Documents of Breathing. Pasqua Vorgia & Pavlos Fysakis

DOCUMENTS OF BREATHING
Pavlos Fysakis & Pasqua Vorgia
CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM OF CRETE
March 19 – May 7, 2022

To breathe is not enough (1).
The Documents of Breathing is a collection of mnemosyne fragments: archival traces, family relics, historical documents, found and structured in an almost associative way. The fantasy of the timeless circular image that encompasses all (like the breath that permeates all living things), dominates this work. Perhaps a "nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement(2)". This desire to restart through a primitive state of magic is experienced as the only future, while every image is full of evidence of the end of time. Whatever knowledge we have gathered – various traces of life – is condensed to fit into the ark that was made here.

There is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands (3).
One of our references has been Walter Benjamin's book "The Arcades Project", a collection of text excerpts by him and other intellectuals focusing on 19th-century Paris, as well as Aby Warburg's "Atlas of Mnemosyne", a sequence of images from antiquity to his time, which highlights continuities of motifs, gestures, symbolisms, their cultural traces and visual representations in the history of art. What both works have in common, apart from the dominant gesture of collecting fragments that create a new whole, is that they never came to completion. Likewise, the book Documents of Breathing has been in the making for six years, and is currently divided into ten incomplete chapters: The Last Version, Chronos, Dream City, Denkraum, Logos, Pathos, Sacred & Profane, Pothos, Θάνατος, The Afterlife.

No one should brave the underworld alone (4).
In the Documents of Breathing, which are presented here in the form of an exhibition, and within which the ark-book is contained, are enclosed images and words that we wish to accompany us in a possible transition to the Afterlife, like spells that protect the dead, for their safe passage to the Egyptian Duat, that is, to the Underworld:

If this book is made for him, then he will breathe like the souls of the gods forever and ever. Hide it! Keep it secret! Do not let anyone read it, since it is effective for a man in the god’s domain so that he might live again successfully millions of times. May he write for you the Book of Breathings with his own fingers. May your soul breathe forever. May you see with your eyes, hear with your ears, speak with your mouth, and walk with your legs, your soul having been made divine in the hereafter so that it can assume any form it desires. May your soul breathe anyplace you want. May you endure in life, prosperity, and health, having been established upon your throne in the Sacred Land. May you spend the night in life. May your face live and your form be beautiful, while your name endures every day. May your odor be as pleasant as a young man’s. May your soul live by means of the Document of Breathing (5).

[1] Yes Sir, I Will, Crass, 1983

[2] Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida, 1995

[3] White Noise, Don DeLillo, 1985

[4] House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski , 2000

[5] The Hor Book of Breathings, 2005 (burial text from the Ptolemaic Era)

LOCATION: CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM OF CRETE (Rethymnon)
DURATION: March 19 - May 7, 2022
ORGANIZED BY: KOLEKTIV 8, CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM OF CRETE
ARTISTIC DIRECTION: MARIA MARAGOU
PRODUCTION COORDINATION: ELENA NTOSA
GRAPHIC DESIGN: IOANNIS MARKAKIS
TEXTS: PASQUA VORGIA
PHOTO PRINTING AND MOUNTING: PAVLOS FYSAKIS
PRESS OFFICE: ELENA NTOSA, ELENI PAGKALIA
FRAMES: NIKOS SDRALIS
PRINTING AND MOUNTING OF SPATIAL GRAPHICS: NIKOS KARAMPASIS
LIGHTING, ART HANDLING, TECHNICAL SUPPORT: VAGGELIS TATSIS
ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT: KATERINA KOUYIOUMOUTZI
ARTWORK TRANSPORTATION: MOVEART
VIDEO EDITING, CONSULTING SUPPORT: NIKOS MARKOU

Go back