Poetics of Trust.

Posted originally on 24 February 2023

The Future Light Cone 2022©Kyriaki Goni, installation view, Warsaw Biennale

Topography of dwellings and visitations.
Conversation over the waves hidden (between) archipelagos.

Ever since I first encountered her work, I became preoccupied on how to structure a conversation with Kyriaki Goni, should it ever come to it. This led to imagining this hypothetical exchange placed in liminal space between Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, same as proposed by Anna Tsing in the ‘Arts Living on Damaged Planet’, categories I have found myself frequently drawn to. In Anna’s proposal Ghosts are enmeshments in landscapes while Monsters are entanglements across bodies. As traces and residues, they leave a trail followed by Kyriaki’s work in its unique poetic way. Finally, drawing on the idea behind this project, the Infrathin, seen as a different type of investigation, is always in the background. Infrathin seems a fitting term to apply to discuss practice driven by methodology lying far from scientific systematic assurances, an alternative approach to inquiry based in chance instead of measurable certainty of numbers. Infrathin is both presence and gap, a narrow space between movement and stasis, between hope and resignation. Here, it is a residue of presence, lingering loss, traces and particles of by-products of various explorations and exploitations left in networks and places emerging from Goni’s particular formula of worldmaking.

In many respects her work is a response to a long term linear narrative of the Enlightenment's heritage and its far reaching consequences. Mars in ‘The Future Light Cone’ is an amalgamated landscape of stars, land, Earth(soil), Space, dreams and nightmares. The artist’s collaboration with Mars, its messages and its wind embodies mythology of expansion and exploitative explorations.

Networks, archipelagos and messages, the Other, and the Homeric, histories and narratives, time modes and passages, Capitalism and Neoliberal technocracy, extractionism and exploitation, colonisations and visits. All live in Goni’s practice interwoven in a web of relationships, dependencies and exchanges, networks and layers of interconnecting stories and ways to communicate. Haunted by ghosts and monsters; by cyborgs and hybrids practice creates a world equally possessed and fully independent, thoroughly discovered and completely unknown.

LANGUAGE

Language is a category lying at the foundations of Goni’s entire practice. Perhaps because in a way, it is a practice of poetics. Practice where manner and shapes of communication, meandering narratives, interwoven stories, modes of contact, translations and exchanges form the baseline for all investigations themselves and for structure of the how, the nature of very working method.

I heard once a statement that translation may be seen as a form of defiance. I believe Goni transcribes and translates her findings in the manner which defies the dominant narratives we are so used to, the status quo. She proposes her own unique poetics and by extension politics, deeply embedded in the aesthetic system organising the body of her work. In doing this she re-purposes and changes accepted, established ways of storytelling to means of her own order.
Another matter is the performative aspect of poetry in Goni’s work. She writes poetry, recites and records it, translates (or suggests ways of translation) messages as instrumental elements of her installations. This take on performativity, equally conceptual and corporeal calls partially to Homer with records of stories passed on for generations, and partially to spoken tradition where word, not written but performed=recited then and there, felt in the body, remembered, transformed and individualised was the primary medium. The choice over different forms of stories investigated, uncovered, described and presented play on immeasurable gaps in structure of storytelling. Filled with trust, poetics of the smallest difference record an ongoing conversation between nodes of the network.

The Future Light Cone 2022 © Kyriaki Goni solo show Gallery Filodrammatica 2023 Photo Tanja Kanazir Drugo

Discrete Life of Infrathin:

Thank you again for agreeing to have this conversation. Even though this exchange is intended to be set on a grid of 5 subject-driven points anchoring all questions, I would like to start with, in my opinion, the most important for your work; language.
You consistently include content associated with the notions of storytelling, how we tell the stories, how the stories are told and how the stories are expected to be presented in certain environments and contexts. You work frequently with poetry, a form which has its own story and context to tell. I find this especially important as you are Greek and some of your texts are in Greek unavoidably drawing connection to oral tradition, spoken word and its impact on Western civilisation. For example, in the ‘Networks of Trust’ you read a poem in Greek which describes ancient origins of archipelago life, its networks and connections, stories of beginnings and gatherings on the islands. I think this gesture really calls to the notion of performing the spoken word and I understand it as something closer to lived experience than performing arts.

Kyriaki Goni:

Language is quite a tricky tool for me. I often start with writing either a poem or a text. Sometimes I write in Greek and I choose to present it in English. Sometimes I make the decision to keep the audio in Greek and have subtitles to whatever language needed for the exhibition, because in a particular case I decide it is important to have the sound of Greek in exhibition space. Sometimes I just write in English straight away. I'm very much preoccupied with the way meanings change due to this process.

You wrote something very interesting about translation, about the way it defies certain systems and how it can be seen, as a way of defiance. I found this a very intriguing idea, putting yourself in another system or in another language so that it may offer you the opportunity to stand against some things.

DLoI:
I sometimes think that maybe this is how you need to approach a translation in general. With the recognition of those little moments, gaps in narratives with other hidden somewhere in the language. It's as if breaking it down. When I think about this, it's not even how we translate things on a purely lexical level, but how we translate ideas and the use of language itself. Or perhaps, how we hear and read what someone else says or writes as a possible form of protest, a form of defiance.

KG:
It's a very interesting observation, which I have to say I haven't thought of previously, but as I try to move around mainly Greek and English, I may have experienced it. Not on a conscious level, but on a more subconscious or rather an unconscious one, moving between the languages, trying to figure out how to write something or how to pronounce something, or think it clearly. Language shapes a space, this space of in-between. Let's say that it allows us to defy things. Or it is a fluid form of defining-defying things and ways to verbalise.

