‘A set of speeds on slownesses’ by Matheline Marmy is the result of a two-years research interval, during which she worked with artist and founder of Yellow Brick Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, keeping notes of conversations, visiting archeological museums and sites, and ultimately making work in the space of the gallery.
This summer, she immersed herself in an excavation run by ESAG near Amarynthos, on the island of Euboea. Archaeological artefacts, gestures and conversations became the continuous ‘note keeping’ for a sculptural making, integrating diffusely the scientific knowledge.
In Matheline’s work the viewer observes her observations. In the day-to-day findings and dialogues with archeologists and local technicians, she unfolds the endurance of materials and explores their capacities as non-human transmitters.
While making her artifacts, a constant observation mode is obvious, as the studio turns into an ephemeral lab where water, metal and soil interact with the space, suggesting the existence of more than one landscape.
Do the work needs a viewer? Perhaps, it happens.
Her gestures and processes presented in Yellow Brick constitute ongoing alterations: as the wire keeps oxidizing, the water evaporates. Translating her experience in an in-situ sculptural installation, she implies a slow economy of ‘getting to know’, working with local craftsmen of Nea Ionia. Alongside, an assemblage of texts becomes a witness, in the form of a limited publication.
Allowing herself and her practice to slow down under the Athenian sun, she suggests on the one hand an understanding of archeology as a scientific realm, and on the other hand, as a way of learning, feeling, making and connecting with the people and the landscape, the anecdotes, the place.
“- And I was cleaning it, there was this byzantine pot handle. Nothing important, the end of the handle. And there was this fingerprint.”
(Quote from a conversation)
In collaboration with:
graduated in 2016 from Photography at ECAL, Lausanne, and continues her studies at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Fine Arts section. She works between Rotterdam and Geneva.
