Rocks in Stock unfolds like an installation in dialogue with architecture that reacts to the present space, relating it to the scale of the human body. Using these proportions Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki creates a kind of ‘sculpture’ in which, as she puts it, her main intention and drive is the material and within which she creates paths where others can enter, and the material reveals its process. The material in Sifostratoudaki’s case is protogenic, concerning not only the object but also the ‘topos’ (space/place), and the habits or behaviors.
By introducing the anthropometric factor Sifostratoudaki allows the spectator to ‘set against’ the object, both literally and metaphorically. The used materials, their origin and physical properties play a key role in her works. Equally important is the social context in whichthese materials are functioning in everyday life – the nature of the relationship they establish between humans and their surroundings, environment, earth and the sky. Henri Bergson has taught us that a fundamental property of material is its duration, its ability to defy linear, modernist conceptions of time, seen as irreversible movement and progression. His ideas find much more efficacy and acquire greater relevance when dealing with objects that were created at a certain point in time but have subsequently been reworked, reengaged with and reactivated through human social practice. Following this line of thought Sifostratoudaki’s objects/sculptures are, rather, multi-temporal, enacting and evoking different times simultaneously. They speak of time as coexistence rather than succession. And they embody, materially and physically, memory as duration. She uses and interprets them in different ways: as transformative sources, entities in dialogue with space and architecture, parameters that enable these multiple temporalities to find physical expression. Arranging space Sifostratoudaki attempts to trigger, on the one hand the interaction between object and spectator beyond a tactile experience, involving thinking, looking, sensing, smelling, imagining. On the other hand she is interested in the interaction between her materials, the combination they bring out together, the representation of the different materialities, the state between materiality and time.
A text by Kiki Petratou cofounder of JOEY RAMONE
Image curtesy of the artist and K. Petratou