The Overwhelming installation was created for the final exhibition of the “Inspire” residency program at the MOMus Experimental, in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, in 2020.
Each year, the program selects a different theme, and for 2020, the chosen theme and title was: Dream Archives: Dreams as a Primal Material for Artistic Creation and Practice.
After an intensive exploration of the cinematic and narrative aspects of dreaming, we gathered an abundance of material to shape our individual dream-works.
This exploration provided many intangible resources—conversations, lectures, research, presentations, brainstorming sessions— and tangible ones, such as documentation of artistic exercises, excursions, performance workshops, planned improvisational performances, and other activities.
The Overwhelming installation consists of three parts: a video projection, a wall piece, and a set of Polaroid photos.
The video is an artistic montage created from the documentation of a planned performance improvisation in the forest of Hortiatis. The props we used were objects brought by each participant, which we all shared during the improvisation— much like in a dream, where unrelated objects and people appear together in an irrational sequence that, upon reflection, may reveal a deeper, creative logic.
The wall piece is an embroidery on 100% cotton paper, resembling an (x,y) graph, (x=time, y=overwhelm) and corresponds to the video’s timeline.
The Polaroids capture the prop I chose to use—an old-school kitchen mixer—depicted in a POV as if reconstructed from memory, almost floating in a void.
