Demining

“…women are the locus of distinction between private and public…”1Klitsa Antoniou has long been engaged in a constant process of re-defining, of visualising, of tracing and mapping an individual as much as collective identity, a personal as much as communal landscape, a private, yet borne out of a public, memory archive. For her installation Demining, she constructs an interior, familiar space – a space of domesticity – yet one colonised by the unfamiliar, the absurd even. On a two-seat, white sofa, several metallic pots are placed, filled with red liquid. Every twenty seconds, the pots spin for another twenty seconds, alternating with a video projection, of the same duration. The constant interruption alludes to a disruption, to a sense of un-fulfilment. The projection takes place behind the sofa, on the wall: in a domestic, household interior, we are looking at woman (shown knees-down only) going through the various rooms – at times on top of furniture and other fixings – as if vacuuming; she is actually holding a mine-searching device. The installation’s title is exploring the polysemy of the word ‘mine’ – my own, but also a land [or other] mine – a destructive device. The female protagonist is ‘de-mining’ the ‘field’ – the familiar and domestic space that may, nevertheless, hide a lot of trappings. In a way, she forgoes her ‘possession’ of the space, by turning it into a strange land that is not ‘mine’ [‘hers’] anymore. The space is at once of the familiar as much of the absurd, even the nightmarish, dominated by visual ambiguity and a sense of estrangement. Estrangement, inner displacement, tension between mundane domesticity and [woman as a symbol of] sensuality (the woman’s voluptuous legs, clad in provocative, net stockings, visualise this tension) – all of these allude to equivalent conflicts within a wider, public domain. The (female) body thus stands as the site of these conflicts – the red liquid exists as a living entity, as its blood, as its very interior. Her body then is what becomes the locus of the distinction between private and public, between, ultimately, the personal and the political, yet no more as a border, but as an embodiment of both. (Dr Antonis Danos, Embodying the personal as political: Klitsa Antoniou’s Demining, Personal Political, Thessaloniki Biennale, 2009)