BREEDING ACARI:
INCIDENTAL ENCOUNTERS
Part of "Soup Opera" Group exhibition
14.12.2019 MEME, Athens
Incidental Encounters is the first work of the series Breeding Acari:. The series focuses on invisible and unconscious triggers in the immediate environment of human & non-human actors and map their repercussion on our mood, mental and physical health.
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By enlarging, microscopic as well as meta landscapes, filtered through imagination and fantasies, I want to draw on the importance of such processes for our well-being, ecosystem and biodiversity. In the series of works, I am interested in symbolizing and metaphorizing the breeding process of such invisible creatures or triggers and draw an analogy to the unconscious state of mind of humans in such processes.
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The acari organism, which the topic is bound to, is a taxon of arachnids, including ticks and mites which count a huge variety of species and plays a highly important role in environmental, agricultural, medical and veterinarian environments, as well as they can be parasitic, cause allergies or carry bacteria. I choose to talk about various tiny invisible organisms to use them as my actors in storytelling, because I think they can mediate and represent the human unconscious and ignorance due to their environment.
I hope to use the creature’s position to rethink ours. As almost invisible beings, they silently inhabit soil and water as they can decompose organic matter, live on and from the skin of birds, other animals and nest in human households. The fact that scientific technologies can imitate such breeding processes and the ability of their controlled reproduction in laboratories transforms our relation to them.