Dafni & Papadatos, Corporate map 1, marker on paper, 110 X 160 cm
Courtesy E31 Gallery, 2007
INFECTED FORMS by Marina Fokidis
In his famous “allegory of the cave” Plato describes the world as a big cave where people live bound in chains, while looking at their own shadows, cast on a wall in front of them as if on a screen, which are produced by the entrance’s light. The only perception of reality for the chained is pastime with shadows. This perception is being enriched by the shadows of the masters who also live in there and pass before the light, so as the chained to have more reasons for being absorbed by the spectacle and not realize the existence of their chains, let alone break them in order to escape!
Although many centuries have past, Plato’s allegory remains actual and true in this modern world strictly under control. The development of contemporary society seems to be governed by miscellaneous economic interests, whilst social behavior and communication are being manipulated to a great extent by mass media, which in their turn are by all means being controlled by global economy. Resting on one’s illusionary certainty and safety that we all seek to secure for ourselves, it seems now that we are living cooped up in a fictitious world, loosing (in part voluntarily) conscience of the reality. More spectators than inhabitants of the world we allow anybody else to playing God and have the power (mostly through TV) to stage, determine and bring under control other people’s lives. But this mental violence against a more natural and conscious evolutionary stage of human condition is not exerted only upon the existing social and geographical structures that constitute the general framework of reality. In the last years, in global scale, private investors have reached the point to determine more and more the shape of our geological and geographical environment. An archipelago of artificial islands, exclusively reserved to private property (hotel groups and housing estates) by way of fictitious paradise, spreads dangerously violating even the laws of nature! This transformation of the original geological structure of the planet, although it is attempted for the supposed welfare of the society, it is pregnant with danger.
The possibility one to be found walking on a palm tree shaped island while listening from all sides in the central squares Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s voice reciting lines such as the following:
Take wisdom from the wise
It takes a man of vision to write on water
Not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey
Great men rise to greater challenges
is not that far anymore, as it may seemed Seaheaven’s environment in the prophetic film Truman Show by Peter Weir back in 1998. Today it has come into reality under the name Palm Jumeirah and regards one of the Persian Gulf’’s artificial islands that can house 4.000 residents in villas
and apartments made, or rather commissioned, by -who else!- Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
Dafni & Papadatos, in the context of their last work titled Corporate Cities Ltd, deal exactly with these “cosmopolitan utopias”. It is about a new reality within which both “cosmopolitism” and “utopia” take negative connotation. If the word cosmopolitism in this case implies a world of relativity where all values are equal provided one has access to the global (in the sense of universal) information system, utopia refers to a zone of lazy “counter-investment” in the real world, from which all undesirable elements have been excluded.
Corporate cities have their own jurisprudence and their own rules connected rather to an economic system, it’s about a fabricated dream (regarding a few) served for consumption. Faithful to their tactics finding connections between different realities, Dafni & Papadatos use the platform of Art in order to create an allegory with a critical stance towards society in a wider sense as well as towards the meaning of the Art itself, in the sense of representation of the world surrounding us. Making a series of “infected forms” that deal with the features of these newly formed urban complexes, they make a statement about the concept of new “globalized megacity” ,resulting from the corporate regime of artificial islands, as well as about the mode in which Art can assimilate the various aspects of capitalism, by making up an open subjective ground for multiple meanings, and not an environment similar to that of the aforementioned fictitious communities where every potential dissent has been excluded in advance!
The installation part of the show Corporate Cities Ltd does not have the character of a denunciation through tangible documents gathered from various sources in order to be presented within the context of Art. It doesn’t implement the methods of political activism and in this sense it doesn’t create a framework for an immediate action towards a better new future. By means of an environment that appropriates symbolically the language of the investors to whom they refer, Dafni & Papadatos do what they actually know better.
Following a classic visual and plastic tradition (via which they usually face the world), they create a series of drawings and sculptures that look like being infected by the present state of human condition!
Art has always been expressing the aspiration to change the world, but during the last years a series of artistic revolutions animated by teenage temperament tumbled onto the wall of impossibility without result. This doesn’t mean that the sign of the times cannot change through the context of creative challenge.
Dafni & Papadatos seem to grasp the proper balance. Their work represents another example of the substantial possibility of Art as being described by Charles Eschew, that of “Modest Proposals”.
«Modest proposals that make use of existing objects, situations and conditions and manipulate the elements into different more aspirational or purposeful configurations. The concern for concrete necessity is the quality that defines the limits of the term modesty in the expression rather than the scale of the issue involved or the absence of grand ambition for change . In doing so these modest proposals exploit the possibilities of free transformative and singular imaginations that art has reserved for itself since the late eighteenth century!»1
1. Charles Esche, Modest Proposals, Theory Series Baglam Istanbul, 2005
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