Eleni Galani , Olympia Kokkorou

NINE TIMES NINE TIMES NINE

Illustrations and other forms of documentation show our various experiments that act as tools for exploring the divergent trajectories suggested in the imaginings of alternative modes of being. We are working on art and story-telling structures challenging the notion of “self” and creating non-anthropocentric future narratives.

Sometimes it feels like we are living in a space of fragments, or as floating fragments in a vast space. Trying to express and understand that bizarre feeling, we changed our perspective and sought the consciousness of the inanimate or the boundaries of our own imagination. Our project is an experiment that follows a specific process. We animate and give life, character and new form to 9 household objects which live in 9 different rooms of a house. The rooms are now becoming their own buildings-spaces. All these spaces together not only complete a dwelling but also a city. Our main issue is how the objects, the house and the city shape ourselves and our everyday life. So, the things we are, are we?

Our project “9x9x9” is expanding on the theoretical background that was developed for our research project titled “Please beware of your personal belongings”. There, we worked on the relation that a person maintains with objects, specifically with the person’s inanimate surrounding. We reversed the typical correlation by viewing the person as inanimate and the object as a living being therefore giving it a new form and character. For this project we developed a series of characters. The stories that these characters inhabit are 9 buildings-spaces. The stories through which they were incarnated were never specifically narrated. One may start imagining what lies beneath these stories after one recognises oneself inside one of these building-characters. This is the moment when the drawings become alive. The action is initiated when you discover yourself behind the facade, in the internal part of the building-spaces. What follows is 9 spaces related to Reception, Solitude, Ceremony, Welfare, Delight, Commons, Logistics, Panoptikon and Function, in which a narcissist megalomaniac, a mentally deranged, a vicious authoritarian, a workaholic, an elderly ranter, an oppressed and absolutely unsatisfied lady, a depressive character, an unhappy dreamer and a careless youngster dwell. Through the selection of extreme situations and characters we are presenting a sample of our experience of the dwelling and the city. Specifically we are functioning on three different scales, that of the object, the dwelling and the city. The project consists of 9 objects, 9 buildings-spaces and 9 symbol models. It is a scenario in which we envisage the dwelling as a city, and the city as a dwelling. We create an endless grid that is set up as a kind of game-board on which the metropolis plays its own development. The choices are infinite just like characters.