DLoI:
I consider it a choice between one or another application of language, how to structure things, and it becoming a chosen way to contest the status quo. So you build different poetics.
‘The Future Light Cone’ is really a transmission from the Other. It’s both a transcript and a translation. Tapestries, transmission and the way the installation were put together are a manner of constituting an alternative form, your particular system of communication I mentioned at the beginning. The arrangement of elements, their internal relations, drawings and process of making drawings, sound of the wind, all of it is language. Weaving everything together is language in itself, story and network.

KG:
It's this experience of doing something, reducing something, of finding oneself within a process, immersing in universes, while not really knowing what you are doing.

And now, there is this opportunity to verbalise it and tell its story, so to speak.
I often start with language, I am interested in storytelling and the performative character it bears. This is important to me, especially in the ongoing installation ‘Networks of Trust’ where I collect stories. I invite people to be part of a nomadic decentralised digital storytelling network, where we don't share the stories by performing them or by reading them. We share stories through writing and storing them in the node. The node subsequently travels and other people access it and add their stories. I think that, although it's not precisely an oral tradition, it becomes oral as it's being shared and at some point, uttered. This is how it gets its voice so to speak, it gets its orality if there is a term like that, by becoming alive when articulated. The stories hosted on the nodes are not being narrated real-time, but instead in different times and through different voicings as they are moving around. It very much touches upon what you suggested about different proposals that the work provides in terms of storytelling or language. These different ways of sharing, recording, transmitting stories, of passing knowledge or experience of fears or desires of the Other happen through a platform which is not the internet and is not the most common method of gathering or of sharing stories, but is rather something in-between. Something that is still digital and behaves like a network, but at the same time is not accessible instantly online. There is no immediacy and there is a gap in time when it comes to the possibility of entering it. But on the other hand there is this sense of locality transferred in time in a non linear way.

DLoI:
When I think about ways of storytelling, I find it interesting that quite a lot of your drawings are intended as a vehicle for knowledge. They are more than just a visual notation. They are records, forms of communication, messages and art works at the same time (because art is research and research is artwork) fused to tell something and to preserve something. To me, you begin with the creation of specific poetics, which you subsequently apply across your practice. Actually, partly I think of what you do as politics as well, as you investigate so many dominant and extractive narratives addressing them through your work. I see this strategy as an alternative suggestion to the politics that we use to or that we live in. Maybe even to the reality that surrounds us.

KG:
Initially I treated drawings as a way of recording my research. Gradually I realised, and it's interesting in this context that you mentioned performativity, although I think you meant something slightly different, but it emerged during making these drawings as constitutive part of the manner in which I was working. Motion and gesture were part of the process, performed with each piece. I was applying all these different colours and I was doing it without really thinking: ”Is this complementary colour or should this like be that or not? ”. It was as if I was throwing on paper all feelings, all emotions, all questions I had, without really considering form, but rather thinking of the corporeal aspect of work, of how I could put them out there as if I myself was making this movement when drawing them.
I worked on the table or on the floor. So there was continuous motion with direction and rhythm, as if pulling away and then returning, coming back. Just to step away again. And in a way the title: “Notes on Space exploration”, reflects it. Movement, covering distance concealed in the very name.

DLoI:
I was thinking about a message from Mars and familiarity characterising exchange of letters, and it occurred to me that a story becomes an act of reaching out and making oneself open not only to the response, but also acceptance to the effects of that response on your-self. There is an element of vulnerability in it. And it is what strikes me in your work, this strange and beautiful balance between vulnerability associated with sharing what was originally private and the decision to make a story public by opening it. And then by allowing it to be read. As a result, something initially intimate has this very intimacy stripped away. I was thinking about how it is willingly exposed.
You often work against this long term narrative of endless one-direction, linear time. And your entire work process-delivery of the story and how the work is experienced is broken into different temporalities.

KG:
Yes, indeed fragility, vulnerability and openness are qualities that can describe the work and the process itself. What I would also like to mention here is the notion of time. The moment, I receive the crate with the installation, after having been exhibited, for example at the solo show SixtyEight Art Institute in May 2022 in Copenhagen or in July in the same year at Warsaw Biennale.
In both locations there were two nomadic nodes active. During the shows, I was not connected to them. I only get to read the stories people upload to the nodes, when I eventually receive the work back. This is a process done on purpose.
I could be connected to the node while it was away. But for me, these pauses between the time when stories are shared, written and uploaded, and the time when I read them, and when I receive them are imperative. That delay is important, it’s purposeful. And not only to me, but also people who would read the stories at the next stop, the next exhibition. There is time in between these two events. The stories, despite being permanently stored on the node, are only temporarily accessible for the specific duration of each installation. There are points of time when stories are visible and others that they are not.

NETWORKS

The idea of networks begins with instances of connection, of communication, evolving web of encounters, alive and always in-change. I feel similarly about archipelagos, where they are places with contact happening at the point of undefinable distance of something that is almost but not quite the same. Difference which comes into existence by moment of closeness, within a gap, a space in-between. Emergence of relationships running across its hidden core.

The nature of Goni’s practice makes me think of it as the told topography of dwellings and visitations. Systems of orientation localities, assemblages, archipelagos and intertwined overlying threads of space-time, are all explored as a possibility of alternative frameworks for horizontal relationships based in equality instead of hierarchic, vertical superiorities. Assemblages of islands (either exhibitions or works) are entangled webs of interceding stories told by haunted landscapes full of overlying threads of time containing universes inside.

Networks are depositories, memories of pre-existing relations alive in ongoing conversations and exchanges, containing all the future gifts and losses. Reaching out, meeting halfway is the only way to survive. Networks are the economy of existence.
If you listen with care you can hear old words below the hidden waves linking the islands. Poems deposited, written and voiced with trust release a lingering presence of stories edging to be told.

