Uh everything looks so fresh – Oh everything is so rotten! is a VR exhibition by London-based, Greek artist Eva Papamargariti, who conceived a simulated environment in which viewers are invited to navigate across a series of CGI rooms comprising films, digital prints and sound.
Uh everything looks so fresh – Oh everything is so rotten!takes its cue from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel(The Invention of Morel, 1940), a novel telling the story of a fugitive hiding on a desert island subjected to a series of anomalous and unexplained phenomena. Known to be the focal point of a fatal disease, the island is nevertheless crowded by tourists living in The Museum, a concrete, modernist building situated on top of a hill where they seem to endlessly repeat the same actions. Casares’ plot gets stranger when the narrator notices that these people, who seem unable to notice his presence, appear as suddenly as they disappear. After a series of investigations, he discovers a machine configured to record and reproduce reality, realizing that he is in fact surrounded by holograms living within an eternally returning moment of
their past.
Combining science fiction, prophetic fantasy and philosophy, La invención de Morel aptly anticipates current concerns regarding the development of simulation, virtual reality and brain-reading devices. In her new work, Papamargariti uses and interrogates these paradigm-shifting technologies by creating a virtual environment populated by hybrid, ominous creatures living in a landscape situated at the end of time – a digital limbo where nature and history have seemingly come to a standstill. The artist distributes fragments of this alternative reality into a series of short films and still images displayed across interlinked 3D rooms, where viewers can observe the absurd and unapologetically grotesque behaviours of characters abruptly shifting from apathy to ecstasy (and vice versa). Either dancing on their own, laying down amid luxuriant fields or interacting with luminescent insects and molluscs, these crossbreed beings – sort of zoophytes from a post-nuclear age – seem to have been part of an unknown tragedy and are expecting the advent of a new realm: an eschatological context suggested by the enigmatic and often oxymoronic graffiti inscribed on the ruins they inhabit.
Like Casares’ novel, Papamargariti’s work uses speculation and fantasy to pose a series of questions regarding the no longer hypothetical advent of parallel realities, contemplating the effects that the prospect of eternally reliving one’s life might have on human modes of perception and action. Can new memories, for instance, be formed when progress, if not time, has ceased to unfold? In one of the films, a book filled with repetitions of the same sentence – ‘we need to create new memories’, at times crossed out and replaced by ‘how to create new memories’ or ‘who needs to create new memories’ – emphasizes the limbo condition in which Papamargariti’s protagonists are trapped. In this story, however, the limbo is envisioned as both a disaster (however splendid, as one graffiti tells us) and a space of reflection and respite from continual progress. Used as an allegory for a contemporary condition in which growth seems as perilous as stagnancy, Papamargariti’s intermediate world reminds us that being stuck is a prerequisite to movement, that stillness is only a prelude to change. In this sense, the indecisiveness of her characters is often counterbalanced by their ability to enjoy what is left from a decaying civilization – ‘everything looks pretty when you’re falling’, as one of them wrote on a wall. Exploring the tensions between agony and delight, stasis and metamorphosis inherent to being confined, Papamargariti’s work extrapolates the present crisis to envision the existence of beings living in the ‘outer edge’ of technological utopia, a place where not only life but death is uncertain.
EVA PAPAMARGARıTı (b. 1987) grew up in Greece where she graduated from the Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly with a Diploma in Architecture (2012). She holds a Master Degree on Visual Communication Design from Royal College of Art, London. Her practice focuses on time-based media (video, gif animations) but also printed material and sculptural installations. She has exhibited her work in institutions museums and festivals such as the New Museum (New York, USA), Whitney Museum (New York, USA), Tate Britain (London, UK), MAAT Museum (Lisbon, PT), Museum of Moving Image (New York, USA), MoMA PS1 (New York, USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Montreal, CA), Athens Biennale (Athens, GR), Thessaloniki Biennale (Thessaloniki, GR), Transmediale Festival (Berlin, DE). Papamargariti participated in two exhibitions organised by NıCOLETTı: without Nature (London, 2018) and Maison d’histoire(s)-(non)naturelle(s) (Paris, 2019).
