Τρίτη 27 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Tu vas a Tuva?








Tu vas a Tuva?*
oui, je vais a Ithaki

Text by Polyxene Kasda

 Ithaca you are always in my mind


Introduction 
At the end of his life, R Feynman has lended a playful actuality to our primordial drive for adventure that pushes us to device Ulyssian ways to reach the ever receding Hercules' columns.
For Feynman, this drive for perpetual navigation took the name of Tuva, a strange land in Mongolia trying out different ways, to reach it. When things were made easy for him to visit this far away land, he died ”still roaming with a hungry heart”
His was a highly playful contemporary version of the transtemporal Homeric Ithaca, that has inspired poets, artists and writers throughout the ages, to create epics and chef d'oeuvres, driven by this Something Essential Missing..
This SEM element *is the agony that pushes us out of our skin,,“peeling our image from the mirror”, as we grow out of ourselves,heading towards Being. This self transcendent process gives rise to the creation of culture within civilization. Civilization is based on survival issues, while culture is the act of challenging survival itself.
In this context, artists are asked to present their own version of Ithaki; their strategy for reaching this vital and lethal somewhere, that is and is not, avoiding any rationalizations that would undermine the inherent, in our human core, mystery.
In our age of self scrutinization, where the very cognitive processes that shape our perception are highlighted to the point of being externalized and manipulated in the fields of genetics and artificial intelligence, this SEM element, engrailed in language,  haunting us from the deepest recesses of our cognitive structure, that differentiates us from the animal kingdom and connects us to the stars, deserves our full attention
What is it? a negative presence?* a positive absence? a black swan information of extra terrestral origin? An extended phenotype virus? A secret “même” imbedded in language itself?
In our eonic age, in our meta-space of extended present, contemporary Ithaki can no more be a far away place, but, could be reached immediately through our tuning to the Here and Now.


Ithaca gave you a marvellous journey without her you would not have set out
She has nothing left to give you now Constantin Cavafy
 This project can be considered as an open end experimental research in depth psychology and syncretic sociology.
The destination for the realization of this Idea is the island of Ithaca
For the moment we can ride on the wave created by the formulation of the idea and follow its unfolding in the insufficiencies of spacetime.



Project description
A group of artists and writers are challenged to formulate their Odyssey, giving a modern version of their voyage. Symbolically, the project workshop takes the form of a voyage to Ithaki where they are asked to tune in the energies of this mythical site and to produce texts and works which will be presented after 10 days in the Ionian center of Kefalonia. They will be asked to produce a collective Map of the secret treasure on this island, having as a guide Odysseus, the Outis (the Nobody), a name bearing pain, happiness and this peculiar, polyform, predictive, intelligence called Mêtis.







1-Inspired by R. Feynman's “ the quest for Tenna Tuva” (Utube video)
2-S.E.M term coined, in 1990, by Poly Kasda to denote the essential human drive for quest, not to be confused with Structural Equation Modeling
3. Lucian Blaga, Trilogie de la Connaissance, 
 
***Tu vas a Tuva Project is copyrighted by Polyxene Kasda and PrimoPianoLivinGallery in Lecce, Italy.

Πέμπτη 15 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Project Miorita, Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes 2007




Miorita/ Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes
Artooth team Project Kasda-Angelou 2007







Article by Polyxene Kasda, dedicated to the memory of Vasiile Avram of Sibiu.


Arscenic, French cultural association for the promotion and the diffusion of digital arts, in the context of its wider project Areas of Conflu(x)ence, had selected our telecommunications project, Miorita, Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes to be realized simultaneously in the twin capitals of Europe 2007 Sibiu and Luxembourg, meeting in Thebes of Greece


Brief description of the 2007 project
In order to soothe the crash and to facilitate communication at a subliminal level, we thought that an interchange should begin at the level of their respective nursery songs and folk tales.
Miorita, the Romanian pastoral ballad gave rise to the concept of the Mioritic space; the unconscious space shared by a culture that is shaped by its natural landscape.
Miorita the ewe and Melusina the mermaid {Luxembourg} meet in she –who- binds, the hybrid Sphinx of Thebes, as the passers by- who are exposed to the sound of the folk tale of the other city- are asked to answer, via an info kiosk, the question:
What is ANTHROPOS?.
The project consists of two similar installations of pictures of human faces and screens, one in each city. The participants are seen and heard on the screens of the installation in the other city.
The responses are collected, via the info kiosk, directly, in our site which acts as one more area of confluence for the project.



Miorita
In the Romanian pastoral folk poem Miorita, its most enduring cultural text with 900 variants, a shepherd boy is warned by his beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his fate, asking only that Miorita go in search of his mother and tell her the story, not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was married to the daughter of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever the ewe wanders, across the rivers of the Carpathian Mountains to the Black Sea, she tells the story-not the true, unadorned facts of death and betrayal- but a beautiful fiction of a transcendent wedding αnd telling the story, she causes geography to spring from myth. She is the storytelling shifting border whose story is borderless and cosmic.