DLoI:
Since we met for the first time in person during your show at the Warsaw Biennale I have been thinking how to run this conversation and I kept coming back to works and their relationship within this very exhibition I encountered at that time. Spatial arrangement of installation in Warsaw made me think of networks, which are at the core of multilayering ways to converse proposed in your work. Network is the means of language application, mode of its distribution. I think how different levels of this internal dynamics affect the experience of spatial presence of all of your works.

KG:
It's something that happens in an unconscious way, at the same time it's something that I do almost on purpose in all my installations. It doesn’t happen immediately, but gradually as I produce and create most of the installation parts. I don't work first on one thing and then on the other, bit by bit. It all begins at the same time and evolves together. As this process progresses, at some point understanding comes : ”I get it now. This should have tapestries”. In ‘The Future Light Cone’ while I was working on the drawings, I realised there should also be a cube that had to be part of the piece.
It is a feeling as if something was being written in the back of my mind. I knew I had to put it on paper, and it was the signal from Mars. That’s how drawings came into existence. Eventually everything fit together. It's like having a garden, plant different seeds, water them and gradually as they grow and bloom connections start to emerge.

Once I have parts of the installation at a more advanced stage I try to make these connections as if the parts of the installation were islands connected by boats, in a way which is not visible to every viewer. To me, this is the system that I am based on when I work on the installation. So this is a very accurate observation of yours, because in every work these internal links exist between different parts of the installation. Viewers are invited to visit them as different nodes of the network and to put all relations together as if putting together a story.
Sometimes I do that very purposefully, very intently. For example, with the “Data Garden”, I made a show here in Athens in September 2020, between two lockdowns, which of course like for everyone else, was very bad timing. But anyway, some people were brave enough and they visited the exhibition! I produced a very specific route, which I asked the visitors to follow. And I hid in the main video, in the main narrative, hints to other installation parts, so the viewing experience was as if playing a game, discovering and finding things along the way. Parts of the story would click as soon as you visited the whole installation. Sometimes I go through this process in a very concrete manner because I want to make this an aspect of a work, a form of mental and emotional journey taken with and by the viewer. Other times, for example, in ‘The Future Light Cone’ it wasn’t purposeful. It sort of happened. Different nodes of the story came together creating a network.

To me networks (and not only in case of your practice) are strongly connected to the idea of archipelago, especially the way Eduard Glissant proposed it. In my mind it's also connected to the term Infrathin. I understand it as a collection of islands-beings-parts that are bound together by the smallest difference. So I wanted to ask you about that?

KG:
What do you mean by the smallest difference?

DLoI:
Well, let’s see. Archipelago is a group of bodies of land sharing a geological core. It's the sameness broken down which over time developed slightly differently. Each has its own uniqueness while being part of the whole. It shares commonality in terms of life, mineral content, how it's built and so on. But it also differs and these differences emerge equally from the distance and from the contact producing new things.
For me it started with reading Eduard Glissant. My later reflections were inspired by his thoughts. I see it with the colonial archipelago in perspective, with forcibly moved slaves creating their own identity pockets that come from their cultures, shared and exchanged, and the dominant culture of the coloniser. Of course, like the archipelago itself and every island in it, it developed slightly differently depending on locality. In addition, Creole language emerged as a hybrid shared in principle but individually and locally shaped. So it's this sort of close proximity in contact that I call the smallest difference. Term that always makes me think of how Duchamp described Infrathin, space which defines similarity, distance and junction at the same time. It’s that moment which is not exactly a gap, also not exactly a touch but a place one cannot name. All these characteristics belong to the same category, but ultimately are different. It's this impossible to define sameness and distance. You can't really put your hand on it, but it's right there. And to me, archipelagos and networks are quite similar. They consist of different anchor points, different stories, different peoples, different localities, but once you acknowledge closeness, exchange happens. Possibility of alliance emerges. So they change. They become part of the bigger multiplicity. And that again will be organised by the smallest difference, which in a sense is a commonality.

KG:
I quite like this idea that the smallest difference as you describe it in the moment actually becomes, more of a point of a connection rather than the definition of division or separation. It makes them more the same than actually different.

DLoI:
I think, in your practice it happens in every work. And more, it happens in the exhibition making and in spatial arrangement of the works. Works themselves create a network together. And further, they create a bigger network with collaborators outside joining in, Mars and research sources and so on. It's something that grows, like a mycelium, sending out messages.

KG:
Indeed there is a network expanding in different layers within the installations, at the same time extending outside of them.

DLoI:
The web of connections you create is a vocabulary and it is an alternative to the language(of power) that is generally imposed on us. Initially you look at the time that is this linear, this particular one-directional time mode of the Enlightenment. You look at the links to colonialism and associations with future expansions and exploitations. So you kind of face all these dominating traditions. To me, they are very much about absolute time, about vertical progressive buildup, about constant progress, constant growth. It's all a very straight projectile-like, wasteful and exploitative system, while you create in response work that consists of small entities, that is like an assemblage or network of assemblages, small bodies that are interconnected and have a potential to do it further and further and further.
It is such a different model where multiplicity extends on more than just number and complexity of interrelations. It consists of many times, as you said yourself it's important that it contains many temporalities, that it has different time spans and all those durations last as they reoccur across ways and beings, as they are spoken in different languages or communicated in multiple manners and through different ways of living. The network is not a total system. Instead it stands as an alternative proposal of collective survival, of how we can do things differently. It doesn't necessarily have to be transferable in any scale. It doesn't have to be translated in one language. And it's a system that in a way encapsulates whole creative practice.

KG:
I imagine works and parts of the work and all collaborations as being small nodes that disrupt these linear absolute traditions, not by neglecting them, but going in between, disrupting and presenting new proposals of new networks that could possibly allow us to approach or understand or feel things in new ways.

DLoI:
Again, like a defiant translation. I guess apart from archipelago it does remind me of constant exponential growth in a way mycelium grows, also a network itself.

