Three Underground Spaces
Three Underground Spaces, Erik Smith’s site-investigative exhibition project for CCA, engages with the subterranean realm of Ujazdowski Castle and its surroundings. Three distinct interventions will emerge in successive stages, culminating in an interrelated constellation of works that surface the material and latent strata of this terrain. The first intervention in the cistern is now open on Thursdays and Saturdays and will be followed by two subsequent interventions in and around the Castle over the next months. More information on the upcoming sites to be announced soon.
Smith’s practice is grounded in what he calls performing the site, actions that extract the underlying features and meanings of spaces but also point to what remains concealed and resists articulation. His excavations and displacements cut through the geological, architectural, institutional, temporal, and sonic dimensions of place. The Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art – once a palace for nobles, then a hospital, and today an art institution – offers a dense layering of sites for such dissections: from long-buried in the ground, to more recently unearthed and repurposed, to fully functional and contained within foundation walls.
The first intervention centers on the cistern embedded within the Castle grounds. A nineteenth-century relic of the former water infrastructure, the space was repurposed for institutional use by Tadashi Kawamata in his 2003 work Reconstruction and has since served as a venue for art events. Smith’s partial deinstallation of the floor draws attention to the space’s materiality and the tension between accessibility and inaccessibility, a recurring theme in his practice. This tension also resonates in the integrated sound installation, where recordings of the site and Smith’s ground recordings of electromagnetic activity – made audible via electrodes inserted into the soil – double and dismantle the cistern’s ambient soundscape.
Presented within the framework of the CCA sound program, Three Underground Spaces forms a statement: sound is never just sound – it is always a fraction of something greater, a broader spectrum of inaudible frequencies, what Clarice Lispector described as nature’s vibrating inexpressiveness. Smith’s incisions suggest that this latent intensity can also be encountered in other realms – architectural, technological, institutional, social, historical. The less we hear, the more attuned to it we may become. In this lies the domain of the project’s central sonic concept: found sound—not only the sound that is always already present in the spaces, but also what we find resonating within it.
Erik Smith is an artist with a background in comparative literature and visual art, currently living and working in Berlin. Exhibitions include: ALL, Palermo (2024); University of Porto, Academy of Fine Arts, Porto (2023); Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (2021); Errant Sound, Berlin (2019); Counterpath, Denver (2018); de Appel Center for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2016); Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum (2012); SculptureCenter, NYC (2008). His first monograph, Substrata, was co-published in 2024 by permanent Verlag, Berlin, U. Porto–i2ADS, Porto, and Counterpath, Denver/New York, with the support of Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn
