Projects — Sphinxes

Candela
2025

Photo series
Materials: Colored Meter-lines
Dimensions: 1m Width x 60cm Height

The title of the artwork derives from the word candela, which is the unit of measurement for the luminous intensity of a light source emitted in a perpendicular direction from the surface of a black body. It is considered a fundamental unit of the International System of Units (SI).

Sphinxes paint meter-long stripes, thereby removing the units of measurement. Using these now-colored meter-lines, they select points in the ravaged landscape of the lignite mines of Megalopolis, “measuring” the destruction that has taken place.

The eroded scars are the result of lignite extraction, which has provided all the energy and light to the entire region through the power plant of Public Power Corporation.

Upon this black land, they bring these multicolored lines, negating the act of measurement while confronting the wounds and voids of this place.

Hadal Zone
The Rise of Orpheus,
Opera for Coincidental Audience
2023

The multimedia installation Hadal Zone, The Rise of Orpheus, Opera for Coincidental Audience unfolds five operatic acts. The soundrack of the work is Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’ Orfeo.

Sphinxes set the first four acts in the Old Oil Mill Factory of Elefsina, while the fifth is staged on the last balcony the open-air theatre, consisting of nine binoculars placed on the parapet, with their backs to the theatre stage and facing the sea and the city of Elefsina.

Indoor multimedia installation

Materials: Wood, Plexiglass, LED lights, 24 View-Masters, 24 View-Master reels, 12 headphones
Dimensions: 2.60m Width x 0.86m Height

Old Oil Mill Factory of Elefsina

Outdoor installation
Materials: 9 binoculars, 9 headphones, 9 metallic bases

The title of the work refers to the term “Hadal Zone”, which was proposed in 1956 by Danish oceanographer Anton Frederik Bruun influenced by Greek mythology and the portal of Chthonius - for the deepest point of the Earth, located in the Pacific Ocean.

The work makes reference to the mythical underworld of Elefsina as well as to the pragmatic over world that emerges from the depths of history and the past, with an overarching environmental narrative that highlights the fact that even the deepest recesses of the ocean are not immune to human-made pollution.

Metatropolis
2023

Building of the Arvali squat, Koukaki.

Metatropolis, is a work in the form of a board game, which, seeking new terms of coexistence and action, invites the exhibition's audience to become participants, fulfilling this way its destination.

With their previous work Thin Red Line (2019) as a starting point, based on the composition of a map, describing the route of squats spaces’ of freedom sealing-off procedure and promoting a new dimension of the of bodies’ movement within the city, they now explore the shifts that occur, not only at these spaces, but also at the city itself.

Metatropolis dashboard
Dimensions: 50.40 cm x 40 cm

“ During World War II, the British secret service hatched a master plan to smuggle escape gear to captured Allied soldiers inside Germany. Their secret weapon? Monopoly boxes.

The original notion was simple enough: Find a way to sneak useful items into prison camps in an unassuming form. But the idea to use Monopoly came from a series of happy coincidences, all of which started with maps.”

The map of the artwork Thin Red Line, showing the locations of squats with sealed entrances in Athens.

By reworking their map, they look for these traces that testify the “passage” from a sepng of sealing, towards a sepng of reconstruction.

The board game they create “freezes” a moment of transformation, while the game’s discourse and conditions allow the effect to the final outcome.

Board game box design

Through the element of the game and the condensation of time, a sense of control and supervision of the situation is being introduced, leaving the potential of change free, as also the influence of the players on the outcome and the formation of a common field.

Installation boardgame

Dimensions: 1.60 m Width x 70 cm Height
Materials: Wood, metal, dashboard, box, pawns, dice, map, cards, banknotes

Luna Meta Park
2022

Luna Meta Park is a large-scale multimedia installation comprising transitional theme park consisting of sound installations and mechanical sculptures called Bio-Games, a terminology used by Sphinxes as they explore the relationship between nature, industry and science.
Luna Meta Park creates a gradual immersion in the atmosphere of Luna Park as the coincidental audience activates it.

The audience is mesmerized by iconic musical symphonies and a simulated architecture. Within these familiar symbols, however, lurks something tragic. The entrance to the new park for the coincidental audience begins with the three-meter illuminated sign Luna Meta Park.

Luna Meta Park Sign

Inscription sculpture, 3 pieces
Materials: Metal, yellow metal color, colorful LED lights
Dimensions: 3m Height x 45cm Width each piece

The route starts at the Bio-game Melting Point, an interactive installation consisting of a cotton wool production mechanism. The new body is sweet. It is shared in the exhibition, under the pleasant melody of Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig Van Beethoven.

