David Claerbout’s Olympia (The real-time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years) is a dizzying reflection on time and perception. Comprising two monumental projections, it makes the flow of time an almost palpable experience. While nothing much seems to happen on the superficial level, closer scrutiny reveals the subtle transformation of both the building and its environs. By feeding current weather data and the position of the sun in Berlin into his simulation, moreover, Claerbout is able to place his digitally rendered stadium at the mercy of the elements.

While the portrait-format projection shows only static images both of the neoclassical complex itself and of details of the floor, the grass, the trees, and the statues of athletes, the larger, landscape-format projection traces the same, dreamy, one-hour-long camera movement around the stadium – an edifice built for roaring, cheering crowds, which here is eerily silent and deserted. The thousand-year timespan of the project references the Third Reich’s claim to a thousand years of dominance, which is the spirit that informed the stadium’s inauguration in 1936. Claerbout himself, in other words, understands Olympia as an attempt to juxtapose the decline of an ideological construct over time with the biological timescale of nature and the life expectancy of a single human being.