INACCESSIBLE, 2024
INACCESSIBLE
Nicosia Municipal Arts Center, NiMac, Cyprus, 2023
Limassol Municipal Arts Center- Apothikes Papadaki, Cyprus, 2024
Espaço Biblos e Museu Arqueológico José Monteiro, Portugal, 2024
Katerina Neofytidou contemplates on the experience of psychological mutation in the chaotic whirlpool of contemporary life, focusing on the relationship between a dysfunctional architecture and the presence (or absence) of a body. Their interaction creates what the artist calls Spaces of Transformation, in which existing forms become de-constructed and re-adapted as new models of 'being in the world'. Here the body acts as the primary site of knowing the world and the artist, acknowledging the body's interdependence with its surroundings, asks questions about the future of our relationship with the constructed space.
In her installations, consisting of sculptures ‘Inaccessible’, ‘Effigy’ and ‘Incomprehensible’ and silkscreen prints series ‘Concrete Tears of an Embedded Goddess’ and ‘Edifice', the artist invites the viewer into her world of architectural fragments and entropy. Her aim is to reveal how the invisible forces of gravity, tension and violence, inherent in the existing environment, initiate splits and rifts upon our inner space, which, in turn, affect our stories and personal or collective myths. As Joseph Campbell writes, a certain function of myths is to act as guiding tools for the psyche' s maturation process. Shouldn’t we consider what kind of symptoms their mutation causes, on a personal and collective level? The frontier separating psychical suffering and social suffering is thin. The balance is very delicate.
By using images and themes from her psychoanalytic setting and by doing psychosomatic practices in her daily routine to achieve balance, the artist consciously performs a self- developed ritualistic method: She internalizes both the architectural fragments and the mutated bodies. The fragments constantly shift, whilst the bodies balance in angst or are in a state of falling forever (defined by D. W. Winnicott as one of the primitive fears). In doing this 'ritual', the artist rearranges such forces of tension into silkscreen compositions and then into sculptural forms. Sometimes, in the absence of a body, other natural elements, such as a rock or a cloud, come into play.
According to the artist, this ‘naive attempt to restore a sense of balance of the place systematically fails', but instead Katerina manages to combine all the elements into a kind of modern mythology of the current human condition and its mutational processes. Here, the artist imagines a contemporary geo-myth about a giantess, who, upon waking up everyday in a reality without a mythological dimension, she cries. And when her tears fall onto the earth, they turn into cracked concrete creating irreversibly broken landscapes.
In the end she asks: Is it possible that these transformations cause a reversal of the heroine's journey and subsequently social dysfunction? Can we talk about this, can we heal it? Or do we desire to efface it entirely?