In a practice incorporating a variety of mediums and techniques, Marina Xenofontos explores the intricate folds and expressive capacities of ideas, mediums and materials as they traverse and affect different perceptual registers.
In pursuing her fascination with making things present, she has collaborated with Christophoros Kyriakides, a long gone architecture draughtsman that she met through a chance encounter with a board game he designed; an encounter that led to the resurface of a lifetime’s worth of writing by a sidelined inventor. Through the techniques of appropriation, of sculpturally actualising sketches, and using Kyriakides’ atypical interaction with the symbolic as a tactical ally, Xenofontos has initiated a process where unrealised ideas and frustrated feelings of failure from the past interact with our present-day reality, opening up new ways to deal with limited conceptions of authorship and authority.
The culmination of this collaboration is ‘We Are Not Alone, We Are a Fly in the Milk of Infinity’ (2016), a publication of notes, sketches and diagrams, arranged in a non-hierarchical manner. Building on the fragmented and scattered state of the found material, Xenofontos stages and handles the reterritorialising current of Kyriakides’ return to public life - a paradoxical process of preservation and hybridisation. By granting the circulation of words that had remained illegitimate and unheard, the artist expands what Jacques Rancière would term ‘the perceptual coordinates of society’. The project has gathered much attention, and the artist now seeks new methods of exploring fluid spatio-temporal coordinates. She is pursuing a path along the contours of unfinished pasts and reopened futures, whilst being preoccupied with both the navigation within arcane signs and the embodied experience of making. To these ends, she is currently in a dialogue with materials, colours, and surfaces, which have started to attain a special weight.