Transcript

Hi, my name is Petros Moris, part of the collective Kernel, founded in 2009 in Athens, Greece by me, architect Pegy Zali and and artist Theodoros Giannakis.

 

Our installation, titled As you said, things resist and things are resistant, brings together materials, forms and narratives that we encountered the last years, during an investigation on phenomena related to global logistical industries and their emergent impacts on local Greek economies and labor conditions.

 

The sculpture is a platform, or a landscape, or even a scenography for the unfolding of an abstract narrative. This narrative goes back to a specific story, one related to our witnessing of the aftermath of an actual act of sabotage and vandalism of an infrastructural project in the Athenian suburbs. This mysterious disruption involved the obstruction of a cargo train on a newly built railway bridge of private Chinese interest.

 

Some months after the incident, the bridge was completed painted over with a huge abstract mural, the form of which we turned into these cast reliefs, which we then electroplated with scrap copper that we bought from nearby yards. This is the type of copper that is usually sourced by smuggling of public copper cable wiring, a parasitic illegal industry that expanded after the loss of many jobs due to the privatization of the Athenian harbor.

 

One of the byproducts of such smuggling is this type of foam cable jacket, that is disposed after the stolen copper wire is removed. We found the specific ones close to the area of the bridge. It was a huge mountain of them, it looked like a black sea.

 

We decided to compose them into this artificial muscle system, a quasi anatomically correct, but disassembled, artificial arm to which we gave a robotic joint and we programmed it with an algorithm that we motionaly trained a couple of years ago during a dancing performance titled Near Real Time. We like to think of this arm as the main character of an evolving story.