E 20 The work opens with a video sequence capturing vehicles entering the underground storage facilities, likely in order to collect book shipments for OUI students throughout the country. It then moves on to a landscape of signs indicating shipment destinations, including Petach Tikva, Netanya, Lod, Tel Aviv and Hadera. A forklift picks up crates of books. The image then dissolves into a black screen, which pauses the visual continuum. It is followed by a new segment that moves through an underground passageway leading to a space where employees at tables are editing, printing, and copying materials. Here De-Kalo turns our attention not only to the workers, but also to a mural of mountains and lakes, which serves as an alternate landscape for the windowless basement space. When this documentary sequence ends, De-Kalo presents another segment featuring an underground tunnel leading from the storage space to the upper world, whose blinding light appears at the end of the tunnel. The combination of the linear movement – the transition from one space to the next in accordance with their functions – with the internal repetition of each segment, creates a type of “spiral temporality.” Each segment repeats itself on four different channels, at once internal and cyclical. Once one segment has been repeated four times, the following fourrepetition segment begins, constructing the work’s linear, spatial, and temporal dimensions. The duality of representing time as simultaneously linear and cyclical enables De-Kalo to create these temporal spirals, thus blurring its essence until it almost disappears. The underground space, devoid of daylight – one of the quintessential markers of time – further contributes to undermining and blurring the temporal experience. “Spiral time” plays a central role in deepening the work’s meaning, enabling De-Kalo to reveal the rhythm and logic of institutional processes in its invisible spaces. The repetition of the different segments before the camera transitions to the next space creates a sense of cyclical time reminiscent of the daily work routines unfolding in the basement area – loading crates, shipping books, editing, copying, and packaging. Rather than moving towards a dramatic climax, these actions exist as an endless continuum of recurrent actions. The “spiral time” thus reveals that the institution does not only rely on visible actions such as teaching for its existence, but relies on the continuous cycles of logistic and maintenance; work which at times appear to be Sisyphean in nature. In parallel, the spiral structure of time undermines the conventional experience of linear development. On the one hand, the process moves from one space to the next on an almost narrative trajectory; on the other hand, the internal repetitions suspend advancement and produce a sense of swirling through time. The result is a state in which time does not advance clearly, seeming instead to fold in upon itself.
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