Traffic of Traffic (2005)
Argon sculpture 140 x 195 x 30 cm
Traffic of Traffic is the first of a future series based on traffic exchangers of different cities. The sculpture deals with a fast changing gaze upon a fast changing world. New strong technological tools and ways of depicting the world changed profoundly our perception.
Traffic of Traffic exemplifies the crosscutting through this contemporary landscape and especially stresses the movement and its standstills and as such lays bare some paradoxes of the myth of speed, movement and freedom.
Traffic of Traffic is a Google Earth image of a traffic exchanger in Brussels written in blank industry argon tubes replacing the fluid (read “unfluid” or jammed) traffic by a smooth and ongoing transport of light where movement and directions have been muted into one line of energy. Clearly the sculpture fictionalizes or rather “phantasizes” about a world where transporting the body (by means of the car) is not necessary anymore. The body could become sedentary again whereas its ideas and data in turn become the nomadic elements speeding on the internet highway.
Traffic of Traffic is also an ironic tribute to the sculpture I consider most beautiful in Belgium (crossroad by its geographic position): the illuminated highways.
– KOEN WASTIJN
