The exhibition Cine(so)matrix charts the work of Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961) from 1999 to the present day, pivoting around video as installation and as essay, starting from her most recent project Matri-Linear B, currently in progress.
Melitopoulos uses video as a tool for sensory intervention on and in the real, in projects which, setting out from specific case studies, address the historical and technological conditions of our cinematic experience of the world. For the artist, the video image does not document the real, but acts instead as a visual memory. Video technology simulates the roles of human memory and its intercerebral communications and brings to light the agency between images, their multiple connections and streams of consciousness. Thus, Melitopoulos’s videos and installations explore memory, perception and the forming of collective historical awareness, in addition to mapping and the use of places in time, moving deeper into specific issues such as resistance to the scattering of migrant communities’ memory in Europe, territorial struggles against extractivism in Greece and the present of animist thought in Japan’s technological society. During the process of creation in these works, different collaborations surface, whether via encounters she maintains with the people involved in developing research or through her relationship, sustained over time, with certain intellectuals, artists or activists — philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, anthropologist Barbara Glowzewski, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Claude Pollak, philosopher and artist Elisabeth von Samsonow or artists Kerstin Schroedinger and Angela Anderson.
The interests and approaches Melitopoulos puts into practice give rise to concepts such as timescapes: conceptual and aesthetic proposals which also articulate her investigations. Matri-Linear B, in particular, explores the action of seeing landscapes as a process of social organisation, connecting the pre-historic past with contemporaneity to explore how to make the dominant form — patriarchal and colonial — of relating to the environment disappear.
Melitopoulos recently dubbed her singular way of working with space, sound and the moving image “cine(so)matrix”, and thus in displaying some of her salient projects the exhibition is at once an essay around this form of experimental cinema and the most ambitious retrospective on the artist to date.
