Episodes of
Domestic Nature

Being located within the Mediterranean, I am defined not by cultural entities with apparent, easily separable and dominant peculiarities, by constant and common archetypal structures, or by ontological and a-historical principles, but from numerous internal differences and antinomies, influenced by both the East and the West. Such identities are marked by historical transformations, and are defined by disputable areas, and by tendencies toward isolation and self-alienation. Such schismatic rather than coherent and self-conscious tendencies exist in an on-going process of articulation and re-encoding, especially when major historical interventions take place. The historico-cultural landscape is a mobile, changeable assemblage of cultural heterogeneity, with an either subtle or a perceptible tendency toward intermittent, multiple hybridisations that produce layers of traces. Episodes of Domestic Nature is consequent of this facto-graphic material, of “Mare Nostrum”, a chronotopos, whose epicentre lies in the nostalgia for a “sea exit”. The solace, liberation, even regeneration, normally promised by the water element, as it has been transmuted into a cultural idiom in my work, is revealed as not only a cultural construct, a fabrication, but the site of misplaced romanticism, false sentiment and nostalgia. “Episodes of Domestic Nature” is not only infused with an autobiographical context but it is even embedded with a psychological, a geographical and sexual content. This enhances the sense of strangeness that merges objects with interior architecture, projecting a distinct theatricality. Objects have a numinous presence. The effect is of a domestic twilight zone, hypnotic, haunting, and possibly malevolent. Domesticity, relating to a body or a country, entrapping or disrupted, is the key premise. (Klitsa Antoniou)