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Adriaport
In the 1970s, Czechoslovakia had a plan to build a tunnel to the sea…
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It is not surprising that landlocked countries might occasionally go stir-crazy dreaming of the sea – wars have started for the want of a good harbour and we all love a sea view. So imagine being a landlocked country in the deep freeze of the Cold War, with an Iron Curtain and a country or two separating you from the nearest beach. This was the situation for those living in then-Czechoslovakia in 1975, when an economics professor, Karel Žlábek, proposed a solution: why not build a tunnel from the Czech border directly to the coast of the Adriatic?
With the help of the engineering company Pragoprojekt, Žlábek produced a detailed design and presented it to the Czech Government.
Previous and this page: Vintage photographs, stills from “Return to Adriaport”, 2013. (Photos courtesy Adela Babanova)
Where his proposed tunnel emerged at the coast, its excavated spoil would be used to create an artificial island with a new port for Czechoslovakia, called Adriaport.
The proposal was primarily economic, as it would enable import and export of goods directly to and from the Adriatic, but inevitably it had an emotional bucket-and-spade edge to it as well – allowing dreams of holidays at the seaside, melting ice creams, lobster-red bodies and all.
This is the side that the artist Adela Babanova picked up on in her recent video work Return to Adriaport, which premiered at Loop Art Fair Barcelona in 2013. -
Vintage photographs, stills from “Return to Adriaport”, 2013. (Photos courtesy Adela Babanova). Extract from: “Return to Adriaport”, 2013, directed by Adela Babanova, written by Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek. (Video courtesy Adela Babanova). Sectional drawing through the proposed Adriaport tunnel. (Drawing courtesy Pragoproject)
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In her work Adela Babanova uses literary forms, elements and procedures from radio and television genres such as staged interviews and TV debates. From the beginning of her artistic career she has collaborated with the screenplay-writer duo Vojtěch Mašek and Džian Baban. She teams up with professional film crews and actors, and uses manipulated vintage photography and 3D animation for her stories. Babanova studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague between 2000 and 2006, and in 2011, was finalist in the National Gallery Prague Art Award. In 2012, she was nominated for Jindřich Chalupecký Award.
Return to Adriaport
HD Single channel bluray projection video, PAL, 13 min., 2013
Written by Džian Baban, Vojtěch Mašek; Directed by Adéla Babanová; Camera Jakub Halousek; Edited by Adéla Babanová, Hedvika HansalováSupported by the Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic; Partners: Pragoprojekt, Czech News Agency.
It takes the form of an imagined documentary, scripted by screenwriters Vojtech Masek and Dzian Baban, using manipulated vintage 1970s photographs and juxtaposed with the original drawings for the tunnel. It reconstructs the meeting that Professor Žlábek had with the Czech President, Gustáv Husák, to convince him of his vision and share dreams of the sea.
Though practical engineering-wise, the project was a pipe-dream geo-politically, not least because the tunnel mainly ran under Austria, a country on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Professor Žlábek continued working on the project until his death in 1984, but his plans ended up in the archives of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, as a small fragment of buried utopia. I (rgw)
Cover of a 1967 report produced by Professor Karel Žlábek, working with Pragoproject, on the proposed Adriaport tunnel. (Courtesy Pragoproject). Vintage photograph, still from “Return to Adriaport”, 2013. (Photo courtesy Adela Babanova)
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