Why a massive hole is being cut in this road
Construction workers have dug up a road in Hobart for a very unique reason and it’s not for the claustrophobic.
Dark Mofo, the annual Tasmanian festival of music and art, will showcase Sydney-born artist Mike Parr’s work: Underneath the Bitumen the Artist.
From June 14-17, Parr will be interred in a container below Macquarie Street in central Hobart. Traffic will stop briefly as the bitumen is poured over the container to seal him in.
Parr also won’t have any food in the container with him but will have a sketchpad and pencils, a copy of The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, a meditation stool, a folding chair, bedding, water, wash and waste baskets, along with “other items necessary for survival”.
The container is 4.5 metre long and 1.7m wide.
Dark Mofo’s creative director Leigh Carmichael said Parr’s work acknowledges “two deeply linked events in Tasmania’s history”: “the eventual transportation of 75,000 British and Irish convicts in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the subsequent, nearly total destruction of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population”.
In a statement, Dark Mofo added the anxiety caused by Parr’s “disappearance” for 72 hours “is the point of the piece”.
The container will remain underground after Parr’s release with concrete poured on top to “fuse the chamber and its contents as a time capsule instated for future generations”.
