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ZISSIS KOTIONIS
b. 1960, Athens. Lives in Agria, Volos. Impatience, 2019
The Man Who Wanted to Look into the Stone, 2018
For the past several years Zissis Kotionis has been working on the field between architecture and art. In the background of his research is the question of how to describe the era of the anthropocene as a geological event of everyday experience. Fear, guilt and a sense of duty provoking a political response are aspects of the motivation that the dramatic geological events of the anthropocene era produce. A new teleological horizon has emerged for the contemporary subject either in the terms of self-victimization or in terms of socio-ecological emancipation from the destructive mega-effect of capitalism.
After having worked on the genealogies of technique and the constructive models of cosmological representation, in the project Anaximandros in Fukushima (2014), Kotionis proceeds to question the cultural experience of geology in the project Lithology (since 2017). Aspects of Lithology are presented in relation to the Collectanea project. It is worth mentioning here the architect Dimitris Pikionis as an inspired ancestor of an ecological approach to both culture and nature in his famous nature/culture landscape project on the slopes of the Acropolis.
The project entitled The Man Who Wanted to Look Into the Stone (2018) is a metaphysical parody. It consists of several pseudo-scientific acts to grasp the essence of the stone
and organize rational acts of anatomy or taxonomy, to manipulate the composite phenomenological aspects of the stone. The video presents these performative acts in a sequence, as if they all constituted a handbook or manual for anyone who wants to look into the stone.
The installation under the title Impatience comes as a continuation of the previous narration. A wooden eating-apparatus-for-two, two meters by two meters and 25 cm high, represents a setting for a meal where the dish is a smashed stone. Corporeality, consumption, ecological and hygienic neurosis are critically offended, since Impatience can be considered a three dimensional visual essay.
Artist Website: www.kotionis.com
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