Doves in the Kitchen'  is a site-specific installation presented in the form of a physical and narrative walk on the rooftop of the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation @theocharakis_foundation as part of the exhibition Sacred or Monsters curated by @ioanna.gerakidi on view until 27th of November.

Developed from my semi fictional short story of the same title, the project invites visitors to experience the narrative spatially through a sequence of seven pieces, each corresponding to a scene or emotional shift from the story.  Before entering the rooftop, visitors receive the printed story and step into the elevator where a soundscape — narration by Ioanna Gerakidi with music by Xato @iamxato — introduces the narrative’s atmosphere, preparing visitors for a gradual transition from reading to walking, from text to image.

The golden surfaces, referencing sacred iconography and materiality, are inscribed with rough scratches and layered symbols. At the same time, the style of the shapes and the figures is naive. The gestures oscillate between violence and naivity, reflecting the contradictions of the story’s protagonist: a figure who moves between sanctity and self-destruction, tenderness and chaos. Ancient and current symbols, faint figures, and fragments of text overlap and interrupt one another, forming compositions that are at times legible and at others obscured.

The protagonist claims his place on a material historically associated with reverence and elevation, challenging traditional notions of who is allowed to inhabit the “sacred.” The rooftop becomes  a threshold space, open to the city, suspended between fiction and reality, where the boundaries between the saintly and the monstrous are continuously renegotiated.

Very very thanks to Marina @de_l_eau , Nefeli @nefelesea and Faidra @faidra.v for this beautiful collaboration!

The project was carried out within the framework of the RAW initiative of @theocharakis_foundation