Art-o-rama 2023Despina CharitonidiFossils of a Future Dream
31st August – 3rd September
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 Charitonidis’ chemical experiments to compress and
bend time.
With properties originating from the core of the earth, the works become a
metaphor of our attempts to reconcile human intervention with our ecology.
Charitonidi, by compressing two thousand years of natural decline into twenty hours,
simulating the passage of time, evokes the brutality and narcissism of our urban
gentrification and the ensuing radical environmental degradation of our times.