Because of the special geological features of Slovenia’s Karst terrain, approximately eleven thousand caves are officially registered in the country. A huge underground network of chambers exists just beneath our footsteps, unchanged since time immemorial, indifferent to the passing seasons, and the mutations of our human environment. This subterranean world has long been perceived as a place of the unknown, causing us to ask what analogous spaces the contemporary environment has sacrificed, and what places remain that speak to the unconsciousness, revealing our deepest relationship to the materiality and immateriality of nature.

From the perspective of design, a natural resource leaves the purely geological realm and enters the human one the moment we encounter it. At that instance, we face a crossroads where the underground world can be “released” from various perspectives. Addressing such a place and the issues it raises, the team of designers identified two scenarios, both of them set in underground Karst spaces: the Lipica quarry which is man-made, and Županova Jama (Mayor's Cave) which is naturally-formed. The central issue of the episode is communication between these two inverted worlds.