eins, Limassol
Despina Charitonidi
For Art-o-rama, Despina Charitonidi presents a series of sculptural gestures that accentuate the dominance of primordial natural materials employed in urban construction sites. Her tendency to study the properties of these materials emphasise an intimate curiosity for creating man-made and temporal geological cartographies.
Dotted within the space are iron rods, sprouting from the ground up, blooming into rusted seashells. At the centre of the booth lies an eroded aerated concrete block resembling a bleached coral. In the foreground, a wall relief diptych signifies the imprinted corrosion caused by Chaitonidis’ chemical experiments to compress and bend time.
With properties originating from the core of the earth, the works become a metaphor of ou attemps to reconcile human intervention with our ecology. Charitonidi, by compressing 2000 years of natural decline into 20 hours, simulating the passage of time, evokes the brutality and narcissism of our urban gentrification and the ensuing radical environmental degradation of our times.
