Mamaliogas Elias
A piece of infinity
cone shaped object made of plexiglass mirror and iron,140x170x183cm(height 140cm-upper diameter 170cm-lower diameter 183 cm),2013.
the object was placed on the furnace of the Fine Arts Scool of Athens,on 1st of July, year 2013
The concept of the event is the field of study in this work.I look forward to a situation rather than an object. The object is the instrument.The project is completed only when the object becomes an event.
The furnace of the School of Fine Arts, formerly industrial site flash point, is today overtone, a disabled action, a non-functional block. The vertical structure of the furnace leads the gaze skyward but its physical nature nails it on the ground, against the tendency to rise further, making the structure boundaries nonnegotiable. The act of opening the limits of the structure to infinity, under the laws of physics, it becomes practically impossible. This condition besides a challenge, functions as a trigger in order to find a way to meet these two dissimilar natures.
Through the mirror is captured the image of the impression that we have for the infinity of the sky. By placing the mirror to a point of the furnace that is not its edge but a point which allows only the reflection of the sky, emphasizes the permeable nature of the furnace but posing inside it a piece of infinity. This paradox opens a peripheral image of infinity horizontally. Creates a sense of flow, transparency and infinity (event).That makes the form (Gestalt) of the object disturbing to sight and gives the impression of instability.
Cause of the mirror properties it is given the sensation of continuous conciliation between the fixed object and the image of endless space and eternal time. The part of the furnace below the point where mirror is placed, it is firmly anchored in the earth, the top part seems to float, it is no longer part of the object but a celestial body, seems like a float in space.
Mirror: the transformation of the field in visible
The mirror, "a magic instrument which transforms things in spectacles, the spectacles in things, me to someone else and the other to me,"[1] expands whatever it sees, displaces fact, complements the external side of things, it indicates the presence of a closed "being" opened the world.
For Georgio Agaben, the image in the mirror is not a substance itself but something that happens, not "resides" in the mirror as in a place, but with the way it was in a subject. "The image is of a perpetual birth (semper nova generatour)»[2], that is born every time depending on the presence of what stands in front of it, so the image is born potentially anew each time. The image is neither form nor image with the ordinary meaning of the words, as a species-occurrence of a form, the dimensions of which are measurable and so is not quantified, is only a displaced reality but does not lack mode of existence.
Under the framework of the Binocular of Descartes, to the effect that there is no vision without thought, the image in the mirror, as a result of mechanical things, returns to us through reflection as dummy, as thought is one that processes the similarity between presence and image. For Descartes, our image in the mirror could not be something from us.
[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Doubt of Cézanne, The eye and the spirit, p. 14
[2] Giorgio Agamben, Desecrations, trans. Panagiotis Tsiamouras, ed. 'Agra, Athens, 2006, p. 90.