Hollow Earth

Year: 2024

6-channel video installation, 10’32”

Hollow Earth is an immersive film installation that documents a fictional journey through an underground that suspiciously resembles the overground, or at least its reversed image. Filmed in the region of Korca in south-eastern Albania in August 2024, the footage makes extensive use of depth maps - a method of recording 3D information used in the film and heritage industries, including for the 3D scanning of places where there is no natural light. The resulting effect is one of being in a permanent darkness, a primordial space in which earthly time is suspended and the time of myth is instead dominant.

Each of the panels of the installation loosely tells an episode in a narrative and makes use of the symbology of origin myths: the crossing of an underground river; the statue of an unnamed warrior; the emergence from a cave; the climbing of an underground mountain. Interspersed with these images are footage taken from within the Archaeological Museum of Korca, where the story of the origin of the state is told through objects brought up from the underground, constituting a myth of their own.