UNDER-world - Concept

To describe the idea of the Underworld is difficult because it seems to be so incredibly fundamental to the point of trying to explain the color purple. However, like the color purple, the Underworld can take fruition in casual instances and subsequently, can be documented. I realized the Underworld’s existence after a series of weeks in central London. The structure of city, the cold skyscrapers, colored lights, and arcane atmosphere of apparent commercialism formulated an answer. There seemed to be something that couldn’t be accounted for. Something that went unnoticed under categorization of being ‘futuristic’, ‘ethereal’, or even ‘strange’. Whilst predictions of the future have always been a form of imagination, it has definitely been heightened post-industrialization. In events where the world’s population is tested, looking towards the future is good escapism. However, I find myself living in a world riddled with modern plague and destructive differences in ideals, yet I do not need to be predicting the future. The Underworld is acknowledgement that this present day is the dystopian future that we can imagine.

Below is the diagram that represents the Underworld broken into its 'fundamentals'.

INSTITUTION

Institution acts as the cement, fully insulated building that maintains and controls movement within the Underworld. Not a governing body, but the blood within its veins. Acting as the seed and necessity to everything. In the late 1960s, Romanian Orphanages began to fill up with the result of an abortion ban and attempts to glorify the nation of Romania, introduced by Ceausescu’s government. Disabled children were taken from their homes and institutionalized.

Stripped of all human trait. All emotion, personality, motor and social skill slowly fades within the institute. The institute is cold and unforgiving and those taking home in its walls rock back and forth in dance for the hope of maternal attachment. These individuals are golden as their spirit is ripped apart and painted across dystopian steel. Nicu, a 13-year-old Romanian boy, sits with his post-institute friends inhaling Aurolac on a franchise hotel’s brick wall in Bucharest. Nicu does not need to dance, he is too young to have experienced the institute. He only indulges in its lasting effects. His new father, a man who is father to hundreds of children, is named Bruce Lee and he handles the ongoing world within the abandoned sewage tunnels of Romania’s Capital. Chains permanently wrapped around his arms and legs, he is strong and forceful, yet utterly forgiving. Bruce Lee sells the Aurolac. Bruce Lee keeps the tunnels clean. Bruce Lee mourns at the funeral of Catalina, the girl whose neck is decorated with a necklace of syringe sores. She had just turned 18 when she collapsed in the tunnels, suffering from aids, pneumonia, and heart failure. At the funeral, she lay in a wedding dress as Bruce Lee lifted her white pillow and placed a pink CD underneath. Music to keep her company.

“We met in a foster home called Pinocchio” he said.

Bruce Lee’s skin did not see the sun for weeks after Catalina’s death. He had painted his entire body with Aurolac. A KING MUST STAY STRONG.

He had dreams to buy a hotel in Bucharest to house all of its homeless. Yet, when the Romanian police raided his underground shelter, they did not care for his aspirations. They took him and locked him away on drug trafficking charges.

The institute is cold and unforgiving, yet it is necessary to seed hope.

Winston Smith, a worker for London’s ruling party, faced internal trepidation of his environment. Feeling unsettled by government issued dictations such as Newspeak, a crushing display of function over form, and his own job, altering historical records in support of the party, he receives a note saying:

I Love You

An animalistic urge of escape fueled Winston’s sense of hope within the decaying institute as he indulges in rebellion against Big Brother. REBELLION. Is love a revolution against the patriarchal metal bounds of disarray? Winston is tricked, sentenced to institutionalization within Room 101 and when he emerges, he feels nothing. Nicu is saved by an adoptive

mother, who cares for him and feeds him. He loves her and she loves him.

The institution is cold and unforgiving, yet without it we would not know the extent of our hope. We would not understand potential as potential has nowhere to sprout from. The steel is necessary to appreciate the air that we already own.