It is impossible to look from a distant future, twenty-five centuries later, to our present and recognize possible traces of matter from the current form of the monuments of the Acropolis. It is impossible to know what the form of the marble matter contained today in the forms of the monuments will be then.
If we think of the random stones we picked up and felt while walking around the rock of the Acropolis or the marble pebbles that swirl lazily on the shores of the Saronic Gulf, we can freely imagine an indefinite future for the matter contained in the forms of today’s monuments. In the random form of each stone from the soil of Attica is contained historical matter, like that which has already become symbols and language in the flywheels, the capitals, the metopes of the Parthenon.
The morphing of matter is its temporary passage into language. Matter is expressed as form. With its return to the randomness of the rock, language withdraws. Then matter, perhaps for an indefinite time, is silent.
Manuel De Landa described the material culture of fortifications and cities as a continuous deposition and organization of inorganic matter, as an exoskeleton of communities and as a production of geology. An analogous process of petrification is that in which the endoskeleton of vertebrates _this miraculous intrusion of geology into the interior of bodies_ returns to the soil as biogeology.
The anthropogenic organization of matter, and the consequent articulation of speech, can be seen within this broad process of lithification. The continuous acceleration of this process in the Anthropocene has made geological time run at the pace of historical time. The acceleration of the production of future ruins is an indication of the definitive withdrawal of language from the form of matter.
The work “Planets of Attica” is an installation and video, which presents random stones around the Acropolis in counterpoint to the designed forms of the Parthenon marbles as versions of the bio-geology of Attica.
Zisis Kotionis
Installation,
For the exhibition “SYMBOLS” ofCITYLAB in ΕΜΣΤ, Αθήνα 2021