13 - 23 July 2014
The 8th ANIMART 2014 belongs to the past. For part of the actions captured by camera lens and video camera, visit Gallery section of this website. All others have become memories in hearts of the participants.
We would like to send our special thanks to Rizarios Foundation that generously supported this year's event.
Preparations for the 9th ANIMART at Monodendri from 12 to 22 July 2015 have already begun. Get ready yourselves to... weave time!

WEAVING TIME
Contemporary visual activities on a person’s life experience which begins in swaddling clothes and ends in a shroud! Allusions about the cycle of life depicted on fabric as well as on screen and canvas. On this imaginary scroll, participating artists attempt to express their own version of an old story that includes, among other things: fidelity and infidelity, love and betrayal, revenge and punishment. Fibers, tombs, meanings, transgressions: words like those on the Pella Curse Tablet. Fibers, veins, scratches, stitches, threads, gauze and wounds on the body. A lifetime of fear of dying and the eternal agony regarding the hereafter have always rendered the crafts an integral part of prospective funereal offerings. To weave time means to consign life to the past. The flawlessness of nudity and the pulchritude of glory as both eulogy and libation. The archetypal figure of Penelope at the loom has in our days morphed into a PC user in front of the world wide web. The fibers-palliatives of the primeval mental adventures became the modern optical fibers-neuroses of the new utopias. The cryptic meanings of the silent handicraft gradually turned into the garrulous hypertexts of interminable Internet information. The knots: the minimal structure of the weave and the mediation of divinely inspired monks, like so many pixels now, haunt the increasing desolation of the global community as connected people. Sign in and sign out continually, with the digital arrow frenziedly darting through the warp of the World Wide Web. Nodes-Gordian knots. Nodes-Links, like the head of the Lernaean Hydra! Likes on fake profiles. Eros and Errors. Embarrassment and delete, when things come to a head. And here the solution comes once again from the Three Fates of Greek mythology, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos merrily spinning life while at the same time also (fabric)ating its demise! The inescapable shut down, which is heard like a funereal sound and cry, could very well be taken as the present-day tetelestai (it is finished) of this futile, but always fascinating world.

V. B.


Note: From the funerary urn and the woman with the distaff on the tombstone up to Vermeer’s The Lacemaker and the Manaki brothers’ Weavers a long time has passed. Its frayed ends are welcome as are the contemporary references to birthdays and funeral customs, to patient embroidery, to elegant useful creations, to the imaginative machinations of betrayed hearts and to the handicrafts of virtuous thoughts.

Monodendri