite of passage

In the design of transformative spaces, correspondences with principles from rites of passage can be found. Rites of passage or passage rites refers to an ethnological concept that was introduced in 1909 by the French ethnologist Arnold van Gennep. He observed that in the course of a person’s social life, numerous transitions between two life stages or social states have to be made, for example between childhood and adulthood or between the external foreign world and the familiar environment at home. (2nd intermediate phase “Liminality”: undefined)

Connection to Neolithic art

Underpasses as modern sites of ritual and change, like Neolithic ritual spaces. Similar to a Neolithic cave (cave paintings, ceramics, metal and stone objects), we return to a border crossing and embed our work in a modern cave.