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ABYSS OF TIME
2022
4K video | 16:9 | 12.02 min. | color | sound


Abyss of Time critiques the post-independence promise of the utopian city of Chandigarh—built in northern India in the 1950s by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier—by staging the city’s architecture as a dystopian, monstrous, autonomous living being. Beyond its formal composition, the film consists of a precise montage of historical and fictional temporalities, evoking the memory of an idea of the future that has now itself become the past and is haunting the present. Conceived by Le Corbusier as a rationalized human body, the city’s plan becomes legible as an artificial anatomy. In the film, this anthropomorphic logic is emptied of its humanist promise and reappears as something uncanny: a cold, machinic body governed by repetition, regulation, and control. Mirrored perspectives and deserted spaces intensify this science-fictional sensibility, as if the city were an autonomous system continuing to operate long after its creators and inhabitants have disappeared. Chandigarh emerges as a post-human entity, a city-body without a subject, suspended between order and decay. The slow-moving images are overlaid with a soundscape that borrows from the sphere of science fiction films: a minimalist, industrial heartbeat echoing the concrete body of the brutalist buildings. The crumbling yet massive structures mirror a broken ecosystem and a harsh struggle for survival—embodying the film’s bleak themes of the search for meaning in a brutalized, failed utopia, and the all-consuming abyss of time.



Concept / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Sound Design: Nigel Brown
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Production Assistant: Barbara Probst
Supported by: MAK - Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Province of Salzburg



︎ Archive Film