THE SoS GATE – TERRITORIAL PHANTOM

“What are you building? I want to dig a corridor. Progress must occur. My location is too high. We’re digging the shaft of Babel.” Einstürzende Neubauten

Alluding to Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle, the German band Einstürzende Neubauten sang of the “shaft of Babel.” Kafka’s tower in The Castle opens upwards, as if the residents confined there had “broken through the roof and stood up to show themselves to the world.” Kafka’s inversion is the idea that progress can only occur when the overly high location on the tower is abandoned. The concept of the shaft, or the inverted tower, is the opposite of the territorial ivory tower. The politics of representation, both old and new, are opposed not by something widely visible or central, but by the construction of something invisible, namely by discourse and dissent, by conflicting publics. Against the towering symbol of political loftiness it is necessary to dig a hole that bores its way deep into the earth – a space where no one can arrogate to having a Big Picture of global events, where progress and identity develop through leaving an over-elevated location and finding access to underground lines and systems.
The inverse tower is a location of currency, of present becoming, a tower that bores its way into today’s world.

The SoS state is everywhere. Utilizing a few manhole covers, this infiltration of established systems is performed as an abolishment of state-regulated land ownership and demarcation. The SoS manhole cover is a state border shift, a new state demarcation, and an artistic sculpture by Robert Jelinek – a transnational entrance on national territory.