Angelos Floros

Submitted: Project Heracles — Call for ideas on a Eurafrican connection, Domus, 2011

Exhibited: The Gopher Hole gallery, London, August 2011

Exhibited: European Parliament, Brussels, 2013; Milan and Munich

Published: DomusWeb, Project Heracles #14, review by Marco Brizzi

Award: shared distinction, Domus, link
https://www.spacecaviar.net/articles/project-heracles

In 2011 Domus published an open call by Lieven De Cauter and Dieter Lesage, asking architects, artists and designers to imagine an infrastructure across the Strait of Gibraltar — a connection between Europe and Africa. Entries had to arrive as postcards. Two hundred were sent.

Frozen Cell was the reply from Athens, and it began from a debt rather than from a bridge.

For as long as anyone has counted, Africa has supplied the Mediterranean with its biodiversity — a consequence of where it sits on the globe. That climatic variety is what gave the Mediterranean its range, and the cultural biodiversity of the civilizations that grew around it followed from the same source. So the question is not what Europe should build across the water, but what Europe owes back.

Africa is condemned by geography to an extremely hot climate without the biodiversity that would require. Low barometric pressure sends warm air masses through the Mediterranean and into Europe; cold masses travel back at sea level towards the African continent to cool it. Given the size of Spain, the high temperatures cannot be reversed by any of this.

The proposal is to build a gigantic field of ice in the heart of the continent — the Frozen Cell — and let it change the microclimate. Warm currents from the African interior and from Europe would be drawn towards the cell; cold currents would be pushed out to the warmer regions. The winds would close into a circuit between the two continents, and biodiversity would arrive inland, carried by air.

The medium is not concrete. The wind is the connection — and wind is a medium in the strict sense: it does not merely carry something across; it is the thing that joins. Air goes everywhere. It needs no permission and no infrastructure; it stops at no border, and it belongs to no one. It has always carried information from one place to another, and before the internet, societies used it deliberately, sending their messages by bird. It is the only connection already in place between the two continents, and the only one that cannot be closed.

The machine, if it is a machine at all, exists to wake a god: Aeolus, ruler of the winds. What it would generate is the new Atlantis, in front of the Pillars of Heracles, as Plato described it.