To take something. A place, a site, a cavernous tunnel, located along the borderline of Belgium and the Netherlands. To know its recent history but start instead at its very beginning. A geological moment, a creature, a billion creatures, each living and dying, their bodies falling to the silty bottom of the warm sea until they start to accumulate. Time passes, a moment, a day, a million years until they become limestone. Time passes, a moment, a day, countless more years until the limestone is tunneled into, like a worm boring into an apple. Machines, men whose back-breaking lives pass as predictably as a hibernating bat’s heartbeat, slowed down to ten beats a minute. Bodies living and dying, lives accumulating, hardening into an unseen residue. And so, unwritten history unfolds in Kristina Benjocki and Stijn Verhoeff’s film, While the Pile of Rubble Grows Towards the Sky (2023), not as a heroic forward-destined event, but a burrowing into the darkness of the unknown.

The two-channel forty-minute film that we first encounter via lightbox images, beckoning us to the basement galley, narrates this story through light, resonant sound, and softly spoken poetic accounts. A slice of light guides us through a darkened cave-like passage of the underground quarry, whose natural stone caverns are shorn into blocks. Their removal formed a negative space below, while buildings, houses, and towns were constructed into knowable masses above the ground’s surface. We see images of them now, projected on the walls of the cave: ornate surfaces, architectural details, familiar, historic. And then the faces, men whose lives we know nothing about, mere bodies moving in labor. We watch them as if in a dream, flickering in the darkness, a slippery slide into nightmares. Soon after, war followed; the arrival of the Nazis, who repurposed the tunneled cave into a bomb and rocket-making center, preparing to fabricate the VI bombs that destroyed London, and the first ballistic missiles that traveled faster than sound waves. Cannerberg, we are told, is the name of this maze of tunnels, abandoned as soon as the Allies arrived.

History in Kristina Benjocki and Stijn Verhoeff’s film is an unfolding mystery, a plot that spreads out like the veins of a leaf, a crime scene moving forward into the dark. The players change; the plot sustains, twisting this way and that. This is, indeed, not history as a story that recounts the past as fact, but a story of its unknowability, and the ways it resurfaces in the present. “Today people are still forced to hide”, we are told. A man, whose war pursuits are supported by fossil fuels as we read these words, is ravaging buildings, homes, bodies, children. This is every war, present and past. Benjocki and Verhoeff’s artistic distillation “compresses this complex time into an instant and points at the negative space of history that grounds the narrative.”¹

The film continues to unfold in time. NATO moves to Cannerberg during the Cold War to use the underground tunnels as the headquarters of its operations. In the wake of a kitchen fire, the ventilation shafts are sprayed with asbestos. People die, slowly but surely, the days passing as slowly as a hibernating bat, which appears first as an idea of time and later as a physical creature nestled into the rock. The Dutch Ministry for Defense proposes to seal the cave, pouring concrete into its concave form. The City of Maastricht and the nature protection foundation Het Limburgs Landschap propose instead to clean out history, to start again. We are told that: “The past is dark and sticky; heavy and sticky like oil. It moves backward and forwards. It changes every time people project ideas, images, stories onto what was.” Through recorded sounds and site-specific compositions, including those recorded on-site, we sense the echoing of these memories in the dark space of stone, as well as in the chambers of our bodies and minds.

In a further basement gallery space, Benjocki’s mixed media installation Sedimentation of Memory (2017) unpacks the Cold War period of Cannerberg’s history through explorations of the once-classified personal archives of individual workers. Foregrounding little-known stories of military exercises that took place at the strategically placed site, Benjocki finds in this regional history inscriptions of the complex circuitous paths of Eastern and Western Europe at large. Casting this wider net, this work poses crucial questions about disclosure. It reminds us not to think we have full access to history, or to imagine that people feel safe enough to openly share memories, regardless of time passed or their legal status.

The photographic and text-based images become materially tangible through the presence of several limestone blocks, some inscribed and drawn-upon, others hollowed out by insects. The architectural realities of the workers’ cavernous existence are brought home through line drawings projected onto exposed walls, showing nameless workers undertaking banal day-to-day tasks. While appearing to show every detail, the representations juxtaposed by the five synchronized Kodak carousel projectors leave us with the sense that we have flicked through a graphic novel at random. We notice, while watching, just how much we don’t know and will never know or truly understand. In Benjocki’s installation, the slide projection acts as both a literal and metaphoric device, being a technology that projects an image while promising veracity. In doing so, the artist exposes the vulnerability and malleability of historical accounts. This roaming through the past, as idea, as experience, as memory creates space for thought. A text by Stijn Verhoeff included in an earlier installation of the work, reflects on how memories and thoughts can better be aired and let out to roam, lest they fester and mold. “If thoughts remain inert, if they don’t move, they pile up and start nagging. Thoughts need light, air. They need to get out.”²

Above ground, on the former factory floor that makes up Looiersgracht’s main gallery, Benjocki’s Tableaux Vi-VII, La Composition (2022) installation presents a series of oversized woven tapestries, draped sculpturally over metal loom-like frames. Benjocki observes that “[t]extile materials such as clothing, blankets, and carpets are more pivotal to human history and culture than we may think. However, this highly degradable material is easily absorbed back into the soil, leaving no traces.”³ Benjocki sees her artistic practice as a kind of archaeology that acts as a counterweight to how the discipline itself has focused on iron, bronze, and other non-perishable materials. In the black and white double-sided tapestries on view, we see pictogram-like images, whose patterns are based on a series of drawings for rug manufacture in the Serbian Pirot kilim tradition, with lineages to the Islamic-Ottoman rule in the Middle Ages, as well as being used in the development of a post-Communist national identity. There is also something distinctly contemporary in these abstracted high-contrast textiles, whose invocation of digital printing nods to the relationship between weaving and computer coding, an aspect delved into in more detail in other works in the series.

An additional series of monoprints, made especially for the Looiersgracht exhibition, pay visual homage to hand-woven textile fragments, gathered as part of the artist’s research into the textile industry in her native Yugoslavia. Having grown up in Zrenjanin, one of the country’s largest textile-producing towns, Benjocki’s awareness of the centrality of textiles to the fabric of our lives also stems from this personal life experience. The privatization and transition to a neoliberal market economy led to the shutting down of Yugoslavia’s textile factories, followed shortly by the nation’s fragmentation in the early 1990s. Through the monographs and the Tableaux weavings, Benjocki examines the wider intersection of human labour, technological progress, and political histories. Made up of interconnected strands that alternately resist each other and come together, these woven textiles echo the transforming East and West European histories in the work’s underlying narratives.

With the ongoing Russia-Ukrainian War and its unsettling of the global order, there is a looming sense that the “caves” of Cannerberg might return to use. A sense that history’s sense of pastness is a protection and a diversion from the reality that everything is interwoven in the complex strands of our political histories, our memories, and our lived daily realities. The hundreds of kilometers of darkness in Benjocki and Verhoeff’s While the Pile of Rubble Grows Towards the Sky are a thought-provoking and uncannily urgent site for the weaving of these histories, and the fabrication of the present. “Each time we think we can start again. Starting again does not exist. The past does not let go.”⁴

Lucy Cotter 2023