Hanover (dpa) – Years in the making, Expo 2000 is almost ready to open: a
world’s fair that has provided contemporary artists with a gigantic open-air
gallery to set visitors from around the world thinking.
Builders are still swarming over the site in Hanover, Germany.
Some key attractions, such as the Global House that highlights world-betterment
projects, are still practically empty, but most pavilions are far enough
advanced to allow a first impression of the exposition.
To a first-time visitor, the immense size of the site and its principal
buildings suggest a great city. The scale of this fair, which opens June 1,
makes it impossible to take in within a day.
Buses shuttle round the margins of the site and an aerial cableway
offers a spectacular end-to-end tour from above, but to “do” Expo, there is
only
one way: on foot. All those pedestrian concourses mean that comfortable shoes
are a must.
With more than 180 countries and organizations exhibiting, there is no dominant
interpretation of the expo theme, “Humankind – Nature – Technology”.
In any case, it is not so much the message that is striking as the way the
theme
is being addressed: with a series of spectacular works of contemporary art
costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
A prime example is the Dutch pavilion, which comprises six layers of Low
Country
landscape: a sand dune, a wall of rain, a forest, the underground, a greenhouse
and foundations. This not so much a building as a collage.
Close by is the German pavilion, 130 by 90 metres in size, which contains just
three galleries.
One contains a collection of plaster heads, the second is a cavernous cinema
and
the third contains a collage including the first printed bible, a harpsichord,
a
Volkswagen and a rock.
Contemporary western art is largely preoccupied with juxtaposing things that do
not obviously belong together, and that is precisely what Antoni Miralda of
Spain does in the food pavilion at the geographic heart of Expo 2000.
A single huge art installation, this exhibition is yet another collage: an
altar
cluttered with statues of saints, cola bottles and much more, overlooked by a
wall covered with plates.
Miralda explains: “I wanted to get people to think about what is
food-related.”
After this intellectual heavy lifting, mums and dads with hungry kids will be
relieved to discover that the food pavilion also contains … a restaurant.
The children can have fun with a few of Expo 2000’s sublimely strange works of
art such as the 72 Knowbots.
These are blobs of plastic, each containing a computer and a video projector,
that circulate in a 4,000-square-metre, mauve-lit room in Expo’s “thematic
area”. It is entertaining to make the robots slither away by waving at their
laser sensors.
At Brazil’s Expo stand, a wall pierced by 1.6 million loose pegs, offers
delight
to the young and not so young.
Anyone leaning on the wall, devised by Rio de Janeiro’s Bia Lessa, will find
that just enough wooden rods are pressed through to create a mould of their
body
shape plus a counterpart image on the other side of the wall.
Traditionally, every world exposition has left behind at least one
architectural
marvel – think for example of the Eiffel Tower.
The Hanover expo contains many buildings that are glassy, cold and grand, but
its real gems are tucked away in the two remotest corners of the site, next to
the cableway terminals.
One is the Whale, the YMCA pavilion, which mimics a leviathan at sea while
providing a perfectly usable building.
The other, equally toylike and amusing, is Venezuela’s pavilion in the shape of
an exotic flower. Its petals are giant sunshades that can be raised and lowered
in response to rain, wind and sun.
Finally, no visitor can fail to be impressed by the fussy attention paid to the
roads, tramlines and railways that lead to Expo. The site, the Hanover
fairground, already had superb public transport links beforehand, but these
have
been further upgraded to cope with an estimated 40 million visitors over the
next five months
