Autobahn
Emanuel Geisser & Kama Sokolnicka
installation views from the exhibition
curated by Agata Ciastoń
produced by: Misia Siennicka, Agnieszka Smutek
2026
Emanuel Geisser & Kama Sokolnicka
used ping-pong table, brass, paper, offset ink, cultivated moss
photos: Jerzy Wypych
installation views from the exhibition
IN THE MIDDLE LANE, THE GRASS WAS TALL IN THE SUMMER
at Wrocław Museum of Architechture
14 May—6 Sep 2026
curated by Agata Ciastoń
artists: Ewa Axelrad, Alicja Bielawska,
Emanuel Geisser & Kama Sokolnicka,
Marlena Kudlicka, Natalia LL,
Piotr P. Skiba, Łukasz Wojciechowski
produced by: Misia Siennicka, Agnieszka Smutek
The exhibition In the Middle Lane, the Grass Was Tall in the Summer is a multifaceted story about the transformations that the Lower Silesian section of the 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 transformations, in which the Polish and German histories of this important artery intertwine.
collage: Emanuel Geisser
The installation Autobahn (8) by Kama Sokolnicka and Emanuel Geisser is built around a concrete ping-pong table and unfolds as a multilayered metaphor of the motorway. The table itself – its material, weight and division into two halves – 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–Wroclaw (Wien–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 around the table – precise, polished, yet heavy. It 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 stabilize the intersection of different orders. This gesture can also be read in relation to the design of the motorway itself. The unrealized Reichsautobahn Wien–Breslau, despite its National Socialist context, was one of the most influential motorway projects. It was planned and partially built under the direction of the engineer Hans Lorenz and landscape architects Friedrich Schaub and Hermann Mattern. 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 materialization. What was meant to be precisely planned remains unfinished, displaced, requiring connection. The motorway appears here as a structure in a state of instability.
—Agata Ciastoń, from the curatorial text
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detail of the installation
The installation Autobahn (8) by Kama Sokolnicka and Emanuel Geisser is built around a concrete ping-pong table and unfolds as a multilayered metaphor of the motorway. The table itself – its material, weight and division into two halves – 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–Wroclaw (Wien–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 around the table – precise, polished, yet heavy. It 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 stabilize the intersection of different orders. This gesture can also be read in relation to the design of the motorway itself. The unrealized Reichsautobahn Wien–Breslau, despite its National Socialist context, was one of the most influential motorway projects. It was planned and partially built under the direction of the engineer Hans Lorenz and landscape architects Friedrich Schaub and Hermann Mattern. 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 materialization. What was meant to be precisely planned remains unfinished, displaced, requiring connection. The motorway appears here as a structure in a state of instability.
—Agata Ciastoń, from the curatorial text
—Agata Ciastoń, from the curatorial text
detail of the installation
from the archival materials of Ředitelství Silnic A Dálnic ČR
