Lito Kattou

South Eastern South


comissioned and produced by PCAI, Collection Piraeus


The software based work realized through a video game engine, acts as a self portrait of the artist’s digital double. It interacts with the weather temperature collected in real time from the artist’s home-place in Nicosia. The character starts whispering her stories, fictional or real, dazzled by the rising temperatures, mirroring to us as viewers the threat of desertification and the vast ecological and social changes impacting the area of the South East Mediterranean.


Lito Kattou, South Eastern South, 2025, 4K software based real-time algorithmic video, HD sound



A woman is sitting on her knees in the middle of a deserted landscape. She is still, though the micro movements of her face and clothing interact with the wind that now and then distracts the scene. Her stillness is intervened by close ups to areas of the deserted scenery, details showing the movements of the sand and soil from the wind. The sun follows its setting route throughoutthe day from dawn to dusk and into the night. The seated stillness of the body is interchanged occasionally with close ups to her face and mouth. In unexpected moments she starts to murmur and whisper continuously. She ends again only arbitrarily at a first glance.

The song, a narration or a grieving delirium that might have occurred to her under the burning Sun is revealing what might have been her story. A story of a landscapes’s destruction or of uncontrollable events that have changed her present irreversibly. Dazed by the landscape and impacted by her solitude, her voice is a self-talk or at the same time and through its repetitiveness, an invocation to the rain. As an elaborated mantra, it becomes a manifestation of a liquid state that could possibly alter the condition of the landscape she inhabits.

Is she the only one there? Are there any other living creatures around her that we are not able to see? This feels doubtful. An absolute desertification seems to have taken place in this area. The woman could be seen as a personification of the desert but at the same time it seems that she is a self-portrait of the artist. To the question of which body could be the one in solitude executing this invocation - an unavoidable call given the condition, a mourning or a summoning of environmental powers that could restrain the scale of destruction that have altered this environment- the artist positions herself. 'South Eastern South' is a self portrait. Lito’s body “collects” real-time temperature data and interacts respectively through the digitally simulated environment.

The idea of the self-portrait present throughout the history of art, becomes a way of contemplation and a positioning of the self in direct relation with the viewer. Devastating to the artist herself the phenomena - that take place around the world and specifically the South Eastern Mediterranean which is profoundly perceived as a hotspot of our new climatic regimes - are carried through her presence. And so they become a mirroring for us of a menace of ecological ruination that might still remain ungraspable in the realms of our lives and localities.

The work South Eastern South constructed through a video game engine, is a constantly changing real-time work which positions the viewer across the body of the artist and her whispering.Temperature data from the location of the artist's home in Nicosia, Cyprus are perpetually collected. The sun sets and rises exactly at the same time as in her growing-up neighborhood, following the cycles of ordering time and seasons. Whenever the temperature rises above 21 degrees, a temperature proven to be a limit of the optimal condition for humans and other living organisms to thrive and unfold their full biological assets, the whispering is commenced. The summoning of rain won’t stop unless the temperature decreases.

Appealing the rain has been practiced widely through the presence of humanity on the planet and its relationship with nature, spanning from tribe rituals, to medieval “rain calling” related to the enraged “witch hunting” of the Middle Ages, to contemporary geo-engineering and weather modification attempts. The exposure to this continuous demand for rain as a soothing agent or a rebirthing activity against desertification due to changing environments or even sociopolitical friction, becomes a reminder for us that we come across the work. An act of resistance and repair. A presence that through its repetition, gives a meditative state of awareness, a coping with the idea of destruction, a reconciling with the sense of finitude and a space where we as viewers and listeners face our realities through its recurrence. The whispering voice of the character becomes a spell imposing a transmittable mesmerized humming, potentially grabbing our consciousness and healing our sentiments of (ecological or societal) despair.

Is this whispering call enough? Could individuals have any drastic impact on the reverse of the desertification of the Mediterranean and in extent of the planet ? They might have not. However, we still sing and whisper to each other when we mourn and when we celebrate, when we love and worship. Animals sing to their out-sprouts, they do so when they mate, they cry to their dead. The character at South Eastern South does so. She addresses what is left around her through what is left within her, her voice. Under the daze and confusion of the ordering sun that has amended her landscape irreversibly.


*The lyrics of South East, the whispering of the character, are excerpts of poems, lyrics of songs or thoughts that the artist noted on her phone and diaries in unsuspected times during the long production of the work.

**The temperature data are set to be collected from Egkomi, Nicosia Cyprus.



Creative Technologist : Costas Kazantzis
Programming: Liam Wolfe
Sound: Antonia Kattou
Digital Garment Designer: Yao Yao