Narcissus and Echo

Claude Cahun – Que Me Veux-Tu?, 1928

NARCISSUS AND ECHO, THE HOUSE OF CADMUS

[339] Tiresias’ fame of prophecy was spread through all the cities of Aonia, for his unerring answers unto all who listened to his words. And first of those that harkened to his fateful prophecies, a lovely Nymph, named Liriope, came with her dear son, who then fifteen, might seem a man or boy—he who was born to her upon the green merge of Cephissus’ stream—that mighty River-God whom she declared the father of her boy. – she questioned him. Imploring him to tell her if her son, unequalled for his beauty, whom she called Narcissus, might attain a ripe old age. To which the blind seer answered in these words, “If he but fail to recognize himself, a long life he may have, beneath the sun,”—so, frivolous the prophet’s words appeared; and yet the event, the manner of his death, the strange delusion of his frenzied love, confirmed it. Three times five years so were passed. Another five-years, and the lad might seem a young man or a boy. And many a youth, and many a damsel sought to gain his love; but such his mood and spirit and his pride, none gained his favour.

[359] Once a noisy Nymph, (who never held her tongue when others spoke, who never spoke till others had begun) mocking Echo, spied him as he drove, in his delusive nets, some timid stags.—For Echo was a Nymph, in olden time,—and, more than vapid sound,—possessed a form: and she was then deprived the use of speech, except to babble and repeat the words, once spoken, over and over. Juno confused her silly tongue, because she often held that glorious goddess with her endless tales, till many a hapless Nymph, from Jove’s embrace, had made escape adown a mountain. But for this, the goddess might have caught them. Thus the glorious Juno, when she knew her guile; “Your tongue, so freely wagged at my expense, shall be of little use; your endless voice, much shorter than your tongue.” At once the Nymph was stricken as the goddess had decreed;—and, ever since, she only mocks the sounds of others’ voices, or, perchance, returns their final words.

[370] One day, when she observed Narcissus wandering in the pathless woods, she loved him and she followed him, with soft and stealthy tread.—The more she followed him the hotter did she burn, as when the flame flares upward from the sulphur on the torch. Oh, how she longed to make her passion known! To plead in soft entreaty! to implore his love! But now, till others have begun, a mute of Nature she must be. She cannot choose but wait the moment when his voice may give to her an answer. Presently the youth, by chance divided from his trusted friends, cries loudly, “Who is here?” and Echo, “Here!” Replies. Amazed, he casts his eyes around, and calls with louder voice, “Come here!” “Come here!” She calls the youth who calls.—He turns to see who calls him and, beholding naught exclaims, “Avoid me not!” “Avoid me not!” returns. He tries again, again, and is deceived by this alternate voice, and calls aloud; “Oh let us come together!”

Narcissisms

Icosahedron
© Jean-Pierre Hébert, Jeremy Sarchet, Ioannis Zannos

Iannis Zannos and Jean – Pierre Hebert collaborate in the Narcissus project

“He spoke, and returned madly to the same reflection, and his tears stirred the water, and the image became obscured in the rippling pool. As he saw it vanishing, he cried out ‘ Where do you fly to? Stay, cruel one, do not abandon one who loves you! I am allowed to gaze at what I cannot touch, and so provide food for my miserable passion!” (Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk III:474-510).

These, as told by Ovid, are the last despairing words of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected on water and was transformed into a Daffodil flower. Echo, the nymph who loved him, could only woo him by repeating his own words, disappeared into the woods, while all that remained was her voice as the sound that bounces back from the hills.
The installation Narcissus is based on the graceful movement of a tensegrity structure, made of rods mutually supporting each other in suspension through interconnecting strings. The installation uses the movement of the tower as reflected on water to create a soundscape of swallows flying around the tower. The tensegrity is a very light but resilient structure, and can be moved easily by the wind or by touching it. It can be likened to a bending flower, but also to a tower circled by swallows, as Narcissus was circled by Echo. At the same time, the visitors circle the tower, and their movements and sounds are merged in the soundscape by recording and playback of fragments of the immediate environment of the installation.
The motivation for the piece was to find a way to use natural elements such as wind and water directly in a digital piece. The idea of Narcissus was a natural consequence of the installation’s configuration and behavior. The swallow sounds from extensive recordings made during the summer months from the last floor of an apartment building in Corfu town during 2006 to 2011. Thousands of swallows nest in Corfu town during the summer. The relatively small number of cars, the narrow streets and numerous old buildings with tiled roofs present ideal conditions for the summer breeding period of these migratory birds. The number of swallows has dwindled in large cities.
The piece invites the visitors to reflect on the fragility of the environment. It seeks to evoke multiple associations between forms and objects, that dissolve the boundaries between urban and natural, technological and poetical.

