E 22 appearing on the screens creates the space of Underground City B, which requires our gaze in order to advance in a spiral movement from screen to screen. The spatial and temporal organization of Underground City B thus highlights the hidden mechanisms structuring the subterranean realm. The splitting and cyclical repetition of the images on several screens deconstructs the illusion of a coherent continuum of actions, underscoring the repetitive, mechanical character of the operational mechanism. Rather than following a linear trajectory with a clear beginning and end, the featured actions emerge as repetitive, routine gestures that gradually meld into an extended process. The underground world is revealed, not as a dramatic continuum of events, but as a sphere of ongoing small processes coming together to maintain the institution’s routine functions. Here too, De-Kalo directs our attention to the hidden layers of labor that are rarely visible to the public, yet constitute the infrastructure sustaining the actions unfolding above ground. The representation of processes in De-Kalo’s work echoes the understanding of repetition presented by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, most notably in his constitutive book Difference and Repetition. Deleuze argues that repetition is not merely the replication of the same, but rather a process that produces difference. Repetition reveals time itself, not as a clear causal continuum, but as a structure in which moments exist next to each another and are altered slightly with each reappearance. In Underground City A, and especially in Underground City B, the documented actions of cutting papers, copying pages, scanning notebooks, and reading barcodes appear mechanical, routinized, and identical to one another. Their repetition on split screens, arranged in different positions and featuring changing sequences, undoes the experience of a continuum and underscores the nuanced differences between them. Each action is repeated, yet each appearance occurs in a different location, at a different rhythm or in relation to different images. Repetition is thus transformed from a mechanism of reproduction into one that produces difference within time. This strategy also approximates the manner in which Deleuze describes the deconstruction of time in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image. When the causal sequence of the action is disassembled, time no longer stems from the narrative’s movement or evolution, but rather appears directly through fragmented, recurrent, or parallel images. In a similar manner, DeKalo’s actions are no longer linearly organized, but rather appear as a multitude of recurrent moments that exist simultaneously on the screens. The viewers do not follow the evolution of a single action through the production process, but rather move between different images, reconnecting them and reconstructing the temporal continuum on their own. In recent decades, the concern with the deconstruction of linear time and the construction of cyclical, parallel, or fragmented temporal structures has become a central strategy in video and installation art. Numerous artists use loops, split screens, intentional suspensions
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk0MjAwOQ==