A post-2020-apocalyptic mourning.
The suffering of refugees in the Mediterranean has marked the sea. The rise of apathy in the land has led to the decay of our civilization. Arctic ice has melted, the world has flooded and heritage monuments are sinking. Marble blocks arise as anonymous tombstones in the black sea of a dark world. A group of praying mantises mourn for the loss of those who dared to hope, accompanied by the sound of orchestrated MRI brain scanners, as another “choros” (ελλ. χορός) of a mutated contemporary Ancient Greek Drama. A female cat, an anchor of affection, keeps the visitor from drowning, on the surface of the sea. “When you suffer, I suffer too” is written on her collar.
Vanessa Ferle is an artist, graphic designer and neuroscientist based in Athens, Greece. She has studied biology and neuroscience at the School of Science of the National Kapodistrian University of Athens (GR) and at the Medical School of Athens (GR), and digital arts and new media at the Athens School of Fine Arts (GR) and at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (FR). She is combining her interdisciplinary interests in art projects and artistic research. Her focus is on the representation of animals per se and their behavioral features in digital art, on the animal essence of automation, machines and smart technologies, which they introduce to digital art, and the distinct emotional response that this “animal-effect” triggers in humans. Petros Chytiris is an obscure observer that shifts between the awake and the dream state, the inner and the outer, the remote and the proximate. His body of work, characterised by an obvious bipolarism, mainly consists of visual notes. These notes eventually form an uncanny and raw documentation of various aspects of life, a personal study on scattered fragments of the collective unconscious in the city of Athens and everywhere abroad.