Kyriaki Goni, Networks of Trust 2019, installation views, Biennale Warszawa 2022. Photo: Bartosz Górka, courtesy of Biennale Warszawa

KG:
And it is a network that grows and connects continuously. I really like the fact that it's a collaboration between species, symbiosis and where parts and partners talk to each other, often for mutual benefit. But sometimes it’s a hostile act. Alliances and necessities change.

DLoI:
My grandfather was a very avid mushroom picker. When I was growing up, we used to forage together. Mushrooms are one of my favourite foods. I have loved mushrooms and foraging since I was a kid and he used to take me along. He never gave me a proper lesson on how to pick different species. I was just learning on the go as I was watching him. But he did tell me how to treat a forest. What I realised later that despite the fact that I never had proper training, I started to recognize very quickly something that you could describe as a mushroom forest. You enter the section of the forest and you immediately think: “Oh, there will be mushrooms here”, you know? That sort of knowledge which does not come from conscious analysis. Originally I started with thinking this was probably a combination of the type of the soil, of the trees I've noticed, how everything around looked and smelled. You know, you get data and eventually neurons do their job and you arrive at the conclusion. But later I realised they were not the elements that I'd noticed. What I've noticed were relationships preexistent within the place. These were the real clues.
I mentioned this story because it's the same with a network or archipelago, web of islands, spots of habitation, one system consisting of many independent but connected parts bound by relationships, multiplied and overlapping. In order to succeed, it has to be in active transaction. It's not a collection of separate elements, it's not a dot that marks an island or location or specific node that is important. Important is the line that connects two or more of these parts. And it's the same with mushroom forest. Mushrooms without trees, without soil, without birds, insects and everything in their habitat could not succeed. Those lines really are of the primary importance. They make space alive.

KG:
I very much feel the same about archipelagos and islands. The knowledge that you have of mushroom forest is of course a result of different factors, let's say of expertise, but also part of the lived experience you had with your grandfather when you were a young child going together with him to forage.
So, it's quite a similar experience in the way that I see archipelago as a network and its islands as parts of this network that could not exist without them. This understanding happens not only through a conscious approach to the system, but through lived experience of being on the islands, hiking on the islands, foraging on the islands. Eventually you understand that you are on a piece of land, which is part of a bigger network, without which it wouldn't be possible to survive. So from an archipelago with islands forming it and organised by network, you move onto a specific island and encounter a presence on the island of another ‘Network of Trust’. Networks are interconnected, and there are different layers of networks also interconnected. This feature is something worth keeping in mind throughout this investigation of networks, be it mycelium, be it archipelago, be it notion of entanglement. A need to acknowledge its significance, to take care of, to nurture, and to repair are acts of necessity.

We previously spoke about this notion of repair you mentioned and I liked so much. Perhaps without being prominent, it is still part of ‘The Future Light Cone’ too. Because in ‘The Future Light Cone’ you can see some landscapes, which are indeed marked with traces of human disturbance, but there are also places which are still physically intact. We see and we observe them, but there is a small chance that we can repair them and by repair I mean to stop repeating the same extractive harmful behaviours. In the workshops I sometimes conduct as part of ‘Networks of Trust’ we gather together and write stories about the future and this process contains notions of repair. Stories are not only about the future. They are also attempts to figure out how we can envision what lies ahead, or rather a better future, achieved by repairing the present. When one puts down fears and desires about what is to come, both what lies ahead and the current moment becomes very clear and apparent in a way that one begins to understand things about their present temporality too.

DLoI:
Network is something that it's opposite to the so far dominant idea of linear time in a sense that it goes from the bottom to the top repeating patterns of geological strata. Networks follow a 3 dimensional model which moves across the whole spectrum of times and localities. That happened with the fossil you mentioned in the poem in the ’Networks of Trust’ even though it happened a very long time ago, the residue of the event and the residue of experience of seeing it are still within the same network and definitely of equal importance.

This notion of different times coming together and translation as defiance and the way you use different languages and create different poetics, creates in my mind a connection between how stories are being told in the ‘Networks of Trust’ and the history of gathering of women telling and sharing their stories. These gatherings were acts of story making, not language, not poetry, not word associated with Homeric tradition, but story making belonging to the community, to women exchanging stories in the circle of gathering. I think that's why your process of collecting and recording stories is conducted at slow, rhythmic pace, marked by gaps and temporalities as if you interrupt this straight projectile of the absolute language and time.

KG:
This reminds me of a lovely memory I have from the island of Paros, which is a very well
known destination in Greece in the Cycladic Archipelago, and where I was invited to, I think, three years ago. It was before the pandemic and a local festival invited me to run the ‘Networks of Trust’ workshop. I collaborated with a group of teenage girls aged 14 to 17, and this was exactly what you described, a group of young women gathered together. One could feel this very special energy, feminine, but not so feminine yet, energy of weaving together stories and sharing ideas, desires, hopes and fears for the future. They wrote incredible stories, truly incredible stories. And at the end, in a gathering in a small garden of a local municipal library, the girls read in front of the audience their stories. I have kept this memory as one of the best I had with this kind of workshop. There were only these young girls sitting on a house stone wall in the garden, reading their stories to the audience and that was actually really, really beautiful. Adults in this gathering were exposed to the sincere and powerful way of thinking of these girls. They had to confront the future through their eyes.

