Mirror Space Travel Pass

[…] Mirror Space – Travel Pass emerges from an investigation of the human voice as a sculptural material and a conceptual compass, which it employs to explore notions of both physical and non-physical boundaries. The work’s interdisciplinary approach embraces visual art, written text, performance and sound, generating a collaborative project. It employs other art practitioners, namely, a group of writers – Thaleia Stephanidou, Yiola Papadopoulou, and Maria Petrides – who have contributed texts for the work. (More writers will be invited in the near future). The work ranges from the poetic to the theatrical, and activates a potential for ruptures in perception, ‘time’ and ways of storytelling. Mirror Space – Travel Pass indicates that the project explores many themes: text and sound, voice and discourse, and, the physical space of the installation. A carousel installation work calls for the viewer to confront perception and memory by fostering self-reflection. Standing in the space, it feels as if you are alternately rotating and flying – a kind of spatial and timely disorientation and play. This uncertainty is intensified as the rotating mirrors alternately catch the spatial lights and daylight from the windows. As the mirrors refract light and reflect the viewer, they create a mise en abyme as the viewer’s repetitive and travelling image is reflected. Standing in front of the carousel feels as decentralizing as any imagined hall of mirrors. The abstraction of self at the heart of the carousel cultivates a suspension of identity the work asks viewers to yield to destabilizing forces and question perception. This temporary embrace of uncertainty seems to draw the gaze inward, providing a meditative reflection on the self. The rhythm and breath of someone reading out loud comes to take us to a world far away. Suspended in the liquidity of words, reading also sets us in motion. Mirror Space – Travel Pass is made of many crossings of the near at hand and, the far away: a body crossing space; a writer’s voice crossing a room; listening crossing with speaking; travelling images crossing transmission. The reverberation of the narrating voice creates both a self-enclosed duplication where the self coincides with itself, and an intense shuddering that can transform the limitations of space and body. (Klitsa Antoniou)