The underground system belongs to the category of ‘non-places,’ such as airports or railway stations, where people come only when they want to go from one place to another. Wyrzykowski juxtaposes the real world with futuristic fantasy. The stations and corridors, deserted at nighttime, resemble the sets of the classic science-fiction films taking place on a space station, suspended somewhere beyond time and space. As we follow the camera’s journey through these enigmatic spaces, we may be under the impression that we are looking at fragments of the virtual world of first-person video games, whose protagonists wander around multiple levels of a labyrinth, searching for or hiding from enemies. The surrealism of space incites a fear that this void is just a facade and that the dark corners hide something extraordinary, some kind of alien, spawned in a world emptied of everything human. The viewer watches this other world through a circular hole in a massive wall, and is thus put in a bizarre position of a post-apocalyptic ape, curiously watching the remnants of a strange civilisation. This elicits a disturbing ambiguity, which is further emphasised by the character of the monumental wall covered in three-dimensional shapes resembling the fantastic visions of H.R. Giger – the set designer for the film Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979), which combined biological forms with high technology. Nobody knows whether the empty interiors reflect a past cataclysm – after all underground corridors also function as fallout shelters, or whether they have been taken over by aliens whose traces can be found on the relief. And who are these aliens? Hybrid creatures, muddled species with an undecipherable identity, awaken angst and evoke an undefined threat resulting from the conviction that ‘they’ are ‘them’, but aren’t ‘we’ also ‘them’?
Wyrzykowski’s Manhunt was based on strong contradictions: on one hand, it describes the danger carried by the expansion of technology when humans lose control over it, and on the other, it acts as an attempt to identify and preserve that which is human in an increasingly dehumanised world.
Piotr Wyrzykowski, Manhunt (2006)
Installation, video, photographs, lightboxes
Ewa Gorządek, transl. AM