Katrin Korfmann

Public Cube is a temporary installation designed for the public space of Schiphol Airport, which was developed during a period of three months for the Prix de Rome.

The white cube is installed in the Arrival Hall 2 at the spot where travellers are awaited by friends and family. Visitors can enter this cube by passing through a curtain at the backside. Once inside they can sit on a bench from which they can observe from behind a glass window the travellers entering the country. From this perspective, the arriving travellers appear as if in a decor, isolated from their actual environment while the sliding door through which they pass suggests a part of a proscenium through which they appear on a stage.

A reversal from this perspective is offered for those arriving of those waiting who appear as a formal image framed by the white frame of the cube. In this way the duality of waiting and arriving becomes through the imposition of a frame, concentrated into rhyming spatial images.

Public Cube is a monument for an invisible frontier found in a specific public space, the airport, which is in fact an in between space, a non-site, but also a space in which definitive borders are drawn.

Thanks to:
Prix de Rome, Chris Vonk, Schiphol Airport