Yorgos Maraziotis
Mythical Truths
A multidisciplinary intervention throughout the Royal Academy of Fine Arts
27 April - 7 July 2023
→ Read the exhibition catalogue
'Mythical Truths', the site-specific artistic research that Yorgos Maraziotis is currently executing at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, spans between archiving, social sculpture and institutional critique. Drawing on the understanding of space through embodied memories and over a methodology that includes story-telling, human relations and visual arts, Maraziotis provokes the canon of academic knowledge and envisions an alternative school model where decision making occurs on the authority of its own people.
During the autumn of 2022, students, professors, technicians, administrative personnel and others that constitute the Academy, were invited to share their everyday experiences while walking through and around the school buildings. Their narratives touch, among others, notions on apprenticeship, spatial agents, representation and identity structures, everyday-life joys and burdens. And they highlight the Academy as a unique and diverse community. The recorded stories have been edited according to personal narrative and literacy criteria into a written archive which upon its publication shall work as a portrait of the school in the 21st century.
Parts of the aforementioned archive gain momentum through their sculptural, design and sound translation in space. More specifically, from April to July 2023, selected oral narrations will be turned into language-based neon, metal and marble sculptures, printed matter and sound projections, and will be exhibited in numerous indoors and outdoors spaces of the Academy; the garden, the Orangerie, the Wintertuin, various halls, the Research Room and the Library. This way a polyphonic landscape will be created where personal truths blur with collective myths and shape the identity of the institution.
'Mythical Truths' stems from Maraziotis’ necessity to look into the school model as an educational, pedagogical and cultural ecosystem where his vision of sculpture and archiving can amplify or sustain its social diversity.
