ANAPTEXES    land art installation

 

Placed on the mountain of Koziakas, on the main road which connects my village with a suffering forest by illegal logging and overgrazing, this land art work called “ANAPTEXES” - a Greek word which means growth ,tries to offer to the local community aesthetic experience and awareness concerning the ecological problems of the  area. The chosen space where the work produced is a gully, created by soil corruption.

Soil is a living element, and its conditions, like pattern, stoniness, color and odor, can be fluctuated depending on the variations of the climate changes concerning humidity, aridity, and temperature.   I dug and carved it creating on it recesses, holes, and nests, and installed in them remained branches and sticks from cut trees. These aesthetic provisions are a kind of a leak rhythm into the earth.

During the making of the work, birds were singing, insects were flying around me, and crickets were starting to sing their evening hymn. Trees were as if had been “looking” at me with curiosity, and cows along with some local shepherds passed and asked me about what I was doing. All these incidents, the interaction between the external world and my visual substance shaped the final result of the work. In other words, an artwork derived from the collaboration with me and the forest. During the process of the making of, and after it, something abstract expressed there, something connected with the fact of the illegal logging of the forest:

“Those bores are the forest’s mouths, the nests where the tree souls inhabit. They are eyes looking at us from everywhere, the ears from the birds hiding in the foliage.”