Marianna Christofides

"In an interview with my uncle in 2008 during the shooting of the film Pathways in the dust. A topography out of fragments in Cyprus he was recounting the story of a single breadfruit tree in a moist hollow amidst the dust plain of Mesaoria. The fruit would be carved into toys – lorries and tanks – by them as children in the 30s.
My uncle's rather incidental question about how this tree may have come to the island accompanied me in the time to follow and would become the stimulus for the work l'histoire d'histoire d'une histoire. There the voice-over begins: "I want to find a story. A story in images. Images that carry with them a sense of arrival and onward journey – trace a path, become movement. To search for images which steer sight towards a threshold."
I found the image that was missing in my uncle's story in a press photo of the Continental Airlines that was taken in 1971 in Hawaii. The place of remembrance itself lies today unreachable within the restricted military zone in the north of Cyprus.
There, scattered in the olive groves and small gorges, one finds bulbous stones from which a rare pigment is won. It is used in icon painting on Mount Athos in Greece – the Cypriot Green Earth. Its winning is, due to today's political situation, nearly impossible and therefore the pigment is available only in small quantities.
I apply it as the first layer in the print. A part of the (hi)story permeates the work as a medium in its actual materiality.
In the text, it says: "A little outside the village in the dry, hard earth there's a hollow where water remains and the breadfruit tree grows."
Marianna Christofides

11 marble cubes (11 x 11 x 11 cm each)
Byzantine clay fragments
c-print, framed 85 x 120 cm
two A4 typescripts
Text: Marianna Christofides, Bernd Bräunlich

"Starting from an incomplete film on the loss of my father, this three-part work which would translate in "Timecode for a Narrative Voice" addresses the elusiveness and merely suggestive feasibility of memory. In the film "Pathways in the dust" there is a scene in which I arrange hundreds of clay fragments on a wooden table that were previously immersed in water. These are part of a collection of sherds of Cypriot pottery from the 12th-15th century that I had found with my father in the ploughed fields and olive groves around Nicosia in the late 80s, rain had rendered them visible. It is a landscape that does not exist anymore, the town has expanded way past it. The shards of earthenware left traces on the wooden table, indistinct like the text fragments that oscillate between first and third person, left in uncertainty as to whom they could be referring to. The passages are in effect musings on a place by an attentive observer whilst he has long since left that place."
Marianna Christofides

An image of an incommensurable landscape is combined with an engraved text, part of the legend of a British colonial map of Cyprus in the 1950s. This pragmatic piece of writing for clarification on the way of reading a map in respect to contours as boundaries or rights of way transforms semantically in the light of the current sociopolitical situation when knowing that the image depicts one square metre of sand beach with tar and bitumen residues in the north of Cyprus.

"divide et impera has always been the maxim of power politics. During a 3-month stay in London in 2013 I pursued a research into the mapping of Cyprus as a British Colony. Going through correspondences between the colonial offices in the National Archives I saw into a kaleidoscope of perspectives dictated by variable political interests of a vast empire.

In the studio in London where I worked during this research I stretched a white paper across the wall from edge to edge, dotting it with constellations of black snippets. They were cut out from adhesive transfer lettering, in fact from the leftover foil around the letters. There is always a historical unconscious which lies beyond the piles and stacks of archival material. In this drawing, a suggestion of a map, movement and direction are implied, the elements disperse, converge, cumulate without however becoming a territory – a centrifugal force is at work."
Marianna Christofides

Text: Marianna Christofides, Bernd Bräunlich

What associations are triggered when one enters a room in an abandoned hotel in Greece and comes across an hornet's nest attached to a curtain rail? The nest had been built layer by layer by hornets from North Africa.
In the work a photograph of the found scene is embedded in a seemingly scientific text concerning the layered composition of the earth’s crust and its folds and fissures in mountainous regions of Europe. Footnotes on geological termini such as thrust from the South or autochthonous massif have been added referring to current social and cultural fluxes – the writing of history, the notion of the endemic, the shifting of borders. What connects tectonically non-shifted rock with the realisation that places of one's personal history can't be detected any longer? How does the origin of rock strata lead to the breadfruit tree's migratory history and the settling of Oceania? Where do parallels appear between geological melange and the Mediterranean Sea as an EU-buffer zone?

"A wasps' nest was sitting on a beam in the roof timbering of my uncle’s house in a mountain village in Cyprus. On an August day the temperature rises up to 50 degrees Celsius in such a roof. At the onset of some previous winter the colony had died away, the nest abandoned; its fragile construction renders it uninhabitable after a year. Having only a bread knife handy we detached it carefully from the site on that late summer afternoon. The nest weighs just a few grams. Mount Penteli in Attica towers above the suburbs of Athens, the quarry is known from antiquity as the site where the marble blocks for constructing the Acropolis derive from. Between the crags there still lie bones of prehistoric animals, long since extinct. The stone is of a pristine white hue. A wasps' nest is sitting on a marble beam, wandering from space to space, lit and covered."
Marianna Christofides

"A wasps' nest was sitting on a beam in the roof timbering of my uncle’s house in a mountain village in Cyprus. On an August day the temperature rises up to 50 degrees Celsius in such a roof. At the onset of some previous winter the colony had died away, the nest abandoned; its fragile construction renders it uninhabitable after a year. Having only a bread knife handy we detached it carefully from the site on that late summer afternoon. The nest weighs just a few grams. Mount Penteli in Attica towers above the suburbs of Athens, the quarry is known from antiquity as the site where the marble blocks for constructing the Acropolis derive from. Between the crags there still lie bones of prehistoric animals, long since extinct. The stone is of a pristine white hue. A wasps' nest is sitting on a marble beam, wandering from space to space, lit and covered."
Marianna Christofides

"The periphery of things has a story to tell, directing the gaze to a seam brings it to the fore. Whilst searching for a compatible tape to fix the deteriorated one that had resulted in the separation of the two glass plates of which a magic lantern slide consists of I saw these brushstrokes – a test for the colour tone.
By applying pigment the colourist back then interpretes the image, creates the place. What is the colour of the shadows for the diver suspended in water behind glass? A passage of J.W. Goethe's 'Theory of Colours' from 1810 is screenprinted beneath the image of an unidentified view."
Marianna Christofides

"The periphery of things has a story to tell, directing the gaze to a seam brings it to the fore. Whilst searching for a compatible tape to fix the deteriorated one that had resulted in the separation of the two glass plates of which a magic lantern slide consists of I saw these brushstrokes – a test for the colour tone.
By applying pigment the colourist back then interpretes the image, creates the place. What is the colour of the shadows for the diver suspended in water behind glass? A passage of J.W. Goethe's 'Theory of Colours' from 1810 is screenprinted beneath the image of an unidentified view."
Marianna Christofides