Buses. Simulacres of destiny and war.

Υiannis Christidis  has studied Cultural Technology and Communication at the University of the Aegean and has an MSc in Sound Design from the University of Edinburgh. He has designed sound and music for audiovisual products, web applications, radio productions and theatrical activities. He is a PhD candidate at CUT and his research focuses on the relationship between sound and image, soundscape studies, sound culture, noise and their effects and applications through new technologies and the internet.

Link provided by Andri Kosti, Marinos Raimondou, Marios Filippou, Giannis Hatjigiannis (Άντρη Κωστή, Μαρίνος Ραϊμόνδου, Μάριος Φιλίππου, Γιάννης Χατζηγιάννης)

Let me take you down, cause I’m going to strawberry crisis forever

Antonis Danos, Yiannis Christidis, Yiannos Economou, Nicos Synnos and Yannis Yapanis collaborate in the project

Strawberry fields …: Global economic crisis, simulacra, maps, and simulated borderlines

Another morning on the way to the office. I finally manage to park, alongside the fenced courtyard of a church. A young man – “looks like” a gypsy from the “north” – is selling small baskets of strawberries, cheaply. “Do you want some?” – I decline (too many things on my mind). We are walking in the same direction. “Where are they from?”, I ask. – “From [the village of] Derhynia”, he replies. Obviously, they have come from up “north” (hence the low price)! Derhynia is just the crossing point. – “I’ll take a basket”…

Evening news – one station after another… An annoyingly boring repetition of images of (euro) coins dropping off the mint’s machinery, and (euro) banknotes being (automatically) counted… It’s the financial crisis daily “update” – money is “short”, yet it overflows off the psychotically and fetishistically looped,  close-up images of currency…

“Strawberry fields for ever – Nothing is real / Nothing to get hung about…”

A global (i.e. Western) financial crisis. Accumulation of virtual wealth – the bubble has burst! Accumulation of virtual goods/art/culture. – Damien Hirst’s diamond scull (“For the love of God”, indeed!), sold at 50 million pounds, sold to [a “consortium” that included] himself. Now, he’s at the Tate – a retrospective! Is he at the MoMA, yet?

The nouveau riche “mediterraneanism” of Cypriot, mass produced villas and “luxury apartments” – to be sold to British and Russians, and to ourselves…

Hirst’s “scull”, his dot paintings / the Cypriot “med” villas: mere mass products in the industrial production mode, or contemporary code products – Baudrillard’s simulacra? The strawberries from the “north”, from the “pseudo-state’s” strawberry fields, are they real? Did I ever buy them? Was the young man “real”?

Both he and the strawberries crossed over via the “buffer zone” (the “dead zone” or, more cheerfully, the “green line”).

Buffer zone sounds: people, cars, footsteps, voices, church bells, the imam from the minaret. This is no roadblock, no dividing line. It is a transitory space – a non-space? a hybrid space? – a becoming space? Perhaps, the only ‘real’ space because of its becoming, its constant flux, its fluidity. Is a ‘fixed’ space, by default, a simulation? Are all -scapes simulacra? What of maps?

Mapping as a code-generated reproduction. The absence of an “origin”. A map – a hyper-reality? Are roadblocks, borders, and divisions of all kinds, ‘mere’ simulacra? No “origins”, just “codes”…

More to come

Çağlar Çetin Μοdern

Fanning Action No 1, Lanfranco Aceti, exploitative action, 2008 (media: Michaela Varzari, curator; Alex Grigoras, photographer; Ciprian Croitorul, model and visual artists).

