For this online open studios, I am presenting the project Future Bestiary (Kerameikos) and the third issue of AM zine, PROPHECY.
Future Bestiary (Kerameikos) is a body of previously-unreleased video-projection sculptures that articulate the entanglements between subterranean memory and the mythical, social and technological construct of the future.
These digital sculptural forms originate from archaeological artefacts depicting daemonic beings and mythical animals that used to inhabit the ancient Athenian cemetery of Kerameikos as the protectors of life and death. They are visually defaced by linguistic signs and Internet imagery that encode wishful speculations and emerging anxieties about natural ecosystems, algorithmic sovereignty, and sociopolitical change.
Presented here in their raw, in-between state, and accompanied with excerpts from PROPHECY, these ethereal entities give an insight into the research I began during my residency at Delfina Foundation: contemplating the symbolic and material aspects of subterranean space, and its historical colonisation that forged the notion of anthropogenic progress.
– Artist-in-residence Petros Moris, 7 April 2020
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
– The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot
Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics. This follows at once if our fundamental contention is admitted that the introduction of randomness is the only thing that cannot be undone.
– The Nature of the Physical World, by Arthur Eddington
A statue of an immense sphinx crouched in the center of the square, its giant head reaching far into the ethereal blue. Fountains played on either side, dashing their silvery spray beyond the extreme height of the head. Under umbrageous trees were resting places, and on the sphinx was engraved the words: ‘That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.’
– Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self, by Pauline Hopkins
One negative, and one positive, a never-ending cycle. Enders end themselves. Starters start themselves. The numbers of God will be studied at this stage. The natural course of the human race shall be broken. Too many things to say here. Pushing the man’s back, forcing him to rest, is actually better.
– Tui Bei Tu, by Li Chunfeng & Yuan Tiangang
There is a large mirror suspended over a well of no great depth; anyone going down the well can hear every word spoken on our Earth; and if he looks at the mirror, he sees every city and nation as plainly as though he were standing close above each.
– A True Story, by Lucian of Samosata
Ah, no! I will discipline my sorrowing heart to sympathy in your joys; I will be happy, because ye are so. Live on, ye innocents, nature’s selected darlings; I am not much unlike to you. Nerves, pulse, brain, joint, and flesh, of such am I composed, and ye are organized by the same laws. I have something beyond this, but I will call it a defect, not an endowment, if it leads me to misery, while ye are happy.
– The Last Man, by Mary Shelley
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all
– Hope is the Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson