akin

In a text for Mousse magazine, examining shared affinities inspired by the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Condorelli wrote: “Friendship, like support, is considered here as an essentially political relationship, one of allegiance and responsibility. Being a friend entails a commitment, a decision, and encompasses the implied positionings that any activity in culture entails. In relationship to my practice, friendship is, at its most relevant in relation to a labour process: as a way of working together.”[1] In this spirit of female kinship, Céline Condorelli and Angela Melitopoulos have been allies, thinking and working, sharing notes and research, and even teaching together. Their shared perspective and commitment to each other as friends and working partners, as well as their unflinchingly resolute efforts to represent the structural complexity of our world has been the driving force that led to our current exhibition.    

Akin affirms a collaborative ethos shared by both artists in their respective practices, allowing for synergies with other activists, artists, and intellectuals, with people on the ground, or with authorial voices and references that make up part of a broader conversation. They bring together on an equal footing all those figures with whom they “think” as part of their long-term research: Marija Gimbutas, David Graeber & David Wengrow, Kerstin Schroedinger, Nita Ferguson, Barbara Glowzcewski, Diane Bell to name but a few. These interlocutors create a diverse mapping of cerebral, empirical, and intuitive knowledge systems. Through dream-states, a constellation of other and outer worldly ideas emerges; a form of collective making of worlds, creating the space and the impulse to re-imagine the world we live in, in an effort to become “un-stuck”.[2] It is in response to this that both artists borrow a plethora of tools and strategies from indigenous practices and other forms of intelligence–in Melitopoulos’ case from the cultures of Titjikala, Yuendumu, and Lajamanu in Australia, and in Condorelli’s case from the ancient technology of cephalopods. 

As Melitopoulos writes: “At the centre of my research into the revisions of seeing the landscape and our history of knowledge, the cultural forms of ritualisation of the indigenous cosmologies in Australia appear as a horizon, that is, as view and boundary. They are over 40,000 years old. Contrary to hegemonic (colonial) homogenising technologies and modes of production, they are pluri-versal, complex, and an open process. They require a way of thinking about the relativity of space, which, according to astrophysicist Arturo Escobar, “is not to be thought about with universal concepts, but with several universes at the same time that can be interconnected.”[3]

It is this intention to keep in perspective the view and the boundary, and to hold true not one but a multitude of universes, that allows for both artists to interlink and simultaneously contain with generosity and gratitude each other’s work and ideas within their own. In Akin, it is never clear whose work embraces the other, with a constant interplay of scales, time frames, landscapes, and skin surfaces to zoom in and out of. They suggest a form of deterritorialization that whirls us out of our safety zone and urges us to invent a new logic for the world. Barbara Glowzcewski in Melitopoulos’ and Schroedinger’s series or narrations Learning to Speak with Earth tells us how we need to re-learn how to “become land, rain, yams, and stars.”[4] Condorelli likewise asks us to dismantle the distinctions between content and object, subject and object into more fluid identifications. Suggesting how learning from an octopus that can transform and become part of its surroundings (coral or cave) is a reminder to readjust and rethink our own distancing and separation from the rest of our world. 

Technologies of representation are key to Céline Condorelli’s current thinking. Her practice has recently focused on research into colour, and the process of its depiction. This research reflects the resurgent interest in the ancient technology of cephalopod skin and its miraculous capacity to alter its skin displays –where the colour produced constitutes part of a camouflage process, or of the state of dreaming, or is a form of emotive expression: for cephalopods, colour is an actual state of being. In her attempt to imagine and simulate how cephalopods create colour, Condorelli has experimented with AI technologies, producing large-scale prints as fields of colour that become all-encompassing environments in an ongoing body of work titled Thinking through Skin. Akin includes these prints as textile awnings and images inset on the walls of the space. These scaled-up skin surfaces, which toy with distance and proximity, horizons and liminality, intimacy, and the alien, become the surface skin of Condorelli’s spatial intervention. The artist has also included two dioramas (small-scale three-dimensional viewing frames) that synopsize the scale and system of colour production. These function almost as referents and notations underlining Condorelli’s thinking process, including once again other artists and anonymous contributors to the conversation. Objects on display range from a block of Tinos marble, Inuit snow goggles, and a shark tooth from Condorelli’s personal collection, as well as fellow artist Irene Kopelman’s “research and process” plate, each suggestive of her research on technologies of seeing, geological deep-time and thinking of colour as skin and earth-surface. 

