HieRoToPy
HieRoToPY . ΙεΡοΤοΠίΑ 2018
Art installation with sound, video and performance PLA ink, gold leaf, mixed materials, variable dimensions
How and Where is the "Sacred" defined today?
The project HieRoToPY is 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 web, a nebula of mental and emotional processes surrounds and connects us. Information, circulating and creating "threads" and paths of a cosmic invisible lace that we weave together, indicates the "invisible" space of interconnection and daily, yet ritualistic, 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 suggest the way of development of intelligence. 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.
Τόπος: Hierotopia
The cloud is one of the most intangible material objects that surround us. While it is visible and gives the impression of being solid, no one can feel it. At the same time the cloud
is connected with the history of painted images and especially with the religious Christian
paintings. In hundreds of religious paintings, figures emerge from the clouds
in a distant universe of fixed absolutes. It took the realistic notes of
Constable to make the clouds feel realØ they remained however
intangible.
Nebula, cloud, constellation or smoke the entity that develops as a construction in the
central space of the Alaja Imaret transforms the sacred Muslim space into a space of a
modern Hierotopia, as Cynthia Gerothanasiou calls her establishment.
Gerothanasiou reintroduces the image of the cloud, updating it with a contemporary
way: it disconnects it from the Christian tradition, incorporates references from the modern
technology and releases it from the distant by starting it from the viewer. The projections and
performances that develop in the space move the interpretation of the work away from any
formalistic reading incorporating memory and reality cues.
Hierotopia identifies a place where the viewer is invited to wander with his gaze and body in experiences that will revise the sacred: the sanctuary with the installation of Gerothanasi becomes present and contemporary and, in contrast to the clouds, forms a tangible area
experiences. Hierotopia creates a landscape that leads the viewer to reflect on concepts concerning his existence, the poetry of space, the energy of the body's movement.
Giannis Ziogas Visual Artist,
Professor at the Department of Visual and Applied Arts,
University of West. University of Western Macedonia, Florina.
THE IMPLEMENTATION
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, wears a metal spinal support splint and begins the "journey" to the heart of the installation.
The crossing of the space is performed in a ritualistic movement using a peculiar portable bridge that borrows from minefield crossing techniques. The performance is performed in a live and improvisational soundscape. The musician Dimitris Papadopoulos, like a mystic, uses
crystal sound stages and creates eerie sounds.