Networks of Trust, Paros Festival 2019, Photo: Nikos Efstratiou

HAUNTINGS

Haunting is a process always in becoming. It's a residue of time other than the present and trace of the Other left embedded within a place. It is not only an outer layer. On the contrary, it infiltrates the very fabric of it. It is there but it is also somewhere else. A constant presence and a fleeting memory.
Ghosts haunt us in many forms. Places Goni portrays and visits tend to be haunted, haunted by pasts and futures, griefs and hopes, absences and extinctions. She transcribes residues of the Other. She encounters Mars, reaching out, paying attention. She gives a form to notation of sadness and loss, grief and melancholy in this eerie, strange place. She listens with care to transmissions from elsewhere.
Ghost and Monsters inhabit lands and islands of Anthropocentric damages. Explored foreign and monstrous bodies end up recorded and remembered in past and future losses. Poetry written in particles of by-products of various exploitations.
Transmissions from elsewhere. Messages from somewhere else. Haunted messages from Mars. Distant places touched remotely, desired from afar. Microbial life in digital debris. Tapestries inhabited by caresses of stranger’s longing.

Kyriaki Goni writes poetry of networks, lyrical and haunting, . Filled with tentative hope.Categorised by interwoven landscape and worlds, stories and myth-making, broadcasts and signals of alien coded messages and strange visitations, networks are devoted to telling and exchanging stories, connections of physical and spiritual survival.

DLoI:
Whenever I think about your exhibition at the Warsaw Biennale and that installation, I always seem to come back to the tapestries, despite the fact that the most uncanny, the most haunting part of the work is the video. It's just so eerie. But it's always the tapestries I remember. That's why I use the word “weaving”. This is how you make wall textile , but also you “weave stories”. You practise recording things in different forms and apply different forms of representation. A photograph is one way of imagery creation. And tapestry is another medium, another method of creating an image. And then drawing is another and video is another one and all these different forms of visual language are woven together. All belong to the one system of communication, internal for your practice.

What I see, and this is again something to do with the “Networks of Trust”, is that because of how you assemble everything, multiplicity of localities and locations, various time modes and time spans emerge.

There is an obvious delay in delivery of messages from Mars. The long term narrative associated with exploration and extraction of Space provides another dimension. Finally, the infinity of time in Space really doesn't have an end, like the Universe itself. So we have different infinities present in work too, the infinity of cosmic time, the illusion of infinity of our(human)time, of Capitalist extractions.
Equally, it's a set of different localities, with one being the Universe, the largest locality you can possibly imagine. The other one is you in front of your computer, or in your studio putting it all together and having conversation with the Rovers and listening to the wind on Mars.

KG:
I really like that you use this expression: ”weaving of stories'. It's quite literal in the process of making tapestries, but at the same time it remains metaphorical.
I was so overwhelmed by the information I collected throughout the period of creating ‘The Future Light Cone’ about Mars, that it felt as if I was transported there. While processing this information, I kept listening to the recordings of the wind on Mars. As I was exposing myself every day to these strange landscapes, I started feeling a kind of affinity.

DLoI:
This brings me to the position and appearance of tapestries which speak of your strategy of organising the work. The tapestries create an island or even an archipelago out of an installation. They form together a narrative, materialising the story going beyond the Western tradition, everywhere, elsewhere.

KG:
So tapestries are, as you said, woven, but at the same time their emergence is my way of bringing together different elements. On the one hand the scientific inquiry and on the other hand stories about the links between technology and colonialism. On these tapestries, I put all these stories together in order to share them visually. So it is a combined act of the actual weaving and the ‘weaving’ of stories.
At the same time, during my research I was continuously on Twitter. Two latest rovers, the Perseverance and the Opportunity have both Twitter accounts and people who are running the accounts, write in first person on behalf of them. So every time, I would get on Twitter and I would read the first person tweets the rovers did, I was feeling as if I was in dialogue with the rovers far away in Space. All these different threads of research and experience are woven into the tapestries. It's accurate that we have been using the word woven, both metaphorically and literally.

DLoI:
Finally, we arrive at the notion of reverse in your tapestries. It is so interesting that you move them away from the walls making them free hanging sculptural objects, instead of flat pictorial surfaces presented against an architectural background. Once you change their relationship to space, their 3 dimensional aspect produces a place for reverse to gain importance. Something that was hidden is now being exposed. The process is not only directed at giving pieces a sculptural quality, it also serves another platform for communication given to the hidden history.
Mars tapestries possess this incredibly realistic and visceral quality. Photographic images are mirrored on fabric, and yet woven in. It makes realistic quality of photography merging with tactile, bodily quality of the thread. They feel like a cross-section of digital and corporeal. They are a bit like a dream giving away the sensation of strangeness, of Freudian uncanny. Like an unknown hybrid. It’s like continuous translation in flux, back and forth. Haunted image and haunted movement.

Kyriaki Goni, The Future Light Cone 2022, installation views, Biennale Warszawa 2022. Photo: Bartosz Górka, courtesy of Biennale Warszawa

KG:
I have edited and manipulated many found images, then the final images have been digitally woven. They are not printed, they are woven. There is a relationship between technology and the history of weaving, which is also subtly addressed in this materiality. I knew from the very beginning that I wouldn’t hang the tapestries on the wall. I was interested in exposing the inverted back side of them.
The curators and architects of the Warsaw Biennale fully supported my idea of hanging the tapestries from the ceiling and we eventually created this installation of the orbiting tapestries, which I have to say really worked in space.

DLoI:
When I encounter your work, I always tend to think about haunted landscapes. About ghosts. I would like to speak about past extinctions, colonial violence, Capitalist exploitation, but also possible future losses, future griefs.

The history of land and violence so often committed against it manifests in the form of ghosts inhabiting it. When I think about Mars and the eeriness characterising the Other, I think of all of your other landscapes and of fossils you mentioned and how you repetitively choose to portray places and dwellings that are haunted.
I remember how years ago I went to Milos, which is this beautiful, completely alien landscape. And I don’t mean only Sarakiniko beach and its Moon-like white rock formation. Strangeness is everywhere. The cliffs are literally covered with fossils created by prehistoric volcanic activity. These crystallised worlds of the past are to me, hauntings. The inhabitations are built out of different traces; traces of the event, traces of the life pre-event, but also a trace of exploration and exploitation that followed or will follow, of later times and finally the haunting of my own presence and my experience, all entangled together.
The haunting is something intangible; of liminal identity. It's something that you only feel, but can't really describe. Essentially it goes into this level of unknown, right?