Considering the Earth’s surface a “speaking landscape” is central to Angela Melitopoulos’ film Matri Linear B (Part 2: Surfacing Earth), installed in Akin. This work, her video essay installation from 2021, forms part of a broader audiovisual research that explores different landscapes on Earth: Lower Austria in Europe (part 1: Revisions), the Zomia Highlands in South East Asia, and Upper Bavaria (both in progress) in Europe and (in the case of the film on view) the Northern Territory in Australia. Matri Linear B[5] explores the methodology of seeing, representing, and mapping landscapes as a process of social organisation. Surfacing Earth commences with a narrative on weaving as a form of connectivity amongst indigenous communities in Australia, only to lead to an insidiously complex web of associations. The two-channel installation creates interconnections between the aggressive dispossession of land from indigenous peoples due to colonial practices and ensuing traumas, wildfires and climatic emergencies, blind-sided state interventions, and other forms of necropolitics. 

Weaving as practice, echoed by the entangled filmic narratives, is a meaningful mode of story-telling and knowledge transmission, illustrative of what is described by Barbara Glowzcewski as a “cosmopolitical vision”,[6] an act of defiance in anti-colonial struggles. The same can be said for Aboriginal paintings, as practised by Nita Ferguson, that show cartographies from a bird’s eye view with schematic imprints on the surface of their land, made up of lines. Aboriginal painting practices entail totemic traces of mythical locations that recorded animals, water holes, plants, and ritual sites, once illegible to the colonial eye. In Nita Ferguson’s paintings land is seen both as historical narration and stratification. Landscapes, in Melitopoulos’ work, become integrally connected to the methods of viewing it, via editing strategies, archival documentation, panoramic views, intimate close-ups, and drive-throughs. The reddish bracken colour of the Australian Outback scales outwards and manages to encompass all viewpoints at once: foreground, background, overview, and horizon. Melitopoulos refers to sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who claims that “a sentence contains more logic than a discourse.”[7] Thus, panoramic illusion is less logical than the logic of the detail, or the other way round, the logic of the detail explains more than the panoramic illusion.

Melitopoulos has coined the term “cine(so)matic” to encompass her expanded filmic practice which discerningly and disarmingly connects the panoramic with the microscopic to shed light on how we inhabit images. Condorelli, in parallel, reveals all the “invisible” structures that create the conditions for the production and viewing of works of art. In Akin, Condorelli and Melitopoulos, for a brief moment in time, invite us to give attention to the complex frameworks that contain our lives and to become part of their conversation, to think with them. Akin gives us the time and space for unflinching critical reflection, to wonder at our evolutionary and technological history whilst at the same time being bold enough to remodel our future relationship with the world. Both artists, through their own distinct practices, but also in their unlikely kinship, ask us to tune back into mythological, ancient worlds, understand the molecular and the vast as one singular expanse and learn from the transformative glistening skin of a dreaming cephalopod. Oh, how beautiful they are.

[1] Céline Condorelli, “Reprint”, Mousse #32, February-March 2012.

[2] David Graeber, David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, United States: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

[3] Angela Melitopoulos, “Girls Born with a Mother” in The Dissident Goddesses’ Project, edited by The Dissident Goddesses’ Network, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Austria: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2022.

[4] Barbara Glowczewski, Becoming Land, Session 3 of the series of storytelling sessions “Learning to Speak with Earth” by ZONKEY (Angela Melitopoulos and Kerstin Schroedinger), 2021.

[5] Title of the research project by Angela Melitopoulos.

[6]  Barbara Glowczewski, Becoming Land, 2021.

[7] “Ein Satz hat mehr Logik ala eine Rede”: quote by Gabriel Tarde in Les Lois Sociales, Oeuvres de Gabriel Tarde, Volume IV, Paris: Les Empècheurs de penser en rond, 1999, S. 115.