Melusina
Melusina,the wife of the founder of Luxembourg Count Siegfried had one particular request, namely, that Siegfried must leave her alone for one full day and night every month. All went well for years and years, when on the first Wednesday of the month, Melusina would retire into her chambers in the ‘casemates’; a network of caverns underneath the city, not to be seen again until early light on Thursday. But one day, Siegfried's peeped through the keyhole and saw Melusina lying, as a mermaid, in the bathtub with a fishtail hanging over the rim. Melusina recognised her husband through the door and jumped out of the window into the river Alzette below, never to be seen again.



Mioritic Space
“spatiul mioritic

Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga argued that the ballads of Miorita were reflected in the Romanian landscape, with the alternations of accented and unaccented syllables representing the layout of the Romanian environment He established the term "Mioritic Space" for the Romanian character as defined by its geography.
An exile of Ceausescu's Romania, Andre Codrescu sought to redefine what Lucian Blaga called Mioritic Space into the idea that thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, is the only creator of its shifting borders.


The Hybrid
In our project, the two folk legends/ Pastoral and Gothic spaces, interact and interchange their characteristics, via cyberspace, creating a hybrid cultural being, made of the interpenetration of the two cultures. This unstable hybrid takes refuge in the ancient, well established superhybrid: the Sphinx of Thebes, projecting back to her Oedipus’ answer to her riddle and thus, converting her enigma.


What is the human being?
What is that which has one voice and becomes four-footed, two- footed and three- footed?".
To the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus answered: Anthropos {the human being}, destroying the all powerful Hybrid with this word. His answer is “insoluble in concrete logic” as Lucian Blaga would say; the human being remains an unsolved mystery which renews itself continuously, keeping us in a constant state of creative crisis and while trying to solve it, each nation develops the specific culture within its civilization, which is shaped by its Mioritic space.



Nowadays, all the nations of the world, as if swallowed by the mouth of Zeus {Dias}, migrate and crash in cyberspace {Diadiktion in Greek means net of Zeus/ internet}, peeling off their skin, searching for their common core; “le noyau se debarasse de son ecorce” {L. Blaga}


The confluence of nations is a crash and interpenetration of worlds of different spacetime perception and this differentiation generates a “polystylistic universe”.


The world- on- the- make, with the bits and pieces of all cultures is the ultimate work of art of the 21st c. and we want to participate in its creation.


Once more Man, who is undergoing a “mutational switch from a cultural paradigm to another”, is called forth to redefine his identity in a global nation, through an interchange of cultural landscapes.















Synchretic European Topology
The Sphinx project 2014
by Kasda & Angelou
in order to express the symbiotic aspirations of european thinking engulfed in the chaotic remix of its diverging temporalities, we propose the creation of a real/virtual ludic territory moulded by the exchange of legendary elements characteristic of its regional spaciotemporalities.
 For example, Melusina the legendary siren of gothic Luxemburg, meets Miorita the lamb of the pastoral Romanian topology to generate a gargoyle with a lamb's head and a siren's tail that questions the stability of the hybrid european identity.
As area of confluence of these disparate elements we propose She-who-binds antinomies in an indestructible formula; the mythical Sphinx, guardian of Thebes, the city founded by Cadmus, on his quest of his sister EUROPE
Thebes; deep ontological topology cemented clumsily in a sick oblivion that obliterates deliberately the ontological nature of the human being.
What is ANTHROPOS?
We reflect back Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx' lethal riddle, intensifying it with this echo
Our answer will open or close the fantasmic gates to Thebes, city founded on the quest of Europe.




topologie syncretique europeenne

Vers une topologie syncretique Europeenne 2014

Pour exprimer les aspirations de symbiose profondes de la pensee europeenne engouffree dans le remixage chaotique de temporalites divergentes, la communication devrait être restoree au niveau subliminal.
L' idee serait de creer un territoire ludique, virtuel et reel, moule par un echange d'elements legendaires, characteristiques aux diverses regions spaciotemporelles.
Par example, Melusine, la sirene legendaire de l'espace gothique Luxemburgois et Miorita, la brebis de la ballade pastorale Roumaine, se rencontrent dans une gargouille a la tête de brebis et queue de poisson, qui questionne la stabilite de la configuration, hybride, europeenne..
On propose, comme point de fusion, de ces elements, celle-qui-renoue les antinomies dans une formule indestructible, la Sphinx mythique qui garde l'entree de Thebes, cite fondee par Cadmus, en recherchant sa soeur EUROPE-
Thebes, topologie ontologique, cementee dans un oubli malade impose par le 'Procuste etatique', qui, selon Blaga, “poursuit deliberement la defiguration ontologique de l 'Homme.”
Qu'est ce que l'Homme?
On renvoie la reponse d' Oedipe a l Enigme fatale du Sphinx l' intensifiant avec cet echo.
Qu'est ce 'Anthropos'?
Etons-nous prets a devoiler l'Idee profonde que Thebes, fondee sur la recherche d'Europe, porte dans ses entrailles, comme un Enfant; l' Enfant qui assiste la naissance de l'Homme Primordial dans ses rites Cabiriques. L'archetype de l 'Enfant, organe psychique, selon Young, se devoile aux temps eoniques, transitoires, pour relier notre present a nos racines spirituelles et nous guerir.
L Eon est un Enfant qui joue “. (Heraclete) ...