THE OTHER

In Goni’s practice the Other carefully relates post-humanist themes, or more importantly non- anthropocentric possibilities of living. Alien=Other selves and communication modes and systems emerge deposited in ongoing conversations. Language in flux.
The unfamiliar, the Uncanny. Sentience, mind and consciousness. Relationships and interdependencies coming into existence through continuous translation to and from the Other.

Mars becomes a merged landscape of stars, land, earth and space. Monster is a bio-machine, life changed by capitalist extractions and patriarchal manipulations. Other is any-being not- so-different but unlike us. The primal anxiety of the not-exactly-familiar.

DLoI:
I wanted to speak about another category I sense so much in your practice, the Other. You engage beings other than humans, other minds and communications. This brings us to the category of uncanny and the uncanny haunts us frequently. It's something that by the tiniest trace of strangeness cannot be defined. We cannot recognise its sameness. It's almost like us, but not exactly, still just enough to make us slightly uncomfortable. The uncanny is here Freudian source of horror, something that is almost recognisable but never truly known. Shadow in the corner of your eye. Half remembered memory. Haunting by a presence that is absent, but doesn't go away.

I wanted to ask you not exactly why, but more of how it is that you tend to be drawn to so many of these instances? I partly understand that your research subjects dictate the nature of results, but partly is it that it's a form of poetics that you use too. Is this little discomfort somehow necessary?

KG:
The answer is, I don't know. One could say that I'm working with art and technology, which is what I usually say when people ask me, :‘What do you do?' I focus on the interconnections of technology and society, and I don't know why I'm drawn to that. It just happens. Maybe it's a need that I have, which I cannot really address and understand. But it’s as you said, I start researching something that is statistically and objectively driven. I start to shift from the objective of scientific or anthropological approach and let it become something else. I look into it in a way that I cannot really explain. This is a point

where different collaborators appear and I am sort of allowing this to happen. I wouldn’t define it as a methodology. Maybe it happens because I feel comfortable, because I'm open to that sort of progress, but if you ask me to do it on purpose right now, I cannot do it. Not consciously. Not with predetermination.

It's a process of being shaped and shaping at the same time, by using the material that you have and the experience that you have with the collaborators, both human and not. In a way it is shaped both by you and the surroundings and vice versa. It's a process of shaping by relation.

DLoI:
Have you ever read the book ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaw Lem?

KG:
Yes, I have read the book and seen Tarkovsky’s movie as well.

DLoI:
The reason I ask about it is not purely because of the context of Mars, extraterrestrial minds and messages, alien planets, Space transmission and the act of reaching out. It's more of a fact that, like in your earlier works, for example “Data Garden”, you go to the place that considers existence and possible ways of working of other minds, of other forms of consciousness, of other sentient beings. Essentially that's what we are talking about in ‘Solaris’, of a sentient being that communicates in its own unique way.
The book considers failure of incompatible, misunderstood ways of communication and various language systems. What I find fascinating, and again this happens in quite a lot of your projects, is that we found ourselves in relation with landscapes that are haunted. Because of those losses and damages already occurred, there is a type of sadness present in the places researched. There is grief in it, feeling of loss. They are a little bit like recordings, not only of something that has happened, but also very often of something that failed to materialise. I think if you encounter a place that has been touched in a certain way, it’s marked.
Solaris Ocean tries to communicate with the main characters by embodiments. The Guests, which are Solaris’ messages in flesh, are manifestations of memories. They are really haunted presences of something that did not work out a constant presence of memories that haunt. The shown haunted landscapes or monstrous creatures emerge from extinctions, from long time narrative inflicted losses. So in a sense, you are like Anna* standing somewhere between ghosts and monsters, hauntings and losses and griefs.
Maybe that is the reason this framework is so fitting for your work due its unset, undefiable identity. Not only it awakens curiosity, and the need to explore further, it also awakens these very contradictory emotions that are subjects of your investigations. That's fear of something that appears familiar, that instigates recognition but scares too. It's not the scientific record exactly of what happens, but in a sense, it gives you a feeling of anxiety rooted in their almost sameness, minuscule difference.

* Lowenhaupt Tsing

KG:
You described it accurately, it is a mix of curiosity and fear or anxiety at the same time that makes me pick these subjects in the first place. Creating work inspired by these subjects is probably my way to banish or at least come into terms with the aforementioned feelings.

DLoI:
Even though subjects that you take on are very tangible and often downright viscerally scary to begin with, as you get more into them, they become a little bit blurred on the edges, not as obvious, not as easily definable as before.

KG:
Quite literally, while I'm going through the process of producing work, although it begins as you mentioned very tangibly, these are certain things that I want to look into. And eventually it becomes something very chaotic. It is a stressful period at the beginning because I don’t know where this will take me. This is something that I tend to experience with every work.
It's not a linear route that I go where I start from A and then move to B and then eventually I move on to C. It's something that I completely lose from the very beginning or don’t even know what's the destination. Instead I let it gradually form itself. But every time I go through this chaotic situation I expose myself to this kind of uncanniness.
And can I add something? You talked about temporalities and in your notes you mentioned extinctions, colonial violence and exploitation. These are indeed present in my works, but also, especially in ‘The Future Light Cone’ these are situations that are yet to come. Among Mars images I used for the installation, two or three already show traces of outside interference, marks of what is already happening; one with the drills and another one with the traces of the Rover. But most of the landscapes are still left untouched. Or more precisely, they are only impacted by the gaze of the Rover’s camera, our gaze. Photographs capture areas with traces of our interventions from a distance . They equally record or predict if you will, future interventions, traces, exploitations, extinctions and disappearances.

