The city is a bond for the diversity of men
PHAEDRUS: “[…] by dint of constructing, ‘he put it with a smile,
‘I truly believe that I have constructed myself.’
SOCRATES: To construct oneself, to know oneself –
are these two distinct acts or not?’
Paul Valery
Eupalinos, or the Architect
The fingerprint, an archetype, a symbol, a reflection of human existence, but lso a gauge, a canvas, a span with which to measure the human condition, the human scale as physical form, as body, is interwoven in my work with the urban landscape; it traces this landscape and engages in dialogue with it, though not arbitrarily. It becomes a road, a route along which repetition and movement generates diversity.
The urban landscape -not an invented landscape- is certainly founded and dependent upon the human scale. Its structure and ground plan, the pattern of its lines, is a projection, a map, an imprint of space as the realm of human relations. What I am trying to do, by erecting these two ground plans ‘before my eyes’, is to search for the nature of those relations.
Thus, the inconspicuous trace of the city come together, they associate and become one at the same time that they compete and compare and join forces to guide, to form a network, a grid, a cluster of information whose constant mobility activates communication.
Within a dense space of metaphor like the actual space of the work, the fingerprint becomes a map that charts the pulse, the dynamic identity of a literally, genuinely human city; a city that causes men in all their diversity to unite, to bond and to establish a collective identity through communication.
The image of a fingerprint is repeated on the work’s surface, always the same yet also different in size, scale, color and orientation. It is always in motion, always facing one of its reflections, thus renewing its image in an endless back-and-forth. It weaves time and is woven in time. It constructs and deconstructs its own space. It radiates and is radiated at a steady, unfailing pace. It records, depicts and reflects motion, vibration and the stillness of events, sending these reflections off into different directions.
Innumerable fragmentary images mix upon the mirror’s large surface and merge into one another with striking precision, avoiding distortion. This is the work’s invented space that simulates the rambling mental space of our lives. It is a space upon which images and emotions are projected at one and the same time; thought together with shapes; one may even make out the trapped reflection of photons from spotlights on the ceiling of the subway station.
The mechanical sound of the work’s ball-bearing blends with the sound of a human heart’s anguish; they come together in joint reverberation. There is the whisper of sweat dripping and the murmur of blood circulating, the sight of a faint smile, a look, of shoulders inadvertently brushing, of hems meeting for a fleeting moment; all are recorded and absorbed, all merge and interweave along time’s endless coming and going, all the hidden and apparent ways in which these connect. Life’s flow attempts its own visualization through a sculpture’s colored metal parts.
Christina D. Saradopoulou