E 11 The Language of the Camera: The camera's wandering movement from a drone throughout the subterranean spaces of the Open University evokes the flâneur, as conceived by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867): an urban wanderer who strolls the city, absorbing its sights and sounds, and discovering beauty in multiplicity. So too is the case with De-Kalo: the camera is not a neutral mechanism but a sensing, thinking, moving organ. It returns to the same subject from different angles, like an unceasing flow, a thought, or a further meditation on place and time. Even the mishaps and glitches become part of the rhythm. Part Two Interviews: Ten-Channel Video In the pillar arcade, ten interviews with the people of the Open University are presented: from the building's architect, Ada Karmi-Melamede and University President Prof. Leo Corry, to the staff and students. The interviewees’ experiences, ideologies and perspectives appear on the screen as a metaphorical encounter — both with the viewer and among the interviewees themselves. The interviews offer a deliberately varied selection, resisting hierarchy in favor of a human gaze that balances appreciation and inspiration with critique and ambivalence toward an architectural space experienced as both empowering and, at times, unsettling. For De-Kalo, the building itself embodies a hierarchy between the upper and under worlds: the surface and the depths that lie beneath. The interviews correspond directly to the imagery of Underground City A and Underground City B: when one interviewee recounts how workers felt compelled to paste wallpaper depicting sky and vegetation in order to bring a sense of nature into the subterranean workspaces, the footage of that very wallpaper is projected on the concrete wall opposite; when another interviewee describes becoming lost in the corridors, those same corridors appear on the screen, and so on. The two worlds — the upper and the under — are not only a geographic description of above and below ground; they echo the persistent tension between architecture and the human experience within it; between material conditions and personal experience and sentiments. The building that Ada Karmi-Melamede designed from local materials: stone, wood, concrete, and light, proposes a concept of stability, order, and a totality of the architectural experience. In contrast, De-Kalo assembles her works from those same “materials of place,” yet she transforms them into a dynamic space made of personal testimonies, industrial machinery, underground labyrinths, and human stories. Where Karmi-Melamede created an architecture of substance, De-Kalo has created an architecture of the gaze, of flow, and of consciousness.
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