Lesvos island occurs 39.3734° North of the equator, and 26.3030° East of the prime meridian.
“What once contained” the rugged rock formations of its shores and “absorbed” them into a continent has arguably evolved to be more than the sum of the land masses of the Greek and Anatolian peninsulas pulling apart to create Europe and Asia. It was the premise of belonging to a contemporary, westphalian world, where sovereignty was the condition that guaranteed these shores’ distance from human suffering.
Standing on top of a mountain of life vests on the foothills of Mount Lepetymnos, and looking down to the 4-mile strait of sea separating Europe from Asia, one can be absolved for thinking that this is an “imaginary now exhausted” (Francesco Sebregondi, 2016), as lines on the calm water caused by incoming vessels contest Europe’s borders. Was modernity a mirage, a fata morgana, the life it promised now distorted beyond recognition and suspended by the thermal air masses escaping the sea’s surface? Lesvos is confirmed as an island born out of fractures, erosions, disarticulations and, if only for a moment, the Aegean archipelago s a non-place, an a-territory.
The stills exhibited in these pages, 3D scanned images of data, are contracted to the possibility of immersion, of encounter with the “other” that is contained within them. Obscure volumes, the navigation of which is a prerequisite for their narrative quality to unfold, and a furthered acquaintance with the territory, the land and human features they capture, to be achieved. Much like the high seas or outer space in previous centuries, the point-cloud is here imagined as promissory, a constellation to be understood through new spaces of representation and mystification calling for an alternative positioning of the lens, where it no more delineates the space between sovereign, and “other.”
