In the beginning of Things, black-winged Night
Into the bosom of Erebos dark and deep
Laid a wind-born egg, as the seasons rolled,
Forth sprung Love, gleaming with wings of gold,
Like to the whirlings of wind, Love the Delight – 
And Love with Chaos in Tartaros laid him to sleep;
And we his children, nestled, fluttering there,
Till he led us forth to the light of the upper air.

Aristophanes, from The Birds – Ὄρνιθες, 414 BC

The second project is an attempt to create an architectural anagram and relates to the ancient pagan tradition of palindromes, representing the construction of the ‘cosmic egg’. According to the poetry of Orpheus, ‘Love sprung out’ of the cosmic egg and brought humans into the light.

This film is experimenting mostly with the temporal values of the palindrome and Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Eternal Return of the Same’. Image and sound have been manipulated in endless loops, forward and backwards in time and by using over-layering techniques. It is an attempt to alter the meaning of architectural and spatial elements by using them in a more graphical way under constraint. Architecture is treated according to its geometrical values instead of in terms of function, politics or urban context; as happens with language in the palindrome. This gives an opening to a different space, that of the hidden poetic space of Orpheus or of Baudrillard’s non-linear relation between sign and signifier in the anagram. Palindromic power lies in the struggle of bringing values together, combining them in one system, in the perception of opposite forces in balance, which strive to keep inside them the meaning we invest in architecture. It is the force that is trying to confine space and at the same time is trying to break out of the material boundaries.

The top of the Swiss Re building (Norman Foster, 2004) was filmed for twenty-four hours, taking three-second shots every ten minutes. The building was chosen because of its shape which mirrored could illustrate the image of the cosmic egg, of the cranes (the video aimed to illustrate the construction of the cosmic egg and the building at that point was under construction), and because skyscrapers are typologies often annotated with erotic metaphors.

In the editing both screens start at the same point in space–time, 24:00; then one starts moving forwards in space–time and the other backwards. Each screen completes a perfect circle and then they flip over. There is no beginning or end and the sequence can be repeated endlessly.

The soundtrack was composed by music producer Robin Morisson who used techniques similar to the editing. Morrison manipulated the original sounds of the recording in loops, over-layered, reversed and mirrored in time.

The whole experience aims for the viewer to stand in the ‘gateway’ from where he or she can experience the ‘eternal return of the same’ at the moment before the beginning of time, or the birth of Eros.