Katerina Komianou
Medusa – At Land II, 2023

They say that every epic begins with a glance in the mirror. I wonder if the same is true for dramas and tragedies. I wandered, walked, and walked some more. I looked around, searching the sky. Perhaps I would find some answers there, I thought. They could be in the clouds. I searched but found nothing. Only emptiness. A movement. It came from the water. Among the waves.

An entity pulsates on the shore, gazing at the midnight sky; its horror and beauty are divine. Was it alive? Was it dead? Does it have a gender? I knew nothing about it, approaching with caution. In its fluid hair seems to lie beauty like a shadow, from which the sacred, fiery, and noisy struggle beneath. It was a jellyfish, made of black braids and the passage of time. The waves hit it like a woman’s body.

From the head of the creature, they grow like from a body, like grass from a watery trunk, hair made of rubber that are snakes, slithering and flowing, their long tentacles intertwining with one another, and amidst the sea, as if mocking the tortures and death within. I saw the air turn into mist.

It is the overwhelming beauty of terror. For from the snakes shines a glow, ignited by this unbreakable error, which makes the wave become a changing mirror. Unique. Thus you can see its terrible face in the mirror; otherwise, you will turn to stone. From all the beauty and terror there—the face of a woman, with black rubber, gazing at death in the skies from these wet rocks

“The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. However, I refuse to empower them by repeating them, giving them something irrevocable, something unmovable, the equivalent of destiny, of fate, to confuse the biological with the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.” (Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975/76)

We are not the feminine landscape of the past, the beloved of bees, adorned with all the buzzing and honey-sting gifts.

“From a feminine place nothing can be articulated without questioning the symbolic itself.” (Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One”, 1981)

Text from the artist, 2023.