UPCOMING Exhibition
Curated by Evagoria Dapola
December 2022 – June 2023
The proposed project’s idea stems from ancient ruins, standing today as contemporary necropolises across Greece & Cyprus. Colonized, hidden, lost within museums’ collections such artefacts are parallel to such topographies. Found in excavations, most archaeological artefacts are imposed to the prescribed gestures of their creators, their archaeologists and their curators. In its core, the project is about the study of gestures and their place in necropolitics, proposing the concept of ‘gestural’ antiquity. The proposed project aims to address the challenges in researching broken artefacts or fragmented collections dispersed around the world and the concepts of repair and healing. Reconsidering our responses to ancient objects extracted of their inherent systems, particular geographies and behaviours.
Ancient objects adjust to temporal modes of the situations they are in and their three modes of time are in play: segmented & finite, familiar and flowing. When we synchronize with them we re-think gazes, gestures 1 and behaviours relating to them and creating new functions. 2 In an ever-ending archipelago of protocols of handling, working, owning artefacts this project proposes a Radical Non-Use. Exploring the diagonal commonhold of antiquity artefacts as objects of necropolitical desire. The exhibition functions as a parasitic council that suggests alternative gestures. New forms of movements, stares and thoughts etched on gestures of handle, care, love and sharing. A rhizome of non-proprietary uses, it opens up spaces for discussion.
Coming into being connotes a gesture; without which nothing comes into being. The project summarizes a long research on how gesture, language and value intersect. It aims to extract gestures and body situations from archaeology and artefacts, enabling them through a new process of interpretation and repetition, seemingly assembled as in a performance score, pushing the boundaries between history, visual arts and choreography, framing thus the value of gesture and its embodiment.
The project proposes an inversion that attempts to affirm an alternate order, refusing to establish hierarchy, whilst attempting to establish a disorder, through the questioning of language and gesture in the realm of archaeology. It urges us to grant no one narrative or discursive practice a preferential role, by reinforcing the idea of incessant metamorphosis by the means of gesture. It highlights an inverted gesture that portrays ecstasy instead of reverence. The project proposes a shift of archaeology’s and anthropology’s innate
The project will consist of a main group artist exhibition in Space52, as well as a rich programme of performances and screenings that will happen across Athens in collaborating spaces and foundations. The project will also include discussions, a panel and a short Academic symposium, that will also contribute research, essays and writing in a publication with a series of images in photographic form displaying the presence of gestures in the absence of objects. The theoretical framework of the exhibition, based on Necropolitics, Phenomenology, Biopolitics and Philosophy of Gesture, will be the central subject of discussions, the publications and participatory will be held, such as thinking/questioning (making) objects, considering latent gestures, discussions on fertility of ideas/ soil fertility in places rich in archaeological past and physical workshops such as design as mode of imagining, producing and attuning to different metabolisms, from performance to archaeology and beyond.
Moving experientially from the private relationship with the knowledge of antiquity, to the static presence of the artefact, to active encounters with featured artists and performances, the visitor is invited to reassess not only our relationship with Greek and Cypriot antiquity, but also to participate in the shifting scales and contours of the “we” who encounter the classical past. This creates and augments a series of singular environments and personal perspectives for engaging antiquity as gestural, liquid, performative and heterogeneous, rather than fixed and mono–cultural. The exhibition’s radicalism becomes an antidote to the colonization of archaeology and gesture itself.
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[1] A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication or non-vocal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages or actions.
[2] The marking of lands and bodies continues to be a way of rendering certain bodies superfluous. That spatiality through which the necropolitan is defined or constituted—becomes a reserve of multifarious material proportions: of negative symbolic potential and death’s liminal pleasures; a reserve of labor, a nature reserve open for appropriation; a reserve of potentially fecund land for settlers; and a reserve of waste land for colonialism’s human and environmental detritus.
