Mnemonic Waters

Το έργο παρουσιάζεται από το Artist Residency Program του School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph.

Χρησιμοποιώντας το γεωεντοπισμό, αυτό το site-specific έργο εντοπίζει ηχητικά τον αρχαίο ποταμό Ιλισό, κάτω από την πόλη της Αθήνας. Η πρόσβαση στο έργο μπορεί να γίνει μέσω μιας εφαρμογής που ονομάζεται Echoes, από οποιονδήποτε έχει κινητή συσκευή σε μια συγκεκριμένη φυσική τοποθεσία, που βρίσκεται στους Χάρτες Google.

In Athens, a buried river is traced using GPS in an application called Echoes that uses Google Maps to play audio along its length. Presented at Platforms Art Fair, curated by Julie René de Cotret, Fishing Mnemonic Waters draws upon two of the five mythical rivers of the underworld of Hades, The River of Unmindfulness, known as Lethe, where the dead drink from its waters to forget their previous lives before rebirth, and The River of Memory, known as Mnemosyne. To drink from the pools of Mnemosyne would restore memory and spare the soul from transmigration. The actual underground river, River Ilisos, is an ancient river that runs through Athens that was buried in a tunnel beneath the city of WWII in an effort to modernize the city. The ancient banks of River Ilisos were written about by Plato, where Socrates and the Cynics would teach their philosophies.

The goddess Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaea, Heaven and Earth, and the mother of the nine muses, all fathered by her nephew Zeus. It is said that although Plato used myth as a teaching tool rather than a belief system, he was known to call upon Mnemosyne to remember his narratives, as the titan’s importance was understood by a society built upon oral culture:

“But besides the gods and goddesses whom you have mentioned, I would specially invoke Mnemosyne (Memory); for all the important part of my discourse is dependent on her favour, and if I can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the priests and brought hither by Solon, I doubt not that I shall satisfy the requirements of this theatre.”

                        -Plato, Critias (trans. Bury)

Arguably the oppositional counterpart of Mnemosyne was Lethe, the goddess of Oblivion, daughter of Eris, Goddess of Strife, who was described as dull, inhabiting the role of guard to the court of Hypnos, where the River of Unmindfulness encircled. Though the mythological rivers are said to be located at the archeological site of Eleusis, where the ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries were performed by the cult of Demeter and Persephone, I am using the metaphoric and formal aspects of forgotten rivers buried underground as thematics within Fishing Mnemonic Waters. Furthermore, the fishes referenced in the title are a reference to another geographically displaced poetic, in which thought and the inception of ideas are like fish that swim away when disrupted, as Virginia Woolf had described in A Room of One’s Own.