Installation
Ping-Pong Table, Paper, Offset Ink, Brass, cultivated Moss
Dimension variable
Collaboration with Kama Sokolnicka
“In The Middle Lane, The Grass Was Tall In The Summer”
at Wroclaw Museum of Architechture, May – September 2026.
The exhibition is a multifaceted story about the transformations that the 3rd Reich built A4 motorway has undergone over nearly a hundred years. It is a story not only of infrastructural change, but above all of political, social and landscape transfomations, in which the Polish and German histories of this important artery intertwine.
→ Read the curatorial text at the bottom of the page
Photos: Alicja Kielan
The ping-pong table itself is a metaphor of the motorway and evokes a road split by a central strip or an expansion joint between concrete slabs. Its function, based on returning the ball back and forth, refers to movement in opposite directions and the rhythmic repetition of driving, but also to the dialogue between the two artistic practices. The condition of the table is significant - degraded, close to disintegration. It recalls the idea of architecture in the Third Reich designed with a future ruin in mind: durable, monumental, intended to endure and impress even after losing its function. The work also refers to the phantom motorway - the never completed Vienna–Breslau route. Its fragments still exist in the Czech landscape, especially near Brno, as plinths, pieces of viaducts and unfinished structures.
Geisser introduces vertical strips of paper into the installation, recalling both the archive and the construction technology of motorways, in which paper was used. They extend upwards like a road without an end, a project suspended between plan and its implementation. The paper strips bear the phrases Not really now not any more and Not yet here no more there. They evoke displacement, suspension, and the disorientation inherent to driving - a monotonous, repetitive movement in which the distinction between the static and the dynamic, the real and the spectral, begins to blur.
Sokolnicka, in turn, traces a brass line over the table - precise, polished, yet heavy. Referring to road gantry, it also binds the structure like a technical element added afterwards, holding together what is coming apart. Brass, associated with measurement and precision, functions here as a corrective tool, an attempt to grasp and stabilise the intersection of different orders.
This gesture can also be read in relation to the design of the motorway itself. The unrealised Reichsautobahn Wien–Breslau, despite its National Socialist context, was one of the most influential motorway projects. The design relied, among other things, on the use of the Euler spiral—curve whose curvature changes linearly with its length. In practice, this means that a vehicle moving at constant speed enters a bend smoothly: centrifugal force increases evenly, without abrupt directional change. This solution allowed movement to be inscribed into a calculable, controlled model combining mathematical logic with the experience of driving. Against this background, the installation reveals the tension between design and materialisation. What was meant to be precisely planned remains unfinished, displaced, requiring connection. The motorway appears here as a structure in a state of instability.