Melting Point

Materials: Metal, purple metal colour, electric cotton candy machine, LED lights, sugar, wooden sticks
Dimensions: 90cm Height x 70cm Diameter

Above it, 124 led lamps form the phrase "TAKE AND EAT” , creating poetic escapes with excerpts of verses from the poem "Farewell" by Yannis Ritsos, this Bio-game refers to the concept of the body, as he proposes as a hero the initiator of the poem in question, Grigoris Afxentiou.
For Afxentiou, fire is his own limit from life to death.

Mechanical Hand

Materials: Metal, red metal colour, green LED light, claw machine, joy stick with screen, mirror, plexiglas, soil, flowers
Dimensions: 2.20 m Height x 2.50m Width x 1m Depth

The skill cut game turns into the Mechanical Hand Bio-game, a metallic installation filled with soil, uproots the vegetation in a literal visualization of displacement. The Mechanical Hand raises issues of territorialization of desires and sensations, for territorialization in other places without roots.

Luna Meta Park’s sounds are classical pieces, that used by Disney after the Crash for his film Fantasia.

The Rite of Spring, developed by Roerich from Stravinsky's outline idea, the scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring.

The coincidental audience can play with the mechanical sculpture, deciding whether to uproot or not the flowers.

Cut Flow

12 pieces
Materials: Clay
Dimensions: Perimeter 16m, each piece 1m Width x 40cm Depth x 20cm Height

Fishing rods stand next to a dry cut river ready to activate the next sculpture.

Fishing Rods

16 pieces
Materials: Wood, colour, rope, fishing sinker
Dimensions: 1m Height x 10mm Thickness

In Cut Flow spectators can fish for plastic fish.
The fish curries texts from ecological disasters of the planet, taken from official world news.

The musical background here, recalls religious rites of penance and invocation to the Goddess with “Ave Maria” by Franz Schubert, creating space and time to reflect on the loss.

Fish

46 pieces
Materials: Recycled plastic bottle caps
Dimensions: 7cm Height x 20cm Width

A road marking material that commands a change of course stands sculpturally bearing the inscription "Everland" *, demarcating both the pause and the entry into new routes.

Everland

Materials: Plastic road marking, LED purple light, yellow sticker
Dimensions: 0.58cm Height x 0.96cm Width x 0.38 Depth

The Avatar of Reckful

For the final Bio-game the audience will need to cross a long, dark hallway, at the end of which they will meet Reckful's digital avatar in the first digital monument.

There, each spectator is confronted with an enigma derived from artificial intelligence mechanisms, marking the moment when the roles between artificial and human are reversed.

Dense Fog
2022

Materials: Processed cotton, ashes, metal
Dimensions: 2.30m x 70cm

“Hiroshima was an experiment.”
— Paul Virilio

An experiment that resulted in shadows without bodies, rivers flowing through cemeteries, people transformed into wounds, and lands without spring.
The final wound of the Second World War.

Dense Fog is an ephemeral monument to hard-hewn shadows on Hiroshima soil.
A monument of reversal in the Ode of the * Sign:

What you see here,
What you do here,
What you hear here,
When you leave here—
Let it stay here.

The work appears in a coincidental place, as coincidental as the fog that saved the city of Kokura on August 9, 1945 from the Second War atomic bomb.

* A billboard at Oak Ridge Facility in Tennessee warns people to keep silent about anything they see or hear there. Oak Ridge was a town built in 1942 to house workers and the laboratory that developed the Manhajan Project – the secret second world war program that built the atomic bomb.

A human shadow on the steps of a bank in Hiroshima, following the explosion of the nuclear bomb
in August 1945.

Holy Factory
2021

Holy Factory addresses the relationship between the power plant Factory in Megalopolis and the ancient temple of Epicurius Apollo. In the video, we observe two workers tracing a route of different places and landscapes, from the factory to the temple.

The uniforms designed and worn by the two workers bear a large pocket over the belly where they carry the ashes, remnants of the factory’s combustion processes.

The route ends with the two workers scattering the ashes into nature in succession as they enter the temple of Apollo - a route by which the cleansing of the place is sought.

Video
Duration: 5:12’’
Music Composition: Weronika Kijewska
Costume design: Sphinxes

Wall Disease
2020

The Wall Disease, is a series of 77 designs on paper, gilding with gold leaf 22 carats.

