Second intervention Three Underground Spaces
- Erik Smith’s second intervention in Three Underground Spaces takes place inside the Castle in an unnoticed corridor on the basement level. Contained within the original seventeenth-century foundation walls, marked in places by rocky protrusions, this space has likely always occupied an “in-between” status as a passageway to other rooms. In an earlier version of CCA, it led to gallery spaces; today it is off-limits to audiences and used only by technical and cleaning staff. Of the three sites in the exhibition project, it alone lies truly underground—a quality that its hermetic character effectively obscures.
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Here, Smith presents a diverse array of objects culled from the room’s history and use—remnants of displays from past exhibitions and cleaning devices—alongside various core samples that together trace the accumulated material layers of architectural and institutional life. These cylindrical forms have been drilled directly out of the oldest foundation walls of the Castle as well as from various pedestals packed with exhibition debris. The logic of core sampling also reverberates in the room’s two overlapping yet distinct soundscapes: the subtle glowing or flickering of light sources translated into sound whose audible holes, breaks and gaps are partially filled in by found ambient and technical noises. In doing so, a perceptual field is revealed that emerges directly from the space itself, echoing the ground/electromagnetism themes of the cistern installation while anticipating the archeological dimensions of the third intervention yet to come.
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- Erik Smith
- an artist with a background in comparative literature and visual arts, currently living and working in Berlin. His site-specific projects and other works have been presented at ALL, Palermo (2024); University of Porto, Academy of Fine Arts, Porto (2023); Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (2021); de Appel Centre for Contemporary Art, Amsterdam (2016); Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, Berlin (2012); and Sculpture Center, New York (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.
