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Miorita/
Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes
Artooth team Project Kasda-Angelou 2007
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Article by
Polyxene Kasda, dedicated to the memory of Vasiile Avram of
Sibiu.
Arscenic, French
cultural association for the promotion and the diffusion of
digital arts, in the context of its wider project Areas of
Conflu(x)ence, had selected our telecommunications project,
Miorita, Melusina and the Sphinx of Thebes to be realized
simultaneously in the twin capitals of Europe 2007 Sibiu and
Luxembourg, meeting in Thebes of Greece
Brief
description of the 2007 project
In order to
soothe the crash and to facilitate communication at a subliminal
level, we thought that an interchange should begin at the level
of their respective nursery songs and folk tales.
Miorita, the
Romanian pastoral ballad gave rise to the concept of the Mioritic
space; the unconscious space shared by a culture that is
shaped by its natural landscape.
Miorita the
ewe and Melusina the mermaid {Luxembourg} meet in she
–who- binds, the hybrid Sphinx of Thebes, as the passers
by- who are exposed to the sound of the folk tale of the other
city- are asked to answer, via an info kiosk, the question:
What is ANTHROPOS?.
The project
consists of two similar installations of pictures of human faces
and screens, one in each city. The participants are seen and
heard on the screens of the installation in the other city.
The responses are
collected, via the info kiosk, directly, in our site which acts
as one more area of confluence for the project.
Miorita
In
the Romanian pastoral folk poem Miorita, its most enduring
cultural text with 900 variants, a shepherd boy is warned by his
beloved ewe, Miorita, that his fellow shepherds plan to murder
him and take his flock. Instead of resisting, he accepts his
fate, asking only that Miorita go in search of his mother and
tell her the story, not of how he was betrayed, but of how he was
married to the daughter of a powerful King. Thereafter, wherever
the ewe wanders, across the rivers of the Carpathian Mountains to
the Black Sea, she tells the story-not the true, unadorned facts
of death and betrayal- but a beautiful fiction of a transcendent
wedding αnd telling the story, she causes geography to spring
from myth. She is the storytelling shifting border whose story is
borderless and cosmic.
Melusina
Melusina,the wife of the founder of Luxembourg Count
Siegfried had one particular request, namely, that Siegfried must
leave her alone for one full day and night every month. All went
well for years and years, when on the first Wednesday of the
month, Melusina would retire into her chambers in the
‘casemates’; a network of caverns underneath the city, not to
be seen again until early light on Thursday. But one day,
Siegfried's peeped through the keyhole and saw Melusina lying, as
a mermaid, in the bathtub with a fishtail hanging over the rim.
Melusina recognised her husband through the door and jumped out
of the window into the river Alzette below, never to be seen
again.
Mioritic Space
“spatiul mioritic“
Transylvanian poet
and philosopher Lucian Blaga argued that the ballads of Miorita
were reflected in the Romanian landscape, with the alternations
of accented and unaccented syllables representing the layout of
the Romanian environment He established the term "Mioritic
Space" for the Romanian character as defined by its
geography.
An exile of
Ceausescu's Romania, Andre Codrescu sought to redefine what
Lucian Blaga called Mioritic Space into the idea that
thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, is the
only creator of its shifting borders.
The Hybrid
In our project,
the two folk legends/ Pastoral and Gothic spaces, interact and
interchange their characteristics, via cyberspace, creating a
hybrid cultural being, made of the interpenetration of the two
cultures. This unstable hybrid takes refuge in the ancient, well
established superhybrid: the Sphinx of Thebes, projecting back to
her Oedipus’ answer to her riddle and thus, converting her
enigma.
What is the
human being?
“What is that
which has one voice and becomes four-footed, two- footed and
three- footed?".
To the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus
answered: Anthropos {the human being}, destroying the all
powerful Hybrid with this word. His answer is “insoluble in
concrete logic” as Lucian Blaga would say; the human being
remains an unsolved mystery which renews itself continuously,
keeping us in a constant state of creative crisis and
while trying to solve it, each nation develops the specific
culture within its civilization, which is shaped by its Mioritic
space.
Nowadays, all the
nations of the world, as if swallowed by the mouth of Zeus
{Dias}, migrate and crash in cyberspace {Diadiktion in
Greek means net of Zeus/ internet}, peeling off their
skin, searching for their common core; “le noyau se
debarasse de son ecorce” {L. Blaga}
The confluence of
nations is a crash and interpenetration of worlds of different
spacetime perception and this differentiation generates a
“polystylistic universe”.
The world- on-
the- make, with the bits and pieces of all cultures is the
ultimate work of art of the 21st c. and we want to
participate in its creation.
Once more Man,
who is undergoing a “mutational switch from a cultural paradigm
to another”, is called forth to redefine his identity in a
global nation, through an interchange of cultural landscapes.
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Synchretic
European Topology
The
Sphinx project 2014
by
Kasda & Angelou
in
order to express the symbiotic aspirations of european thinking
engulfed in the chaotic remix of its diverging temporalities, we
propose the creation of a real/virtual ludic territory moulded by
the exchange of legendary elements characteristic of its regional
spaciotemporalities.
For example, Melusina the legendary siren of
gothic Luxemburg, meets Miorita the lamb of the pastoral Romanian
topology to generate a gargoyle with a lamb's head and a siren's
tail that questions the stability of the hybrid european identity.
As
area of confluence of these disparate elements we propose
She-who-binds antinomies in an indestructible formula; the mythical
Sphinx, guardian of Thebes, the city founded by Cadmus, on his
quest of his sister EUROPE
Thebes;
deep ontological topology cemented clumsily in a sick oblivion
that
obliterates deliberately the ontological nature of the human being.
What
is ANTHROPOS?
We
reflect back Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx' lethal riddle,
intensifying it with this echo
Our
answer will open or close the fantasmic gates to Thebes, city
founded on the quest of Europe.
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