Until Second World War, there were 16 border walls around the world. In 1989, the fall of Berlin Wall brought a sense of hope that fewer walls would emerged. Causation of this artwork, a woman resident of Leipzig who could not open her mouth. Medical diagnosis a strange incident. Two months later she commits suicide. This incident, along with many others from people who lived between the walls was recorded until in 1973 the term ‘’Wall Disease’’ was born. For the first time Psychiatrists associate mental disorders of people with their living near the walls. Today the number of border walls has risen to 77 and the wounds they leave behind continue to seal people’s mouths.

Materials: Paper, gold leaves 22 carats
Dimensions: 32,9cm Height x 48,3cm Width

Panoramic X-rays of people that passed away, archive material from dentists.
Text: The walls that exists until now around the world.

*Diewried Müller-Hegemann was a German physician specialising in Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Neurology.

In 1973 Diewried published a short book entitled "Die Berliner Mauerkrankheit "The Berlin Wall illness: societal origins of a psychic disorder" in which he put forward the thesis that a certain combination of psychological symptoms correlated with how close they lived to the Berlin Wall, the sudden erection of which in 1961 had been a particularly acute source of stress-shock for its nearer neighbours on the "eastern" side.

There were nevertheless indications that one start towards healing for those affected might be to find a way to escape from the east to the west.

Thin Red Line
2019

The Thin Red Line project is comprised of nine mailboxes located on the cemented entrances of squats, at the point where a wall barricading ideas, thoughts, collectivities, political stances, social acts and human lives arises, thus creating blank spaces.

These mailboxes create a small space aiming to fill a big gap. This map functions as means of communication within the city and a quide on how to reach one of those boxes in order to develop the free speech on how to tear a barricading wall down.

The map functions as means of communication within the city and a quide on how to reach one of those boxes in order to develop the free speech on how to tear a barricading wall down.

Materials: Nine red mailboxes, maps

83.

Wall-mounted artwork, 83 designs

Élie Faure writes about The Disasters of War, the emblematic series of eighty-three engraved works
by Goya:

“Never before had black and white found such an opportunity to express so vividly the power of the diametrical oppositions of light and darkness.”

Sad forebodings of what is to come, With reason or without it, The Same, Women give courage, And they are like wild beasts, This is what you deserve, What courage, This always happens, They do not want to, Nor these, Nor these, This is why you were born, Bitter presence, The road is hard, And there is no remedy, They take advantage, They do not agree, Bury and be silent, There is no other time, Heal them, then we go for others, It will be the same, So many and even more, The same elsewhere, They are still useful, The same with these, You cannot see this, Compassion, The common people, He deserved it, The disasters of war, This is too much, Why, What more can be done, For a knife, No one knows why, Not even in this case, This is worse, Barbarians, Great deeds, on the dead, There is something to gain, They flee through the flames, Everything is upside down, The same with this one, I saw this, And this too, This is bad, So it happened, Harsh shame, A woman’s compassion, Unfortunate mother, Thanks to the millet, They did not arrive in time, Nothing could be done and he died, Vain laments, The worst is to beg, At the cemetery, The healthy and the sick, You shout in vain, What can a cup do to you, There is no one to help them, Perhaps they are of another breed, The beds of death, A pile of dead bodies, Carts loaded for the cemetery, What is this noise, Strange devotion, This is no less remarkable, What madness, Nothing. We shall see, They do not know the way, Contrary to the common good, The results, Deceitful pantomime, This is the worst, A troupe of charlatans, The carrion vulture, Look, the rope is breaking, He defends himself well, Truth is dead, Will it rise again, Fierce monster, This is the truth, Dishonorable profit

Materials: Processed cotton, ashes
Dimensions: 2.50m Height x 2.50m Width
Each piece: 15cm Height x 20cm Width

The duration of the pandemic, which in many ways recalled conditions of war, became the inspiration for a dialogue with Goya’s eighty-three engraved works. CoIon, as a natural, pristine-white material used both to produce our clothes and to close our wounds, is employed in this work to achieve absolute whiteness and, through fire, to pass into black.

We create eighty-three drawings made of burned coIon, in the same dimensions as Goya’s engravings, measuring 15 cm in height and 20 cm in width. Finally, the titles of Goya’s works are composed into a single, unified text, which we present together as a reminder of a condition that seems to have no end and no season.

Lost Spring
The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1919
2019

The work Lost Spring was created during the period of quarantine. Klee’s diary appears as a chance object encountered during a walk in the city. The book becomes a place in which a new diary can develop.

Materials: Klee’s Diaries book, fragmented flowers and leaves, glue

The flowers we collect during the short walks of quarantine create a new text on top of the already existing one. By cutting and pasting petals and parts of flowers onto the text, we cover certain words and reveal others.