PLANETS OF ATTICA

It is impossible to fantasize looking backwards to the present from a distant future of twenty-five centuries beyond. It is impossible to know how the matter that constitutes the forms of Parthenon would look like then.

Thinking of the stones that we picked in a wander around the Acropolis or thinking of marble pebbles that idly roll on the sea shores of Attica we can speculate on the future condition of the marble forms that make up the Parthenon. There is no way to escape the de-symbolizing process of petrification. In the random stones of Attica, history is contained on a way we can never fully represent through language.

Manuel De Landa has described material culture of cities and fortresses as organization of inorganic matter to form an exoskeleton for human activity.Yet a parallel process of petrification occurs in vertebrates where, their endoskeleton eventually returns to the ground as a geology of biological materiality.

This general process of petrification is constantly accelerating in the anthropocene. The accelerated production of the human exoskeleton and its future ruins is tending to leave matter without form and language without words.

The project “Planets of Attica” is a video and an installation presenting a collection of random stones selected around the Acropolis rock, and  put together in a dialogue with the designed marble stones of Parthenon, as variants of the bio-geology of Attica.







Installation by Zissis Kotionis

“SYMBOLS” Exhibition, CITYLAB, EMST, Athens 2021