E P A S everything is made of dreamsemanuel 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