DLoI:
I see this gaze as an expression of the desire to possess completely. In a sense, it's like an unreciprocated interest, an abuse that originates in its need of possession, of ownership, and dominance. A desire associated with power.

KG:
You also spoke about grief. Some of the locations indeed contain a sense of grief. Grief either for something that already has happened, or when it lies ahead in the future as so far it is only Rover’s gaze that has interfered.
My method of working in this case was to leave something open-ended. And this opening is an expression of hope. At the end of the video, if you remember, there is this question posed possibly by the landscape itself, by the rocks themselves, by the ancient ocean; ”Are you here to tame or are you here to converse with us? Are you able to converse?” For me this means the presence of grief for something that has already happened, but also of a small chance that maybe we may yet to find other ways of conversing with other than human entities that are around us.

DLoI:
When I think of that gaze that watches with such desire, I hope that there is also a chance to change its aim from the desire to possess, to the desire to begin and establish a relationship, which is of course something completely different. I believe a good relationship that we have in mind is about exchange between equals. Originally that gaze is the gaze of a conqueror, a coloniser. That makes it being gazed upon as something to possess and exploit. And maybe this gaze can be changed into a gaze filled with desire to establish a partner relationship.

KG:
The desire to begin and establish a relationship, which implies at the same time desire to care long-term.

DLoI:
Experiencing ‘The Future Light Cone’ prompts reflections about Mars and ideas originating from science fiction, like contact with Alien, for example. Mars is this very metaphor of something in Space that is uncanny and possibly may have life or may have had life before. So the context of science fiction is attached to it too. Concept that quite a lot of people believe is real, or believe as a possibility that it could be real somewhere along the way. But I think Mars is not only seen from a perspective of sadness or dreadful possibilities behind future discoveries, but also about this very ultimate idea of the Other, an eerie and uncanny stranger.

KG:
Yes, exactly.

DLoI:
It is something equally terrifying and fascinating and can also be fragile as you have shown within the work. There is this idea in science fiction and in common conviction that the Alien is always the enemy. Someone or something who poses a threat, which of course beautifully writes itself into the idea that any Other, anyone and anything associated with difference, foreign, strange or out of norm, is a source of danger. So it's fine to hate or fear. It is to justify exploitations and extinctions.
But what if you present a proposal with a message that is an invitation to converse? It's also in the wind, it’s also in the land that has been already affected in a small way, but can be possibly affected on an enormous level in the future. So if it is the proposal that shows the Other as potentially fragile and vulnerable and not a source of fear at all, even though it has an uncanny quality? I think this to be an introduction to consider the Other not as something or someone that needs to be contained and subdued, but with an approach that is based on care and relation set in exchange.

It's like a map of anxiety. You frequently work with other human collaborators and exploration stories you cover.And they in the process create a hybrid environment,where even exhibition and how it is presented, is a network of different collaborations and exchanges in-between different states of being. I was wondering how you would see that in the context of the Other?

KG:
It's a difficult question. I agree that you can describe the work and installation as a hybrid, because indeed it is created and built with different parts and collaborators, both human and non-human and all these different stories that come together become one story in a way.
If you look close enough, you can see that there are multiple elements that are actually making the big whole. In this sense, I agree that this is a hybrid.
And there is a relation with the Other of course. First of all by recognizing that hybrid is a part of many others, who in turn are connected and collaborate with each other and are in a state of interdependence between each other in order to create something. So the approach to hybrid here is as something other in a way.
For example, I felt that very intensively with ‘The Future Light Cone’. When I was working on it I didn't have the chance to set it up in another space, before the installation in Warsaw. Of course, we were discussing possible installation modes with the curators and the architects. But when I went there before the opening, I felt as if it was some other place. There was this entity- the work itself- that I haven't properly met, although I was working with and on it. I felt that I encountered it in a way. Again, for the lack of a better word, it was physical. It was as if the presence of all these stories and all these others were brought together by being there in space, by materialising.
The second aspect of these communications has actually to do with the audience. How other people reach out or connect with the work. This is an important part for me. During the Warsaw Biennale I kept receiving DM and stories on Instagram from people that I haven't met. They would write, “Oh, I really liked the “Future Light Cone’. It made me think about that..., it made me feel that...” I think this is also another aspect of meeting the other in that way, an- other encounter.

Networks of Trust, workshop, Warsaw Biennale 2022, Photo: Bartosz Gorka

PRACTICE

If one looks from a certain angle, Goni’s practice falls into the form of socio-political investigation. Her research touches the very nature of how we define and treat the world we live in, how neighbouring worlds and worldmaking to be seen and how we choose to navigate it, how we compromise and negotiate it, all in relation with an-other. As such a method of investigation, it has at the core the practice of living in-between beings and landscapes existing in the realm made and born, living and existing, other and the same, by extension meaning being an active member of a community.
In a way, it grows on foundations of language as formula, form and shape of what it tries to communicate. An expression of need to tell and share a story. To define the message. Poetics web across works with inwoven and continuously evolving inter-relations; poetics of exploitation, poetics of encounters; poetics of assemblages (women planet space people resources). Dominating strategies and narratives, extractionism and exploration weave into personal stories and networks connecting archipelagos of existence.

DLoI:
I would like to ask you about a very broadly understood take on the notion of practice. One of the aspects I consider in the context of practice is seen through lenses of Duchamp’s proposal of inquiry based on chance which we spoke of, and which seems to fit perfectly with your way of doing things. The other aspect of your work is that due to the subject and nature of your research, it unavoidably touches problems and issues that have strong social relevance as although your practice is not directly socially involved, it contains a socio- political commentary that is affective and often unavoidable. Finally, you create networks on different scales and with the different participants.
I was wondering if you would consider your practice in this context collaborative? Or rather, would you consider it being in collaboration for example, with rovers on Mars or with the network itself. Would you say that to you Space is only the subject of the research or could you possibly see it as another being, a collaborator as well?

