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Charlie Tweed | Man From Below
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My alter ego, the Man From Below, has been traveling to Bern for a long time. Two small spades, bound tightly to his hands, allow him to tunnel underground in any direction as long as it’s below the surface, using a swimming, flailing arm motion to proceed.
The Man From Below has been tunneling all over the place, spreading the word of his desire for a safe, underground and sustainable life. He began at London’s Thames Gateway where he constructed an underground community in a field opposite City Airport, devised plans for removing unsightly buildings such as the Excel Exhibition Centre, and orchestrated a mass return of raw nature, a sort of extreme re-wilding approach. His is a vision for ultimate survival using the most simplistic, low budget and functional means to exist.
He is driven in part by ideas of risk; he sits in his shelter thinking about "the global warm up dangers", the "flooding dangers", "the dangers of future developments in nanotechnology and biotechnology". He listens and believes every radio transmission, every news story. He attempts to work out how to eliminate these dangers and bring things back to a simpler time.
He proposes that all travel on the surface should take place using his "self sustainable system". This system allows him to travel around the surface "without needing anything or anyone".
During dragged down into lowercase he finally re-surfaces from a hole in the exhibition space itself. Then he builds a shelter and sets up a demonstration of his plans for Bern’s future. He encourages the visitors to join him and also takes his ideas to the people of Bern via his website and various interventions.
His plans for Bern include a mass movement underground together with a mass re-winding and re-wilding of the surface. "Back to the time of the glaciers that once shaped Bern." (Using homemade Tesla conductors to "bring back the ice".)
He likes the underground lives of Bern’s bears but he "doesn’t trust them" and instead has designed a new safer version, easy to control and simple to manufacture.
He also plans to appropriate many useful sites around Bern to help expand the community. These include cellars, underground car parks, an underground library, the university’s underground laboratory, Katakömbli underground theatre, the bear pit and the Grimsel test site (he also has his eye on their tunnel boring machine as it "will speed things up").
It is unlikely that the Man From Below will leave Bern until all his plans have succeeded. Every-one should leave their old life behind, join him, grab a spade, start digging their new future and tell everyone else about it. THE ONLY WAY IS DOWN.
Follow the Man From Below’s progress in Bern and beyond at: www.manfrombelow.co.uk
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Charlie Tweed, Man from Below, 2008.
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