stadium/stadion #3

1.
On a square in the city stands a scaffolding structure called stadium/stadion #3, which looks more like a launching pad for a rocket, or a boatyard, a storage space for large pieces of furniture, or a building site. At the centre of the construction there is an empty square where there's nothing and where it seems anything might happen.

2.
Its presence is too emphatic; you can't avoid looking at it. It occupies a place and deprives the city of space. It has even made the benches next to it unusable. And, as someone says, it's not even nice to look at. It screams for attention. It wants to be the focus of attention. A place that gives importance to the things at its centre.

3.
Why do we put people or things at the centre when we venerate them? Why do we stand around someone when we pester or stone them? We sit in an arena around a boxing match, in a parliament around ministers. A street performer is surrounded by his audience. We stand in groups around a fire, and the closer we stand the more heat we feel. When something is put in the middle, it always all at once gains in importance.

4.
Someone says it's a stadium, and it does look something like that. A flat surface with a structure around it, intended to enable as many people as possible to look at something from as close as possible. But it looks more like an abstraction of a stadium, a simplified form of an arena, and actually a bit too small. Yet you always have a perfect view of the middle, wherever you stand, except that the perspective changes a lot depending on the height you choose. The higher you stand the more you can look down, the lower you stand the more you look up.

5.
Someone says it's a stadium under construction, a place where something finds itself briefly as part of a process. That it is actually about one of the various stages of what a stadium might be. Which is why the title is followed by the figure #3. Perhaps #1 was just a circle around a fire. This stadium tells us about the stage a work has reached. It shows the progress of things. The state of affairs. However continual and permanent it may be.

6.
It appears to be an observation post. A station much more than a stadium. A place where things stop, a place to stay standing. Just like a place for horses or boats or trains, but in this case intended to make people stop and reflect on what has been put in the middle. It is a focal point, almost like a gigantic magnifying glass, to focus or shift the attention onto an action, an object, a movement or an image. And to peer at each other.

7.
One day there's a big cube standing in the middle of this construction on the square. And someone's playing an instrument. And there is light that's meant to make it nice. And there are people standing everywhere, far too many, you can't see the musician anymore. Someone says it's better to do this sort of thing in a theatre, or on a stage that's equipped for the purpose. Someone else says: but then this could never have happened in exactly this way.