The AR’s April issue goes below ground, to uncover the hidden infrastructures that underlie our world
A year on, the air outside and above ground remains hostile. We are called continuously to retreat to our warrens, to look for safety below the skin of the city, to dig deeper into ourselves and the structures that surround us.
The underground might be largely hidden, but it is far from being an empty or inconsequential space. Full of pipes and myths and trains and bodies, it is also the site of sedimented histories and power struggles, of politicised excavations and commodified infrastructures. The solid fill of the section hides the extraction of wealth from beneath our feet. A land rich with matter is drained to a hollow void, ignoring the multiplicity of meanings associated with everything below the datum. The underground is ‘full of imaginaries, beliefs, beings, water, soils, rock, energy, minerals that exist on their own, beyond their potential benefit for human life’, as Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita writes in this issue’s keynote. While we pillage petroleum, natural gas, sand, stone and water,the ground we imagined as irresolute is found to be rather more mutable and unstable, and increasingly undermined.
Among its many stories, this issue includes the afterlife of a marble quarry in Switzerland, endangered subterranean waterways in Ahmedabad, contested excavations in Jerusalem, and the layered histories of the Shimoni caves in Kenya. While we share the same Earth, with the same core at its centre, undergrounds are plural and distinct, coursed through with meaning.
Lead image: To some, the ground can provide a refuge: a space to run and hide. On 11 October 1969, at 8:15pm, an image of a figure in a field was broadcast on German television for two seconds. It came with no explanation, and regular broadcasting resumed immediately. The next evening a similar image appeared again, showing the figure descending into the earth. The sequence continued over nine evenings, unexplained, sometimes interrupting programmes at peak times. The artist, Keith Arnatt, saw Self-Burial (1969) as an engagement with both the absurd and his position as an artist, remarking: ‘I’d already dug quite a lot of holes.’ Credit © Keith Arnatt Estate. All rights reserved. DACS/Artimage 2021. Image courtesy Sprüth Magers