Çağlar Çetin collaborates with Lanfranco Aceti in the project Considerations on Reactions and A Small Picture: Fine Art and Research Methodologies in Collaborative Artistic and Curatorial Projects

If Reactions as an artwork is embodied physically in the blood – in a genetic and physical interpretation of the trauma as a biologically inheritable scar that shapes human behaviors [3], therefore physically placing the communities as focal point of both aesthetic and artistic practice, A Small Picture engages with the remnants, the disappearance and re-appearance, embodying once again, in the physically small, but microbiologically even smaller, the reality of such vast discourses.

Are there Nazis Living on the Moon?

Europe: are there Nazis living on the moon?

by Srecko Horvat

Recently in Bucharest, I came across an apparently innocent map of seminar rooms in the elevator of the hotel where a conference was taking place on ‘The National Question in Central-Eastern Europe’. There it was, a little map of Europe, consisting of ‘room Berlin’, ‘room Amsterdam’, ‘room Paris’, ‘room London’, and others, promoting the diversity but at the same time unity of the European project. So – this is the national question in the European Union solved? All countries can live side by side, happily without conflict, each room with its own identity and activity; in one room a wedding party, in another an academic conference, in one a commercial promotion of a product, in some other a focus group, and so on. And what is even better, you don’t even have to leave the hotel – everything is here.

Costa Concordia, the famous cruise ship that hit a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea in January 2012 might offer another aptly-named example for symbolizing the harmony and unity between European nations. It too was comprised of 13 decks named after EU member states: Poland was the upper deck, followed by Austria, Portugal, Spain, Germany, France, etc. In the middle of the ship there was an ‘Atrium Europe’ with a ‘London Salon’, ‘Disco Lisbon’, ‘Berlin bar’, etc. This huge, slow, luxury cruiser served as the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s Socialism, who took it as a symbol for modern Europe. In the movie, Alain Badiou is holding a lecture in front of an empty hall and Patti Smith is wandering the decks with her guitar… but, no one really cares and what we have is just decay inevitably leading to a disaster.

Isn’t the captain of Costa Concordia, who, the night before the accident, was spending his time in the company of a beautiful woman drinking expensive wine also a metaphor for the financial elites of Europe? Isn’t the captain who left the ship before all passengers similar to those bankers, managers and brokers from Goldman Sachs and the European Central Bank, who always leave the sinking boat on time, leaving the people to drown like today in Greece or elsewhere in southern Europe? On one hand, the European central bank ‘released’ more then 1,000 billion Euros from December 2011, again to save the banks. On the other hand, shock therapy, austerity measures and structural adjustments in all European countries, from Greece and Romania, to Italy and Spain, but also Slovenia and Croatia.

Tariq Ali What is imperialism

Tariq Ali is the second key note speaker in the “Through the roadblocks: realities in raw motion” conference.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, No definitions for activism

H Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak στις 23 Νοεμβρίου 2012 είναι η κεντρική ομιλήτρια του συνεδρίου. Ακολουθεί το abstract της εισήγησής της.

NO DEFINITIONS FOR ACTIVISM

I start from three assumptions: 1. There is only the local. But the local is global. Therefore the global is diverse and differentiated. I give examples, among them the diversified globality of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. 2. Art is singular. I will spend some time on singularity. Following on 1., I will say that perhaps the place of dissident art in Eastern Europe is somewhat different from that in, let us say, China. I will draw on what will then be my recent past, a discussion of Ai Weiwei at the Smithsonian on October 7, segueing on to “dissident art.” I will go forward to my immediate future, November 26 in Singapore, discussing the Asian Century or the Rise of Asia, as well as the opportunities and desires for greater exchange with spaces within and beyond Asia. In that context, as in Cyprus, I will suggest that “art” means different things for the producer (artist), consumer (intellectuals and a tiny class-determined “public”) and productive consumers (investors, individual or institutional). I will consider the metonymic location of “Asia” and the arbitrary designation of “century” in “the Asian century,” as I will consider the metonymic location of other named or implied spaces such as “European Union,” “Eastern Europe,” “Arabia,” and “Wall Street.” I will also consider worldwide biennales as examples of the ways that the local-is-global problematic is negotiated, bartering the singularity of art in the interest of space-name designations. This gives a different riff to Zygmunt Bauman’s attempted revision of Bourdieu’s idea of culture in the service of class into culture as the site of the omnivorous versus the univorous. (I might here repeat my earlier theorizing of class-in-culture as the possibility of code-switching, the broadening of the range of self-metonymizations, the diversified part-subject of codes.) The local-is-global biennales become speculative marketplaces of codes to switch to. The question then becomes: what are the biennales local to Eastern Europe? Who invests in art in Eastern Europe? Does Soros count? Or the recent Biennale in Kiev? Is that roadblock down the line or already there? 3. In the field clearly distinguishable as activism, you do not ponder definitions. (This applies of course and also to politically correct party lines.) Theorizing is a practice there, “norming” definitions that have lost their proper names in the performance. With this proviso, I will look for definitions: especially of democracy and aporia, of the European Union and its presidency, by way partially of Kant’s ideas of world governance. I will think of state, market, and people as locus of democracy, of the relationship between democracy and judgment. How does the ancient Byzantine conflict play out in divided Cyprus, even as Byzantine art has already been claimed for disciplinarized modernism? To this concluding question I will pose the fragmented discourse of subalterns with no claims to history or citizenship: illegal immigrants in Greece, and Rohengyas as democracy is inaugurated in Burma.

