by Apostolis Artinos
Through charting Topos intervenes, displays its geo-graphy, and immerses in what it had always been: its own narration. Originating in the incipiency of language, in the impossibility of linguistic consummation, in language’s spectrum-graphy, Topos is realized in a process of de-objectification, in an act of negation,where its energy surfacesat the moment of its eclipse, this unique moment of commotion. The more a spatiality is de-lineated, the more Topos becomes exposed to its absence and mine, to the com-motion of this loss. The only gesture possible on Topos is a gesture of inscription, of transcription in the language of the visible, of comprehension and enunciation: a gesture that cedes Topos to what is only a reminiscence of it, a fantacisation, an outside, which, without disturbing its chronotopic condition, is always beyond it, inscribing it on the u-topia of its points, on a non-spatial foundation, on the darkness that nurtures it. Topos is an inscription that geometrizes both absence and the experience of its consolidation.
In TheodorosZafeiropoulos’ video Scrolling Topographies II the camera composes a never-ending, Kaleidoscopic horizon; an indeterminate environment of internal spaces, where each opens up to the next, in the flow of an evolving discreteness, a discreteness which does not yield to the interplay of its climaxing narration, to its hypnotic sequentiality, but simply accumulates the never ending-ness of its lengths; a craftsmanship that also structures space in a dimension alien to its reality; art, a linguistic event of reminiscing of the spatial experience.
In the video, the camera which reads the space does not practice a passive contemplation. Its panoptic range discerns associationsthat can only be produced by it alone, and always at its own pace: a hybrid perspective, which precedes any spatial perception, much like the renaissance one. “There is no landscapein the catacombs”, Gombrich reminds us. Thus, the interpretation of Topos is also its verifiable inscription. The camera reads its own text, viewersinterpolate their own, and Topos reclaims its characteristic palimpsest, its historio-graphy, its invented memory. Only in this manner does Topos become comprehensible - when it becomes narratable, exhausted by the labor of visual perception and by the technocracy of its consummation.
Art is a process of dismantling this “texturing web”, its semiotic perspective, its traceability. Besides, this is the alien-ness of Topos, the extra-terrestrial of its cardinal points, whatever protrudes from it, its eccentricity; a spatiality that always renders Topos “the space of the Other”, as M. de Certeau insists; a dark experience, a commotion, a psychic stimulation. Art has always depicted the world in this metaphorical intervention, being itself one of its metaphors, an exogenous origin, the deepest memory.