E 19 Weaving Sky and Earth The artistic and visual strategy of repetition is employed again by De-Kalo in Weaving Sky and Earth, which explores the Open University building planned by Israel Prize Recipient Ada Karmi-Melamede and inaugurated in 2004. The exhibition is composed of three parts: Underground City A, which captures the activity unfolding in the building’s underground spaces; Underground City B, which features closeups of the activities unfolding in these spaces; and a series of ten interviews with various employees – ranging from the Open University’s president, Prof. Leo Corry, to administrative staff and students. In these works, De-Kalo follows the building’s physical division into two distinct realms – the upper world and the subterranean sphere. The upper world is the site of representative, front-stage institutional endeavors: instruction in classrooms, seminar spaces, laboratories, the gallery and library, as well as the administrative wing, including offices and conference rooms. This part of the building is characterized by a continuous structure, whose eastern side forms a rigid facade facing Route 4. The building complex, which extends along the road, continues to wind, enclosing and defining two internal courtyards. The upper world constitutes the institution’s symbolic facade – hence the significant investment in the building’s materiality and the quality of the finishes. Most of the building is faced in stone, while other sections feature precisely modeled architectural concrete formations. As in Karmi-Melamede’s other architectural projects, the structure is self-enclosed and fortress-like, shaping complex internal worlds while appearing authoritative, majestic, and endowed with gravitas. In her treatment of the Open University as an institution, De-Kalo chooses not to engage with the building’s upper world. It is not documented in her work, and its presence is given expression precisely by means of its absence. Rather than turning her gaze to the institution’s representative spaces, she chooses to focus on the subterranean realm, whose various parts remain concealed from public view. This is the locus of the organization’s less glamorous operational mechanisms, such as book stacks, exam storage facilities, binding and packaging areas, and spaces devoted to maintenance operations. This institutional backstage is buried underground, illuminated by little or no daylight. As is the case with many buildings, there is less investment in areas that remain hidden from public view. Physically, they are simpler and more modest than those in the upper world. Instead of carefully planned stone cladding and representative facades, basic concrete pillars and walls dominate. In Underground City A, the portrayal of this subterranean world combines the repetitive elements characteristic of some of her works with a presentation of the space as a continuum that may be perceived as linear and causal.
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