MARIANNA CHRISTOFIDES

What associations are triggered when one enters a room in an abandoned hotel in Greece and comes across a hornets’ nest attached to a curtain rail?
In the work What if you find a hornets’ nest in a hotel room? (2012) a photograph of the scene is embedded in a seemingly scientific text concerning the layered composition of the earth’s crust. Footnotes on geological terms such as thrust from the south were added referring to current social and cultural fluxes – the writing of history, the notion of
the endemic, the shifting of borders. What connects tectonically non-shifted rock with the realisation that places of one’s personal history can’t be detected any longer? Where do parallels appear between geological melange and the Mediterranean Sea as an EU-buffer zone? The waters in the Western Mediterranean Sea are colder and less
saline than in the Eastern Mediterranean since they flow in from the Atlantic through the Strait of Gibraltar. Here, already during the battle against the Moors, ancient mythology was drawn on as part of political propaganda – the non plus ultra of the Pillars of Hercules is again in force today. Even for the naming of the operations at sea to control migration, ancient myths are used. They bear names of gods who rule the sea or of humans who venture onto the high sea and are therefore punished.
Employing an archival aerial view of a parking lot close to the UN-Buffer zone in Nicosia that has been marked anew over and over again, Christofides reconsiders the water currents and their circulation in the Mediterranean in the work What if you meet a God on high sea? (2014). To an oceanologic essay she adds footnotes that look through a kaleidoscope of disciplines: historiography, literature, military
terminology. What is the impact of the Coriolis effect on missile accuracy? Can one observe a sole wave in every single aspect? For the film essays Days In Between (2015) and Black Mountain (2015)
the artist has been recursively visiting the Balkans for the past four years seeking out sites along borders lying by rivers and lakes, where the course of the boundary remains uncertain. After having lost the entire first block of footage, the data on the hard drive not being retrievable, she sets out anew, only to witness that the places do not exist anymore in the same way. The topography had changed within a year insomuch that landscapes seemed to have vanished and observations were no longer current. The approach of the film extended accordingly, so that it now focused on the loss of images – internal and external. The project itself got into a flow: as a recurring attempt to approach – the very constant failure and beginning anew within this process becomes part of a poetic narrative. The spiralling vacuum of stereotypes and metaphors that characterize the gaze of the West onto the region comes to the fore.