HieRoToPy
HieRoToPY/ΙεΡοΤοΠίΑ 2018
Installation with sound, video and performance,
How and Where is the “Sacred” defined today?
HieRoToPY/IROTOPY a multi-sensory narrative work. An allegory of a hypothetical sacred place. The visitor is invited to “converse” with an organic form, like a neural network, which, installed in suspension, develops in space and with a peculiar symbolic bridge.
A grid, a nebula of mental and emotional processes surrounds and connects us. Information, which circulates and creates “threads” and paths of a cosmic invisible lace that we weave together, indicates the “invisible” space of interconnection and daily, yet ritual in the form of prayer. “Synapses as spaces of an unholy sanctity of our everyday life through an “invisible” writing, notes Dorothea Konteltetzidou, which attempt to define and also to retrieve the sanctity of a Place that bears the traces of the past but also indicates the accidental and non-random interconnections of millions of neurons in order to imply the way intelligence develops. The permanence of the object, in this case the installation of Cynthia Gerothanasiou, functions as the basis of reality, as a sensorimotor stage that attempts to sort and reflect on ideas, assumptions and logics that shape cognitive development” and define the quality of our coexistence.
Place: irotopia
The cloud is one of the most intangible material objects that surround us. While it is visible and gives the feeling of solidity one cannot feel it. At the same time, the cloud
is connected with the history of painted images and especially with the religious Christian
painting. In hundreds of religious paintings the figures emerge from the clouds
into a distant universe of fixed absoluteness. It took the realistic notes of
Constable’s notes to give the clouds a sense of reality.
intangible.
Nebula, cloud, constellation or smoke the entity that develops as a construction on the
the central space of the Alaja Imaret transforms the sacred Muslim space into a space of a
contemporary Hierotopia, as Cynthia Gerothanasiou calls her installation.
Gerothanasiou reintroduces the image of the cloud, updating it with a contemporary
disconnecting it from the Christian tradition, incorporating references from contemporary Christianity and the contemporary world.
technology and releases it from the distant by starting it from the viewer. The screenings and the
performance that develop in the space remove the interpretation of the work from any
formalistic reading by incorporating clues of memory and reality.
Hierotopia identifies a place where the viewer is invited to wander with his or her gaze and body in experiences that will reconsider the sacred: the sanctuary with Gerothanasi’s installation becomes present and contemporary and, in contrast to the clouds, forms a tangible territory
of experiences. Hierotopia creates a landscape that leads the viewer to reflect on notions of existence, the poetry of space, the energy of the body’s movement.
Yannis Ziogas Visual artist,
Professor at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts,
Yannis Giannis, Professor of Fine Arts and Applied Arts, Yannis Ziakis, Professor of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences, Western University of Athens, Greece. He is a lecturer, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Western Macedonia, Florina.
Execution
Everyday life as a ritual of a precarious transition, in the form of prayer and ontological transformation. The performer as a contemporary carrier of mental and emotional processes and part of the whole in the complex and uncertain field of survival, dons a metal spinal support splint and begins the “journey” to the heart of the installation. The crossing of the space is performed in ritualistic movement using a peculiar portable bridge that borrows from mine-crossing techniques. The performance is performed in a lively and improvisational soundscape. The musician Dimitris Papadopoulos, like a mystic, uses
crystalline sound stages and creates eerie sounds.