Interventions in the carpark and the city railway stop Gerlingen, 1996

The Stuttgart city railway extended its transportation system in 1996 to include Gerlingen. At this end-of-the-line station in the heart of Gerlingen's center, a new town square has come into being - with an underground parking area, as well as a city library and apartments for older citizens...

The excavation for this construction site was a very large one. On the occasion of laying the foundation stone for the city library, artistic interventions were initiated at several different places of the excavation.

The setting up and the waning of the interventions were a foreseen part of the artwork's totality. The temporariness of the interventions became an allegory of time. Only a few installations were preserved from the on-going construction.

An enormous hourglass showed 92 minutes of time running out.

A small rest room tappering to a point is the last part of the large staircase. A floodlight lightens an extract of the Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin written over the bare concrete.

Sentences about time are written on stripes of mirror glass. By reading the sentences the reader is confronted with himself looking at the words. Thus he becomes at the same time part of the words and a witness of his confrontation with time.

Words - written on building struts - remained for days until they disappeared, only to reappear and be re-established at other construction sites

Place names remained on the walls of the underground parking area. They remind one of the native towns of the people who worked here: manual workers, construction workers, architects, building owners...