A door and six heartbeats away, 2020
Panayiotis Michael in collaboration with Maria Petrides
Single-channel video, 6’14’’
Panayiotis Michael in collaboration with Maria Petrides
Text by Maria Petrides
Video editing and technical support by Panayiotis Charalambous
Voice of Diomedes Koufteros
The house portrayed in A Door and Six Heartbeats Away flowsbetween its location and what appears indoors, but the two do not necessarily concur. It is situated in what is referred to as Cyprus’ Green Line or the Buffer Zone or the “Dead” zone, patrolled by the UN forces. Since its front entrance and garden rest in the prohibiting line, the residence hovers in an in-between space of entering and exiting, its only access being through the back door. This daily experience of a direct partition is expressed in ordinary moments of living somewhere where contrasting sentiments destabilize one’s sense of time and space; in the compromised limits of seeing beyond one’s immediate settings, and in the spectacle of the weather, a phenomenon beyond human control. Weather has been a feature of literature for centuries, often employed as a stylistic means to build narrative, to establish romantic affection and to unveil relationships, acting as crucial parts that make up a novel and its plot.
For A Door and Six Heartbeats Away, the text was written without the author having previously seen the video; it took off from the imagined backdrop of an invented home and its interior. This incidental relationship of text and image, like that of the house itself and the surroundings outside it, engenders stories and new remains of life elsewhere, behaving therefore like a dissonance to the moving image it engulfs.
Exhibition history
2020 Net Works - Pitch for a Social Network Sphere, group exhibition, KARA AGORA - online Art & Research Center. Curated by Julia Hardmann
Participating artists:Parwana Amiri, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Bernadette Anzengruber, Maya Attoun, Between Bridges, Louis Cameron, Constant Dullaart, Lucas Gabellini-Fava, Rajkamal Kahlon, Egor Kraft, MAI LING, Panayiotis Michael + Maria Petrides, Timea Oravecz, Vasilios Papapitsios, Stefanie Seibold, Darja Shatalova + Maria Belova, Technopolitics, Borjana Ventzislavova, Christina Werner
2021 Humming in non-linear time, solo exhibition, eins gallery, Limassol, Cyprus