Project Info
In 2022 "Wandering Within Clarity" installation was presented in a new form, under the title Sea Waves, in the IN PRESENTIA exhibition, that took place in the Bastion of St George in the Medieval town of Rhodes.
IN PRESENTIA was performed and presented as a joint work by Christina Nakou and sound artist / sound art performer Anna Pangalou.
In Presentia deals with the Asia Minor Catastrophe through the notion of grief and our encounter with the sea. Combining light, the movement of the sea and sound, the work serves as a silent remembrance that seeks to tenderly restore back to life what remains precious in our present.
The work is comprised of a visual and sound installation and culminates into two performances that took place within Promachonas.
The Hall of St. George’s Bastion, an enclosed, stone and secure architectural space with a curved roof, provides the necessary framework for the unfolding of the work. Its curvature acts as an embrace, while the skylights in the roof, offering view corridors of elevation and communication, illuminate its darkness.
At the space’s entrance, the fountain of Heron welcomes the visitors, bathed in the light that pours down from the one and only uncovered skylight. The fountain recalls the cycle of life and perpetual flow.
18 Notes on a Grief, a modular work that develops across a sequence of metallic showcases, introduces the visitor to the darkness of grief, offering at the same time a conduit for reaching our inner self. The light reflections on the last metallic component lead like a gateway to the visual installation.
A large-scale design, drawn with a metallic paint over stripes of handmade paper, instigates a poetic space, like the imprint of a sea relief that transforms through the reflections of the light. Coarse, raw salt lays scattered on the floor and follows the undulations of the work, evoking the foam of sea currents. The natural salts from the stone walls of Promachonas, after patiently absorbing the humidity of the space, are developing like natural expansions of the work.
The space's skylights penetrate both the roof dome and the floor. In the visitor's encounter with the work, the light, this time arriving from the depths of the space, invites their gaze to seek the end of the depth and face the bottom of the sea.
The discreet sound of water drops is transferred into the hall, through microphones placed in the bowels of Promachonas and at places where centuries-old stalactites have been morphed, creating this way an idiosyncratic rhythm. Promachonas is indeed instilling. This unique hourglass – an ancient device used to measure the passage of time – sensitively displays the flow of time, referring to the changing and indeterminate rhythm of personal time.
The grief’s space and time are interrupted, reversed and expanded to the depths of our memories and the overflow of our emotions. The light, ever present even as a slight reflection, is transforming with us and keeping us attached to life’s realm. Grief, as a personal path of accepting loss, gifts us the salt of life.
The work invited the visitor to wander within its premises and listen to it carefully. The installation worked as a music score for the two distinct sound performances that were presented at the end of the exhibition.
With the kind support of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Dodecanese.
In Presentia functioned as the springboard exhibition of the TRANSIENS Nostrum Project. See more in https://www.transiensnostrum.com