The mountain islands shall mourn us eternally (Dolomites data garden ), video still 2022 ©Kyriaki Goni

KG:
Now I am thinking of “Counting craters on the Moon” an 2019 installation. The core of the installation is a fictional conversation between a 19th century acclaimed astronomer and the third director of the National Observatory in Athens, Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt and DeepMoon, a 2018 neural network, both set to count craters on the Moon. I started by visiting the Observatory in Athens and looking into the astronomer’s diaries and notes. Eventually I was drawn in by his personal story. He was living alone with his parrot and his cat, completely devoted to science. This feeling of almost chatting with him about his discoveries, eventually was the basis for the fictional conversation. So, yes, it is as you put it, a collaborative process between myself and other collaborators.

DLoI:
This series started with a proposal coming from the position of language, and with the term Infrathin as a prism for all the interviews published here. I think of it as understanding the idea of artistic practice as investigation based in irony and chance, an alternative to the scientific Enlightenment-based method ruled by numbers and certainties, way of inquiry.
I think you fit into this investigative frame because of the way you work, and how you centre research. You start with a methodology that is widely accepted. But the process leads you elsewhere and you let it. You created unique poetics we spoke of, in order for this slight shift of direction to happen. And it happens because of acceptance of chance. You don't know where your investigation is going to lead you. This is not something that would be considered strictly scientifically done. The process is completely open.

KG:
So that's why I shared with you a story about the Rovers and the wind on Mars. I don't feel that I put something under my microscope and just say ”Okay, I will explore that”. And I will make it work. I open up and I spend time with the wind, with the rovers, with the landscapes, with the islands. The stories that emerge as a result of this process are not completely mine. I am up to some extent a mediator. While I have a part in co- creating and co-shaping stories, I'm not creating with the scientific paradigm in mind. I feel that these are other entities that share their stories with me and I am present to listen to them. Like the fossil on the Aegean island, which shared a story about the first networks in the Aegean archipelago. It is the fossil that I actually encountered while hiking on the island! This is how I wrote the Poem of the Origins of Networks of Trust.

There is this pair of words in Greek which describe an act of listening. “to listen” ακούω, which means an act of listening originating in the ability to hear, like listening to music for example, and another word αφουγκράζομαι, which considers listening “carefully”. “I lean in and listen carefully”. I feel like I try to lean in and listen carefully to these slight infrasounds that are all around us.

DLoI:
I think it's about paying attention.

KG:
Exactly, paying attention to stories. Paying attention to the carriers of these stories, who cannot share them in our language. I encounter them and I am being present, being there spending time with them. I collect and share stories of all these beings, of all my collaborators.
My experience with work on the ‘Future Light Cone’ was as if I was on Mars. I was there in a way, trying to hear or to listen carefully. To me, it's a kind of collaborative process. Although in this instance collaborators are not human beings. Of course on many occasions I will commission someone. For example, for the installation "A way of resisting, Athens Data garden” I joined forces with a women only vocal assemble in Greece. In the process before the actual production, there is another layer of partnership, which is the alliance with non-human entities.

DLoI:
I definitely see your practice in this way. It's a really beautiful way of working. It reminds me of Tomas Saraceno and the way he works with spiders. About sculptures he makes with arachnids which are listed as made by the spider collaborators. So animals are recognised as co-creators participating in the artistic process. And in this relationship different species and co-creators participating in the artistic process. And in this relationship different species and minds exist on the same level. There is a difference but no division, exchange but no hierarchy. I think it's a very beautiful approach.

KG:
I think it's soothing somehow as well. To me it is also a way of caring and of connecting with other worlds beyond the human.

Kyriaki Goni is an artist, who for ten years now engages with diverse media to explore the political, affective, and environmental dimensions of big tech. Her focus encompasses extractivism, surveillance, human and non-human relations, as well as alternative networks and infrastructures related to care and community. Employing websites, textiles, ceramics, drawings, videos, sound, and text, Goni's installations construct alternative ecosystems and shared experiences by bridging the local with the planetary and intertwining the fictional with the scientific.

Recent solo exhibitions have been showcased at The Breeder Gallery in Athens, the Blenheim Walk Gallery at Leeds Art University, Drugo More in Rijeka, SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen, KVOST Art Collection Telekom in Berlin, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and Aksioma in Ljubljana.

Goni's work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as Art and Technology Biennial INDEX, Braga, 1.5 Degrees at Kunsthalle Mannheim, 2nd Warsaw Biennale, 8th Gherdeina Biennale, The New Digital DealArs Electronica, Modern Love at EMST, 24th Thessaloniki Photobiennale, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Transmediale2020, 5th Istanbul Design Biennial.

Goni has been commissioned from prestigious organizations such as the Shanghai Biennale, Gherdeina Biennale, Warsaw Biennale, Onassis Foundation, PCAI, Ars Electronica, and Art Collection Telekom. Her work has garnered recognition through prizes and fellowships from Allianz Kulturstiftung and Bertelmanns Stiftung, Ars Electronica and Telekom, as well as the Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki, Greece, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Her art is included in institutional and private collections.

In addition to her artistic pursuits, Goni frequently lectures, writes, and delivers talks. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Prior to that, she pursued graduate and postgraduate degrees in Social and Cultural Anthropology in Athens and Leiden, Netherlands.

Kyriaki Goni.

Poetics of Trust.

Discrete Life of the Infrathin

Kyriaki Goni.

Poetics of Trust.

Felix Lenz

Max Limbu

Discrete Life of the Infrathin