Olympia, by Belgian artist David Claerbout, is a computer-generated replica of a building in a time-space devoid of human intervention and entrusted to the cycles of nature. Following the ‘ruinwert’ theory pioneered by the stadium’s architect Albert Speer, in which a building’s decay was an inherent condition of its design, Olympia tracks the lifespan of the structure from creation to disintegration by the slow forces of nature. From season to season, year after year, we can observe the growth of weeds 'irrigated' by the computer program that calculates the exact precipitation, weather and seasonal conditions in Berlin, until eventually the vegetation eclipses the stadium completely. At Samstag, we experience seven months of this epic thousand-year-long project, coming face-to-face with the temporal impossibility of ever fully comprehending the impact of the architecture we leave behind, and the attitudes we adopt in order to exist alongside the echoes of expired ideologies.

2020 Adelaide//International catalogue with essays by Robert Cook, Ross Gibson, Rachel Hurst, Gillian Brown and Andy Butler.

Listen to an audio description of Olympia.