Broken Signal (Father-Tongue washed up the shores of plenitude)

Broken Signal (Father-Tongue washed up the shores of plenitude) incorporates an array of references ranging from colonial history, psychoanalysis and archaeology. Having as a starting point the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe, his story is interpreted here as yet another chapter in colonial narratives, in which the male European subject enforces order in Nature and the Other. Such order is first and foremost established by a dominant Language. In opposition to such a worldview, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva describes how archaic impulses resist our signifying practices and destabilise the dominance of Reason. The rigidity of language is thus perpetually overthrown by a flowing unconscious, here supposedly streaming out of a seashell. Seashells are also the first “technological” instruments for the production of sound, thus expressing the human desire for communication.

The second work of the installation, Pro itu et reditu, is inspired by a specific type of “petrosomatoglyphs” belonging to a network of ancient votive plates encountered across the Mediterranean. Consisting of footprints or engraved representations of sandals, they are associated with pilgrimage, when the traveller would place his feet in the footprints to mark the beginning or end of her undertaking (itus et reditus). The version of the work exhibited at the Benaki Museum consists of a ceramic object and the reproduction of a plastic sandal in bronze. The bronze sandal highlights the cultural transformation of pilgrimage to contemporary tourism. The ceramic manifests an affinity to the earth. In the context of the global lockdown, however, the sculpture alludes to physical immobility. It attains the status of a relic, alluding to journeys unrealized or constrained.