Wandering On Thin Surfaces

Degree Show at the Athens School Of Fine Arts, Kessanlis Hall, 2021

In the randomness of everyday life, we often look through something else. Through distinct and concrete boundaries of things that become the tools for us to think or feel. Τhe mediated visual relations that emerge seem to contradict the simplicity of a free and direct wandering gaze, which reveals to us an inner intensity of emotions arising from the very common and human feeling of loneliness. In his book “Letters To A Young Poet”, Rainer Maria Rilke records the emotions that remain clear and unspoken, that converse with intuitive thinking and are cultivated by our relationship with nature. That kind of loneliness is essential to Rilke, like a dream refuge that preserves our earthly elements.

The installation ‘Wandering On Thin Surfaces’ consists of an archive of letters, sketches, photographs and a video, investigating the abstract properties of reality that get involved in the process of writing a love letter. It's a poetic narrative of a character who explores the ways erotic speech is shaping in her era, where screen relationships affect the human ones. On these small and large surfaces of things, colors look different and touching seems like secret cryptic pauses. As the French philosopher, critic and art curator Nicolas Bourriaud has stated: “Our age is undoubtedly the age of the screen. In addition, it is strange that the exact word is used to describe at the same time a surface that collects light (in cinema), and an interface on which information is recorded. Interface is the thin surface (usually transparent) that separates an entity from its environment or two entities.”

The relations between the material and the intangible, the real and the dreamlike, the analogue and the digital are explored in the pieces of this installation. Aerial words marked with indelible colors, reflections on screens, car windows, mirrors and cell phones. But there are also blooming or dried flowers, streets that are full of water when it rains and gradient colors at sunset. Abstract thoughts that are not always said or communicated in the right time. All these qualities signify as well the sensitivities that sometimes come to a rupture with reality. Along with the materiality of error that comes accidentally to analogue mediums, something true may survive. Within the increasing speed of the digital world, in a period of absolute “visibility” it is almost like walking between thin, transparent surfaces and trying to see as they would see. In spaces that float and in the relationships we create with them but also, them with us.

Project text by Eva Anerrapsi

Photos by Neslechanidis Stratos

Duration: 6-9/10/2021