Five-channel synchronized video installation, 20 min, Greece 2020
AEONIUM
In the five-channel installation Aeonium, five plant-nursery employees speak about a mysterious disaster, a “terrible event”. They respond successively to unuttered questions, while cultivating a plant of the genus Aeonium. The plant, an enigmatic remnant of an abandoned world or the symbol of a new era, imposes its own temporal regime. The artist notes: “In a plant nursery, the circle of life continuously ends and begins again. Uprooting and constantly transplanting a succulent creates an endless vicious circle of life and death. 5 persons are trying to understand what was that which happened to them. They try to exist again. They try to explain the unexplainable”. Aeonium evokes a suspended condition between movement and stasis, speech and silence, deterioration and regeneration, discontent and anticipation, monotony and variation. It depicts a world hermetically closed and protected from external conditions, yet transparent and susceptible to change.
Anna-Maria Kanta. (Taken from the catalogue published on the occasion of the solo exhibition “George Drivas. Structures of Feelings”)
PREMIERED
“George Drivas. Structures of Feelings” (solo exhibition) Annex M, Megaron – The Athens Concert Hall, 2020
PRESENTED
“The Tides of the Century”, Ocean Flower Island Museum, Hainan, China, 2021
International Forum of Performance Art, Drama, Greece, 2021
Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 2020
The Riddoch Arts & Cultural Centre, International Limestone Coast Video Art Festival, 2020