“All things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless (and) moving objects constantly multiply themselves… Thus, a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.”
Umberto Boccioni, The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910)
The first locomotive was created in the United Kingdom in 1802, setting a promise of a continent connected by steel, steam, and industrialization. Indeed, together with the mass-produced commodity came the fast-moving object, and a fascination with trains grew in European consciousness. As Filippo Marinetti states in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909 - “a new beauty has been added to the splendor of the world – the beauty of speed.”
At the turn of the 20th century, as speed coalesced with war, the ideas first tested through technology were now being tested through art, expressed in painting by a method of fragmentation. A common Futurist idiom declares – with speed, forms disappear. Fittingly, European railroad tracks began carving the surface of the Levant, overriding tradition by means of technology, manipulating local landscapes through a western gauge. Thus, as the Futurist lens was dissecting the world into fractions, railways were being exported as tools for empire-making, facilitating the colonial effort of dividing the Middle East.
The wagon thesis project reframes its own imperialist past as well as the origins of its Futurist representation. It proposes a conscientious replanning of the defunct Haifa-Beirut railway, connecting diverging and, at times, contested spatial identities through the planning of a single vehicle’s section. By redesigning the leftovers of a no-longer-existing foreign empire the project tests the paradigms of technology as a liberator from locality. As a transient space between two sites, the wagon poses a disciplinary question asking how can the design of a single object affect its territory.