Skeleton Crew – The Border

 

Objective Phantoms: “Archimandrite monk of Mount Athos and linguist emeritus”

George Alexander in his introductory text writes about Gherasim Luca“someone who induces vertigo at the border zones” Read more about this phantasmatic romanian surrealist

Objective Phantoms

By Kenneth Cox

Featured in Mute Vol 2, No. 12 − The Creative City in Ruins

The Passive Vampire, Romanian surrealist poet Ghérasim Luca’s recently translated book, brings objects and desires into intimate contact, with unexpected results. Review by Kenneth Cox

Ghérasim Luca’s Le Vampire Passif has for many years been surrounded by an aura of mystery, like a ‘forgotten’ or lost grimoire of surrealist writing; a book that, like its author, has had something of a ‘phantom existence’. First published in Budapest in 1945, by the appropriately named Éditions de l’Oubli (‘Forgotten Books’) – written in French, and not his native Romanian – in an edition of only 460 copies, the book was not republished until 2001, by José Corti. It was not only its inaccessibility that created the book’s legendary status, and not only amongst that minority readership interested in surrealism, but the personality of its author.

Born Salman Locker in Bucharest in 1913, the son of a Jewish tailor, it wasn’t until much later that he became Ghérasim Luca. Drawn to poetry and the Romanian avant garde, when Locker was about to publish his first text, the pseudonym ‘Ghérasim Luca’ was suggested by a friend, which he promptly used. Only later did he learn that his friend had stumbled across this name by chance in an obituary. In 1940, together with Gellu Naum, Dolfi Trost, Virgil Teodorescu and Paul Paun, he founded the Romanian Surrealist Group, following a visit to Paris in 1938 where, through fellow Romanians Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold, he had met the French surrealists – a decisive encounter. Although in existence for only seven years, cast adrift in clandestinity throughout WWII and mostly remaining in obscurity ever since, the Romanian Surrealist Group was nonetheless one of the most explosive, original manifestations of surrealist thinking and practice. Throwing down the gauntlet with their pivotal statement, composed by Luca and Trost, The Dialectic of Dialectic: a Message to the International Surrealist Movement, they set out to challenge any slide into complacency that might result in surrealism’s discoveries being absorbed into means of cultural production only, to prevent it ‘sinking into a hackneyed Romantic idealism’. Their declaration makes the uncompromising demand that surrealism remain in a condition of perpetual revolution, through taking a radically dialectic standpoint of continuous negation, and further, the negation of that negation.

In 1952 Luca moved from Bucharest to Paris, the city he loved, where his poetic researches were mostly of a solitary nature. Perhaps best known for his poetry, with its hermetic wordplay exploring the morphology of language, breaking down and rearranging its constituent parts to uncover new meanings, Luca was described by Gilles Deleuze as the greatest living poet writing in French. Having spent over 40 years in France without papers, he was evicted from his apartment in 1994, along with all the building’s tenants, victims of ‘urban renewal’. At the age of 80 and unable to accept his new situation, Luca committed suicide on 9 February 1994 by drowning himself in the Seine – a poet’s death, his body being found exactly one month later, an event curiously foreshadowed in a text from 1945, La Mort Morte (Dead Death), composed of five ‘suicide notes’. <!–more–>