Killing the father, 2004
Installation in the exhibition ‘The body in Ancient Drama’, Kronos factory, Eleusina.
The piece is created around the idea of the body attacking the Father/Logos, the reason-oriented linguistic structure that fragments the body in order to contain it. Words mark, wound, elevate, or shatter bodies, as Mayra Rivera notes in the book ‘Poetics of the Flesh’. In the work the body fights back by reversing these same actions. Imprints of my body are made with ink on pages of the book ‘Bacchae’ by Euripides in an action documented in video. The pages are detached from the book, pasted on card and hung in an installation in space. On the reverse side of the photo there are black and white photographs of the relevant part of the artist’s body. The video of making the imprints plays inside the installation on a small TV set .
Pentheas
The text as the eternal, unchanging, preexisting Word. The Word as the Father. The duty of the body is to serve the Word of the Father. Reason, order, consistency, measurement. The body as servant of the word, of representation. Each of its gestures has to re-present. To stand for something within the ruling system of the Text. Thus, bodies become the pages on which the Text is written.
Agave
The mother of the body, Mother Earth, overturns the ruling of the Word-the Father. It transforms the eternal, and thus preexisting text to a site for the body’s autonomous action. Its writing. The body is transitory, leaving just the traces of its act, that do not mean anything but themselves. It shatters the unity of the Text, transforming it into a transitory, fragmentary ‘event’. Like two sides of the same coin, they mirror each other’s dismemberment. The body, by separating itself from the Word through its active writing, kills the Father in violence and celebration. The orgiastic dismemberment of Pentheas by his mother, Agave. A possible theater in which the action of the body gains autonomy creating anti-texts over the eternal cultural Texts.
