Industrial Hole Complex

Exhibition Text

It had been 3 days now since I had been in the tunnels. A system of long silver rectangular passages

which I had crawled into after detaching a grille between a bench and a watercooler in the waiting

lounge at Fontanarossa airport. People assume you’re up to no good when you do anything unusual in

an airport. I wasn’t, but knew the only way was forward, now that I was in. Turning back would mean

Police questioning, and if there was anything I knew about Sicilian authorities, It was that you didn’t

want to run into them. This kept at bay any initial desire to turn back out of fear. I was uncomfortable,

completely caked in dust. Despite this, I had something I needed to do. Detritus floated through the

vents, grouping and coagulating at intersections and forming body-like shapes slumped in the corner.

At one point, I saw a real body, someone who had tried something like me, no doubt. I didn’t stop to

look. The air pumping through the system howled, the metal walls warping rhythmically, banging as it

shook.

I did have a watch but had long since lost the habit of checking it. At rough intervals, maybe 6 hours

or so, I’d come across other grilles – exits. They came in a variety of shapes and forms. Silhouettes of

24-hour artificial airport light beaming straight into the dark corridors. The shape of the grilles varied

but shared a common thread. Each one was a patternistic series of lines or circles, arranged in such a

way that as I came across them, they seemed to spell something out. I had taken a short online course

in cryptography and was able to recognise the patterns which indicated a code but found myself

balking at the possibility of abstracting any concrete meaning from symbols themselves. They were,

however, beautiful. Stark white light beaming through the holes and projected solidly onto the rough

and dusty back walls, the atmosphere was eerie but almost calming. As I passed one, I looked at it, a

series of bright white circles arranged in a horizontal figure-of-eight. Focussing on the negative space,

it appeared as a dark black panel, punctuated by white, circular holes. I realised the walls were

dripping in thick, pungent tar.

I was close, I’d almost found what I had first come into this hellscape for. The door must be close, I

could feel it. Behind that door, what I was really looking for, the Elysian Fields. Any prickling doubt

in the psychic that had told me the door was here, was gone and I simply knew I was in the right

place. The warping of the walls seemed to get louder, faster and more rhythmic. Instead of metal,

tunnel walls now resembled skin, its movement synchronised with the pace of my breathing. The tar

pooled by my ankles. Its smell had become more potent. The vent seemed to wheeze like a smoker’s

lung.

Finally, I had arrived. The door was rectangular, but different from the vents, its panel was punctuated

by protrusions rather than incisions. Three horizontal rectangles. Instead of white they appeared black,

a light-dark-light gradient giving the illusion that the front of the smaller rectangles, rather than

coming out, were falling away into a void. The panel was screwed into the vent frame. I took my

driver from my backpack and began undoing the fixings. By this time, the tar was up to my knees, and

seemed to be rising quickly. The first screw rattled out and fell into the black liquid, disappearing into

its depths. The next two came quickly too. The last one, was of course, the most difficult. The tar was

up to my shoulders which didn’t help. I twisted over and over, the screw seeming not to budge, but

obviously turning in some capacity, the metal wrenching and creaking. I tilted my face up, my mouth

and nose almost reaching the roof. I smiled. At this point I knew I was going, one way or another, to

the Fields of Elysium.

Jasper Jordan-Lang

2023