Marianna Christofides

A canary called Cassandra

* 1980 in Nicosia, CYP, lives and works in Berlin, GER
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens, GRC, the Slade School of Fine Art in London, GBR, and Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, GER

In one of her most recent works, the three-channel projection A canary called Cassandra, Marianna Christofides uses more than 200 collected slides to tell the story of the renowned Imperial Hotel, which was built by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Tokyo in the 1920s and opened just hours before the major Kantō earthquake that destroyed large parts of Tokyo and caused the death of more than 100,000 people. But the hotel survived almost undamaged. It took another 40 years until it was finally demolished for economic reasons in 1967.
In her earlier projects, the artist also dealt with architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, who sought to seamlessly integrate buildings into the landscape with their design concepts and followed the basic principles of organic architecture. In this work, Christofides approaches the theme via a rhetoric of collective memory. Slide by slide, the history of the Imperial evolves, futuristic interior and exterior views are paired with pictures of the surrounding nature and almost pilgrim-like group photos. Along with the slow fading in and out of the pictures, text also appears—lines like harbingers and yet referring to the natural catastrophe that just took place. A first vivid reference to the Kantō earthquake reaches the viewer in the third minute. Views of the stately Imperial now appear more frequently alongside pictures of destruction. The opposition of man and nature, creation and destruction, control and loss of control, is marked by the words »construction destruction« appearing simultaneously on all three projection surfaces in the eighth minute.
But what one experiences remains fragmentary, with a sense of incompleteness dominating the position of the viewer, for one can only surmise what the images—themselves marked by transience—convey and fear the unknown outcome. The fact that we as humans cannot always keep control and often face the power of nature with overconfidence is something that should preoccupy mankind today as well, almost a century after the opening of the Imperial Hotel and the Kantō earthquake. The title of the work is a reminder of this: It was Cassandra, the tragic heroine of Greek mythology, who foretold the fall of Troy and whose warnings went unheard.

Riccarda Hessling

Artist Statement
In my practice I deal with entangled stories that constitute the different layers of multi-authored places. Drawing on an array of discourses such as geography, architecture, anthropology and literature my mediums are film, text and sound. A canary called Cassandra departs from the entwined path of F.L.Wright's Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to pursue lines of geological and socio-historical narratives that explore phenomena of continuity, rupture and uncertainty in the anthropocene. Employing over years collected slides taken by an American officer stationed in Japan after WWII I weave these together with own texts as well as auditory footage of an uncontrollable nature. Editing a film in still images reactivates the archival footage and subverts its historical value by embedding it in a speculative narrative about the way we inhabit our environment. The belief that existing mechanisms to react on extreme changes are still effective is here challenged.

Marianna Christofides