ART BY TRANSLATION

The Tyranny of Distance

  • Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018, at FLAX@ Tin Flats, November 2018

  • Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018, at FLAX@ Tin Flats, November 2018

  • Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018, at TALM-Angers, November 2018

  • Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018, at TALM-Angers, November 2018

  • Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018, at TALM-Angers, November 2018

Lila Athanasiadou, A triangle collapsed into a line, 2018
Video (7' 55''), stereo, at TALM-Angers
Video (14' 38''), stereo, at FLAX@ Tin Flats

In the two films created for the two spaces of the exhibition The Tyranny of Distance, Athanasiadou takes as a starting point the condition of mimicry as a multi-dimensional translation, as an attempt to dissolve the distance between a voice and another, a body and its environment embodied and articulated in architectural gestures.

Athanasiadou looks at mimicry as a paradoxical visualization of power that is simultaneously an act of appropriation of the other and a self-sacrifice. Using this idea of mimicry as a metaphor for the minimal state of the authorial voice within every act of translation, Athanasiadou sketches out a spatial process of subjectification as the geometrical power relation between architecture, body and matter.

The two films, exhibited simultaneously in two locations, operate as doubles of each other both focusing on the same tripartite process of mimicry: camouflage, modulation of the background noise and self-erasure. The film exhibited in Los Angeles focuses on architecture as the fixed identity of space and explores scenes where this identity gets undone. This film follows sites of urban camouflage, gentrification and suburbanization as well as demolition and re-construction as spaces when the relationship between architecture, human subjectivities and matter get renegotiated. The film exhibited in Angers explores the return of the body into matter in three parts; firstly through melding into architecture, secondly, by finding a third term, a space that unsettles the relationship between body and architecture contaminating both, and lastly by returning the body in its pure mediality, becoming a point of communication.