Topography of the Underworld

In one of Dostoevsky's cryptic novels, Notes from Underground, or in Danish: Kældermennesket (the basement-being), the story is one of a duality between the physical underground and an inner sentimental one. The story ends with the protagonist denouncing the mechanical and superficial nature of his contemporaries and questioning whether our society knows what life is or if we just indulge in the illusion of it.

The novel is a complex product of its time. The nineteenth century was marked by rapid urbanization and industrialization, which reshaped infrastructural practice and caused a paradigm shift toward hygiene and controlled environments. Infrastructure became a superficial tool in the sense that it established the conditions for our prolonged presence within a space, a means of colonizing the land and nature upon which our cities and societies still rest.

A fascination for the epistemological origin behind ancient myths and the commonality of covering rivers through urban infrastructure brought me on a fieldwork trip for two months to The Danish Institute at Athens, to seek out the Ilissos river and shed light into dark tunnels as its river path flows beneath the city today. Within deep tunnels of massive acoustics, deep moisture, old cooling winds, and subterranean lakes sculpted with unknown life, I followed the contemporary river path and experienced the continual agency of a river urbanely forgotten.

The great illusion of infrastructure is its apparent stability: once in place, it seems to regulate, control, and stabilize otherwise dynamic systems, creating a predictable ground. Yet the buried Ilissos demonstrates the limits of this control. Out of sight, the river continues to act, eroding, forming lakes, and undermining parts of the city of Athens. It acts with an agency, interacting with the organisms in its waters and in the soil beneath. A vibrant matter beneath the thin membrane of stone, asphalt, and concrete upon which our daily rhythms unfold.

Topography of the Underworld is a title implying a duality of space, the current feral agency of the river shaping a new topography of the underground beneath Athens. The project proposes the body as a method for engaging with the complexity of the river, within and affected by the space, to transcend an under-world dimension: an inner reflection as we temporarily become part of the deep subterranean forces and perhaps rethink the role of our infrastructure, and co-exist with the waterbody and ground, essentially challenging the perception of an over/underground polarity.

As the thesis interacts with the Ilissos, the most culturally referenced river in Attika, from the Parthenon statues, Plato's Phaedrus, to countless romantic imagery of a past Athens, it crosses with the importance of ecohydrology and a study of the porous karst landscape upon which Attika rests: the effect of human-made infrastructure on a complex ecology spanning mountain origin and river mouth, while being linked to countless other-than-human processes. What does it mean to seek out the tunnelled Ilissos as a speculative, active participant in the landscape, shaping it dynamically and conveying the importance of microbial, bacterial, and fungal life entangled in soil and water?

Within this thesis, the basement-being returns within a new light: an inner dialogue prompted by physical descent. We can ask ourselves the same question as in Dostoevsky's novel, and reflecting on basements, we are invited to dream with subterranean forces, imagining bodies as instruments for engaging with agent rivers. To descend is to explore what it would mean to place this logic first, to think in terms of a dynamic river and its unpredictable, living landscape.

[KATABASIS]: A Greek term that literally means "a going down" or "descend". Most commonly, it refers to a mythical, religious, or psychological journey into the underworld or realm of the dead. The film is an entanglement of scenes from fieldwork in Athens in December 2025, paired with a journey downwards. It sets the scene of the topography of the underworld. 

The following drawings and sections explore Aghia Photini, an area in Athens where the Ilissos river once ran but has since been enclosed underground. What remains is a residual landscape where natural and cultural histories, a dry riverbed, a Byzantine church, karst springs, ancient temples, continue to overlap and entangle.

[AN UNDERWORLD DIMENSION]: Taking inspiration from the epistemological origins of mythological tales, where a descend into the underworld was a way of understanding through transcendence, contemplation, and enlightenment, this project draws on the idea that we might descend into deep caverns, into a dimension of the under-world and to learn something new about the life above. In doing so, it seeks to erase the hard frontier of the surface. These diagrams aim to couple biological and geological processes with the act of submerging oneself into the depths, drawing on cultural references to evoke a state of reflection within the under-world.

What’s the name, what’s the name
of the river?
Ilissos, Ilissos.
I am going to tell you my little secret.
I love you, I love you.

Babies cry for their mother,
but I am a lonely orphan.
Birds fly with their feathers,
but I am flying into the dance.

What’s the name, what’s the name
of the river?
Ilissos, Ilissos.
I am going to tell you my little secret.
I love you, I love you.

Manos Hadjidakis - Ilissos Ιλισός