Artist transforms 4,000-km Porsche journey across Europe into multimedia installation

Paweł Kalinowski started with a story that never happened. In the fictional world of Shinjuku—a universe he built around 1980s Tokyo—there was an imagined race from the city's neon streets to Mount Fuji. No one ever drove it. But the idea lived in his mind, and in 2026, he decided to make something real from it.

He gathered seven classic Porsches, machines built between 1955 and 1992. He found twelve people willing to drive them—friends, parents and children, strangers who would meet for the first time at the starting line. Together, they would cover roughly 4,000 kilometers each, moving through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania without support vehicles, without tow trucks, without a script. What happened would be what happened. The cars would break down or they wouldn't. The people would bond or they wouldn't. The journey would be the work.

They drove through vineyards in Tokaj. They took rural roads in Romania. They crossed mountain streams and navigated the Transfăgărășan, a high pass that tests both machine and nerve. The temperature climbed to 38 degrees Celsius. Roadside repairs became necessary. Mechanical failures became inevitable. A spar on Kalinowski's own car needed fixing—a quick diagnosis, a few skilled hands, and they were moving again. A flock of sheep appeared on the road ahead. A river crossing threatened the cars' undercarriages, but the sharp rocks below caused no damage. These moments—the breakdowns, the encounters, the small victories—became the actual material of the work. As the route unfolded, the destination mattered less. The cars mattered less. What mattered was what the journey generated: interactions, experiences, the texture of time spent together in motion.

Kalinowski documented everything. Photographers captured the road. Film cameras rolled. He collected objects, recorded sounds, gathered the fragments of memory that accumulated mile after mile. All of this—the images, the footage, the artifacts, the audio—became the raw material for a second creation. Contact Layer of Shinjuku, as he calls it, transforms the lived experience into a seven-part documentary series and a physical installation. Inside the exhibition space, the Porsche becomes a container for memory. Moving images, sound, light, and the objects gathered along the way are arranged and rearranged, reconstructing pieces of the journey through spatial, visual, and sonic means. The recorded experience becomes art material, broken apart and reassembled so that viewers encounter not the journey itself but its echo, its shape, its emotional residue.

This is the third chapter in Kalinowski's exploration of how cars, memory, and fiction interweave. The first chapter, Shinjuku, constructed memories around a race that never took place—a 1968 Porsche 911, hand-painted in Tokyo, became the vessel for that imagined past. The second chapter, Ghost Layer of Shinjuku, treated a decaying 356 as an archaeological object, a car carrying traces and artifacts of a life it had never actually lived. Contact Layer approaches the question from the opposite direction: it begins with something real, something lived, and asks how that lived experience can be transformed into memory, into form, into art.

The first public presentation happens in October 2026 at Luftgekühlt in Atlanta. After that, the complete work will premiere at Reszel Castle in Poland. And then, eventually, it will return to Tokyo—the city where Shinjuku began as fiction, where the journey across Europe was always meant to circle back. The trajectory completes itself: from an imagined race in a fictional city, through a real journey across a continent, back to the place where the story started. What began as a story that never happened becomes a story that did, and then becomes art that holds both.