AD gallery opens Evangelia Basdekis’ solo show entitled “The Silence of the Monkeys” on Friday, June 12, 2015 at 20:00. The show will be accompanied by the relevant performance, which will be presented on Friday, June 12 (20:00-22:00) and on Saturday, June 13, 2015 (12:00-16:00).

With this performance the artist Evangelia Basdekis is trying to close the gap between the narratives about human and nature.

Nature’s representation in Western culture is being done by the construction and the subsequent use of stereotypes, in the creation and processing of which fine arts have helped a lot. The most common stereotypes are those of nature as an inexhaustible source of food, wealth, but also as a nostalgia of the wild and primitive or as a romanticized background of human activity.

At the performance, seeds of various plants necessary in our diet are planted on the head into the hair of the artist to grow by her care using herself as a host. The performer consciously decides to dispose her temperature, sweat, time and space for the purpose of the growth of the seeds. As a result, the artist’s body is being marginalized-isolated, cannot work, participate in social activities, cannot eventually participate in simple, everyday events, around which she has organized her daily routine or life. The idea of abstinence from her previous life in order for the seeds to grow cannot be a product of obligation. This (rebellious) body cancels habits and actions, denies priorities.

Basdekis has no intention of creating a metaphor or allegory of nature in this performance. She does not aim in the representation of a mystical ritual that has references to cultural products, such as that of the shaman-healer artist. She does not make a sociological comment here by using the artist’s body as the ultimate refuge of survival, as the only place for the seeds’ growth in crisis conditions.

On the contrary, the artist considers that there is an urgent need to break free from any kind of theoretical references, schools and academic approaches of the nature and of the need to protect the natural environment. She believes that everyone has to take reponsibility as part of his/her own lived everyday routine.

Basdekis seeks the reappearance of the ties between two seemingly distant worlds, that of human and that of nature. She tries to remind us that the distance between them is constructed. She overemphasizes with this performance an unbreakable bond which, perhaps, has never been disrupted.

It is an effort of “de-conceptualization” of nature and the purpose of “representation” itself and it poses the question whether another contract between nature and intellect could be achieved beyond any notion of catechism.