Passage X
Team: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan, Tornike Dadiani, Zurab Macharashvili, Gizo Rukhazde.
Location: Tbilisi, Georgia
Period: may 2012
In the framework of Undergo. The Parallels that promotes artistic action in the public space and the recovery of urban public spaces for art, culture and their residents, studioBASAR developed the project Passage X.
Over the past decades, in the former eastern bloc, the leftovers of the scientific modernism project were conquered and valued for commercial reasons by the new market driven society. This happened also with the underground passages, those large pieces of infrastructure that were dug out in the name of the separation of uses in the city: the car has to go faster and untroubled by pedestrian crossings, and the man has to be safe and to go underground.
Diagrams from the book The City and The Urban Circulation - Editura Tehnica 1964
The Passage X is a temporary passage, a double of an existing passage built as a secondary structure that will support new possibilities and provoke new ways of interaction bellow the city.
For three days, an end of a passage in Tbilisi has functioned as a wood workshop where we recycled euro-pallets that traveled the world that now are covering the exit of the tunnel.
Passage X is a versatile and unfinished structure, meant for different and unclear purposes: in between a shop and a passageway, a gallery and a hallway, the Passage X is a place in continuous transit and for temporary rest, where exhibit, commerce or gathering can take place.
As a visualization of it’s potential, Passage X hosted on 30/05 an opening about the history of the passages in Tbilisi, where texts, images, archive files, interviews or plans had transformed the space for transit into a temporary public gallery.
