Lito Kattou

Days of San

Benaki Museum, Athens
Organized by DESTE Foundation and Point Centre for Contemporary Art
Jun 15 - Jul 29, 2018

The DESTE Foundation, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum and Point Centre for Contemporary Art, present Lito Kattou’s exhibition Days of San within the permanent collections of the Benaki Museum of Greek Culture.

The exhibition includes the real-time video projection Red Lake on the Museum’s third floor as well as five new sculptures, embodiments of the fictional character San, on the ground floor.

San, a liquid, ungendered being between a human, a machine, a god and an animal, was conceived as an Artificial Intelligence. It reflects and negotiates the presence of creatures, guardians, and non-human entities in mythological traditions, artifacts and histories spanning from the long past until today. Skins and feathers from the creature’s epidermis are extruded from its body and cohabit the space as sculptural forms coming together in dialogue with ancient traces and archaeological depictions of subjectivities found throughout the Benaki Museum.

In reverse, the exhibits of the permanent collection witness San’s constant trial of success and failure, its activity within a 3D simulated environment. The entity adapts and evolves through the algorithm that directs its everyday Sisyphean fate of patrolling the Red Lake, the remnant of an ancient copper mine close to Nicosia, Cyprus, active from the Chalcolithic period until the late 60’s. The mine’s landscape is highly affected by climatic change and the ecological destruction that is developing dramatically in the South Eastern Mediterranean. The creature’s brain is designed to collect real-time climatic data from the geographical spot of the lake. San, as an AI being and through its sculptural manifestations, incarnates new forms of adaptive intelligence reacting to violent changes, materializing current ecological concerns, and raising questions on the complexity of the nature-technology relationship.

Days of San is the second part of the exhibition San by Lito Kattou presented at Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia, Cyprus (May 19–June 20, 2018).