On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare...
Biennale Arte 2024
7AVRION PROIN EN NA DEIS
Alexandros Xenophontos


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“TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE”

Drop ceiling lighting, acoustic tiles, acrylic, LED strip, metal pipe, leather, PVC, satin.

2024



Photography by Ugo Carmeni 2024


When infrastructures break, disruptions within their temporal geographies and contexts become hypervisible. The artifice of time is torn out of shape, apertures leak damage and operations of phantom agencies flicker in white artificial light.

Sixteen tiles form a corporate suspended ceiling with one panel missing at its edge. A message in Morse code flashing out of the missing tile repeatedly spells out AVRION PROIN ENNA DEIS (TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE), both a promise and an omen. Leaking out of the missing ceiling tile is a severed subsea cable, adorned in pin-striped leather and corsets – an agent of sorts, infiltrating the backdrop of enterprise and photo-op handshakes from which infrastructure projects emerge. From the cable’s severed roots, the Organ’s (Emiddio Vasquez, Rafailia Tsiridou) transmissions are amplified within the space.

The installation is informed by the history of telecommunications in Cyprus, used as a global command point within the Levant region, as well as the island’s condition within ‘post’-coloniality and transnational capitalism. Two artefacts dictate its form: a 1955 telegram sent from Cyprus to Alexandria which reads “AVRION PROIN EXROMETHA PARALAVOMEN XYLIAN” (TOMORROW MORNING WE WILL ARRIVE TO COLLECT WOOD), and a 1975 post stamp from CYTA (Cyprus Telecommunication Authority) depicting a French ship laying an elongated phallic-shaped cable into the sea.