DIVING SUIT
FROM THE SERIES: FRONTIERS, METHODS OF ESCAPE



INSTALLATION: FABRIC, THREAD, METAL, AND PLASTIC.
VARIABLE DIMENSIONS.
ATELJÉ STUNDARS, SOLF, FINLAND.


2023

Borders, Methods of Escape investigates attempts to flee undertaken by citizens who, when faced with a totalitarian regime and systems of extreme surveillance, turned to invention as their only possibility of passage. Drawing on fragmented knowledge and recycled or adapted materials, these “amateur inventors” constructed precarious artifacts that challenged borders by air, land, or water. Although many of these devices did not comply with the necessary physical principles and calculations often failed, they concentrate a form of technical imagination driven by urgency and the desire for freedom.

Construction of the Migrant Object No. II: “Diving Suit” is based on a device fabricated by Josef Skopl, a Catholic priest who attempted to leave former Czechoslovakia by crossing the bed of the Elbe River. Skopl designed and sewed his own suit using waterproof fabric, sealed it with bicycle inner tubes, and built a helmet from an aluminum pot. To breathe, he improvised a system of hoses—one for air intake and another for air output—topped with a float to prevent it from sinking. In reconstructing this object, the work does not seek to faithfully reproduce its functionality, but rather to activate its symbolic charge: the suit as an extension of the migrant body, as a fragile and radical tool that reveals the tension between calculation, risk, and imagination in contexts of extreme control.