VOLCANIC IDENTITY: STATES OF EROS | SOLO EXHIBITION BY IRIA VRETTOU
The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses.
— Anne Carson
“Volcanic Identity” is Iria Vrettou’s on-going research art project, which begins from the narrative grounds of a volcanic island to unfold between the real and the imaginary, the entanglement of various time modalities. While it draws from the attributes and nature of familiar volcanic islands, it deviates in terms of the lives that inhabit it. It constitutes a wild terrain of speculative fabulation where queer ecologies and more-than-human species erupt, mix, fl ow, melt, seethe, are being vaporized and dissevered, thus conjuring and altering unexpected forms of kinship.
In this work, volcanoes are not viewed as isolated geological formations, but as dynamic bodies, already and always present in myths of origins, catastrophic historical events and sociopolitical symbolisms. They are formative, lethal, shapeshifting entities, composed by chthonic and celestial elements, hidden materialities and yet-unexplored quantum natures. Entities which belong to the state that Karen Barad has described as “nature’s queer performativity.”
Iria Vrettou chooses to investigate this particular state, and by naming it “volcanic identity” she critically questions common understandings of identity, the limits of representation, the potential of performative, multisensorial thinking, the real possibility of a «metaphor,” i.e. the transportation of the self to the other.
In this first episode of the project, titled Volcanic Identity: States of Eros, the artist approaches the endlessly emerging and transforming nature of erotic love, its victorious, emphatic but not rigid, transgression of boundaries and intuitions.
In the performative, indomitable nature of the volcano, Vrettou’s work acknowledges similarities to Eros, born from the union of Chaos and Gaia. They are both states of a certain kinship, powers of annihilation and regeneration, energies of abundance and ambiguity, beautiful, terrible, feminine, refl ecting one another. With reference to Anne Carson’s work Eros the Bittersweet (Dallas, Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 2022) this exhibition invokes the mysterious links that express the volcanic identity as erotic identity; explosions, magma, heat and ashes, desert and fertility, iridescent colors and toxic gases, time warps, multifaceted expressions, plural reformulations beyond the human; the state where hybrid and chimeric bodies are possible, desire and pleasure are liberated from the capitalistic imaginary, its racist and colonial necropolitics.
The “demons,” the painted and animated bodies of this exhibition are otherworldly apparitions of tentacular reach, insurgent sexuality and symanimagenic complexity; untamable witnesses to this reality, sudden and true embodiments of a metaphor. These bodies haunt the exhibition space that is turned by Iria Vrettou into an odd diorama of a certain volcanic/erotic plot.
Painting, animation, soundscape and live performances flirt with the “subconscious state of the explosion” and tease the “deep time” of volcanic identity. Contradictions, ideas, intensions run along in a dizzying effervescence, towards the volcanic explosion, the release of the magma, the creation of the first ground. Upon this ground, geological formations are ever fluid. Everything is changing, all is ephemeral, ever suggestive even in its most terrifying, volcanic roar.
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Volcanic Identity: States of Eros
Solo Exhibition by Iria Vrettou
Curated by: Vassiliki- Maria Plavou
Organized by: Sfigga 45
Duration: 9th – 18th of June 2023
Opening: 9th of June 20:00
Visiting Hours: 20:00 – 23:00 Monday to Sunday
Sound Design and Sound Installation by Dimitris Kalamaras
Activities: Performative response to the work by invited artist Valinia Svoronou, June 18 @ 21:00.
*Iria Vrettou and Valinia Svoronou are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows