Lokomotywownia is a site-specific installation located in a disused train repair depot in Krakow, Poland. The history of the region, its old technologies and its witnessing of the passing of time, and the transient, are brought into conversation through the rediscovery and intervention of the site. The train’s previous life and its trajectory of motion are mimicked in the reciprocal motion of the iPads – they are alive, the train is now stationary. Motorised tracks, built inside one of the abandoned carriages, allow the materiality of the site to define the structure of the recording device. The captured footage is then played back on eight iPads that move around the space, mapping the carriage interior and re-tracing the exact path of the camera, spatially and temporally. As the iPads drift slowly across the surfaces of the abandoned railway carriage, the exact representation in scale is seen on the screens, highlighting the architectural site below.
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Informed by Giuliana Bruno’s writing in Atlas of Emotion (2002), the installation approaches film as a spatial and haptic practice rather than a purely optical one. Rather than positioning spectatorship as fixed or detached, the work considers how film unfolds through movement, navigation and the inhabitation of space. Moving image operates here in close relation to architecture and choreography, where perception emerges through spatial encounter and bodily orientation.
Lokomotywownia preserves the spatial memory of the site through precise recording and playback, while reactivating the abandoned carriage as a living and performative environment. Through this recursive movement between image, apparatus and architecture, the installation reflects on how technologies mediate our relationship to time, industrial memory and the afterlives of place.
