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) ...



 

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