Metro is an ongoing project initiated in autumn 2006.

The Metro is, undoubtedly, one of the most admirable and popular assets of today’s technological progress. Being made underground, as many underground communities throughout the millenniums of humankind’s history, it proves for one more time their intelligent nature and reflects the needs of a highly urbanized society.

In my opinion, what is very interesting is the metro as space and its relationship with the world on surface. Particularly, we could say that the Metro functions in a parallel and highly dependable way to earthly world. However, it is also an independent and very autonomous space, clearly separated from the earthly world by the ground. Thus, the metro is within the earthly world and at the same time out of it. It turns out to be a heterotopia (term introduced by Michel Foucault).

For instance, in the metro there are no day and night, seasons or weather conditions. There is always the same lighting, which seems to appear in all its stations. Consequently, the time in the metro works in a very different manner than on surface. We cannot understand what the time is, unless we see the clock.

Moreover, the metro is a very well organized place characterized by sameness and continuity. All its stations, trains and tunnels are similar.

What stops this uniformity and reveals information about the world on surface, is the variety of the peoples who are using the metro in a particular moment. For example, if people in the metro carry umbrellas, it means that it is raining on surface.

However, one could notice these differences, provided that they have lived on surface. If not, they would not be able neither to understand, nor to justify these differences. They could only wonder about them. They would be like the prisoners of a Plato’s myth the Myth of the Cave.

What also interested me was the vacuum of space and time. The idea of not being which in the end occupies the biggest part of being. One could find the essence of this particular idea in the Metro. Namely, every movement or transport within the Metro uses space and time, without occupying them. They instead enhance the sense of void. However, the void accentuates space, time and their ‘users’, as it contradicts their immobility and underlines their dynamics.

Hence, the figures, the objects and the space are painted in a way that stresses their energy, the dynamics and the void of their (mostly solid) structure. Therefore, I do not intend to make any strict representation of static patterns in this project.

                                                                                                                                                   Anastasia-Zoi SOULIOTOU

2009