E      P      A      S
everything is made of dreams

            
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta

            
mykonos biennale
            . 2015

            
to Lydia Venieri and Marcia Grostein
in memory of José Mariano Gago
          
          

            

















All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.
Jack Kerouac


In April 2015, my dear friend and great artist Marcia Grostein introduced
me to the Greek artist Lydia Venieri. It was a late afternoon at Lydia's home in
New York City.
Very fast we discovered not only common friends, but also a shared
interest on etymology and, of course, a common deep attention to love, which
Plato described as the cement of the world, what much later we would identify
as the first law in thermodynamics, a magic force recalled by Ficino in
Renaissance.
Plato said that "love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the
amazement of the gods"; and in his Symposium, that "love is born into every
human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to
make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature".
If you know Lydia - and also Marcia - you will see that love is something
fundamental in their lives and works.
In that meeting, Lydia gave me a box and a challenge: to put inside it
something for her art project ANTIDOTE, for the Mykonos Biennale of 2015.
Her project reminded me John Cage's Rozart-Mix.
In all senses, it was epic!
Greek language has four words for love: agape, eros, philia, and storge.
Agape indicates the idea of brotherly love, fraternity; eros is connected
to sex; philia means friendship; and storge is almost exclusively used to
indicate the feeling of members of a family.
I joined ten images for the box. I did not select them. I simply put in the
computer, searching on Internet, the follow key words:
          
        
        

          

            
click on the map above . see the text aside











 

                  
emanuel pimenta
mykonos biennale



lydia venieri
marcia grostein
josé mariano gago
 

            

            
          
          

            
1. Sky map
2. Internet
3. Cuneiform
4. Leonardo da Vinci
5. Nanotechnology
6. Nano image
7. Frontier of the Universe
8. Flash Gordon
9. Nano material
10. Planet Earth

Key words for an epic trip. After these words, one image for each word
was selected by chance.
Since the 1970s my works have been often designed accordingly to
Zen aesthetic principles: ten, chi, jin.
In this way, to each image I superimposed a fragment of a zodiac map -
in Gemini - and another image, of my eyes. So, in each one of them, we have
three elements.
It is not necessary to say about those words and their meaning - as a
process of discovery - regarding Lydia's challenge.
I titled the work - which is dedicated to Lydia Venieri and Marcia
Grostein - after the first letter of each one of the four Greek words for love:
EPAS. Interestingly, the Greek word epas means word, a tale, a prophecy,
and generated the term epic. Epas appeared from the Proto Indo-European
*wekw, meaning "to speak", "voice"...
But such an epic imaginary trip, made of dreams impregnated by love
for Humanity and Nature, should never be closed inside a box, even for one
second. Then, I made its ghost, its phantom, which is a word appeared from
the Greek phantasma, meaning an image, something made of light, real and
unreal, connected to another Greek word: phantasia - imagination, dream.
The phantasma of EPAS, of this epic dream, is a virtual box of light,
open to everyone all over the world in this website.
This website is the phantom of the box that is place in Greece now.
Few days after I'd concluded this work I received the sad news that my good
friend José Mariano Gago had passed away  in Portugal. We'd met each other
in 1986, when I was one of the art and science curators at the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation. This work is also made in his memory, like a Pandora Box,
but with unexpected marvelous discoveries, like what happens both in science and
in art.

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
New York City, 2015
          
        
        

          

          

        
      

      
 

      
the box