“This is a personal statement Blindfolded
This is a personal statement about you
About your body...”

A voice cyclically repeats these initiating words. From a distance, sombre vibrations of a synthesiser can be heard. In the middle of the skies, video columns diffuse on three monitors the same blue-toned image: the face of Katerina, blindfolded by a rectangular screen, across which pass lights, flames and shadows.

“You have become the composite series of an infinite erotic fiction
Blindfolded A magic image
Hermaphrodite Angel ...”

Upon entering, you are struck with owe at the powerful impact of two large photographs in black & white: the Angel, a majestic figure, doubly welcomes us - the same image, in positive and negative version. Her-his eyes are covered with a small neon tube of fluorescent light.

“Blindfolded You are the celebration of a myth
You, the erotic mutant
A peculiar offspring of a sexual and artistic avant-garde
This is a personal statement about you”. ^[4]

Now you are facing the ex-ticket booth, a small room fronted with glass and varnished wood. From behind the glass windows, two huge white owls lit in purple, like frozen queens, stare at us with their strange, severe golden eyes. They are the guardians of this night room where, on the black back wall, the word Remember is inscribed in fluorescent letters. Inside, glass bowls and chemical tubes are displayed on wooden shelves. Five magnificent satin and lace dresses hang against the back wall. To their right, a naked young boy casts his shadow, his head turned towards the door. As you enter the booth, you are surprised by the luminous blue of his eyes, his glistening dark hair, his tender lips, his slim child’s figure with blue-lit satin skin. With his legs slightly crossed, he seems in precarious balance. His hands, gently folded over his sex, hold a large white feather that droops lightly. Though he looks very vulnerable (or maybe because of this), he seems untouchable. But his fragile equilibrium will remain since he is a mannequin. Also, his gaze seems inaccessible: contemplating the night sky or some inner dreams. Is he the protected lover of the huge eagle-owl which stands just behind him ? Wings opened wide, its round eyes penetrate the darkness with a flamboyant scrutiny. This terrible-looking owl may be the double of this angelic-looking boy, the wild, untameable part of himself, the obscure power of his dreaming, ready at any time to fly away into the night with one great flap of its huge wings.

The Angel of Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki does not belong to the realm of the Sun - with which we usually associate angels. Here, the Sun is in total eclipse, a black Sun. Just part of the great night of the Universe. Observe the large photographic portraits of the Angel: a hermaphrodite body with a male morphology and a female sex (in fact, a clinical document from the beginning of the century): s-he superbly gives her-him-self to sight, despite a blindfold tied on by some prudery (or fear ?) of the medical establishment; on the body are superimposed views of the Milky Way, galaxies, nebulae, or black holes. Since Klonaris & Thomadaki have been working on the theme of the Angel, they have conceived her-him as a Body of the Stars ^[5], figure of a nocturnal realm, like all the other archetypal bodies appearing in their work. Every time, you are invited to a certain night, the power of which invites self-abandonment, just as before sleep, when one allows oneself to seek another world. The night of this Angel’s show, with its starry infinities and musical echoes, is at once immense, disturbing, yet familiar. That it is associated with a swimming pool, site of a ritual of nakedness, is also revealing.

In this rectangular pit seen in perspective, three imposing black & white photographs of the Angel are displayed between the black lines on the white tiled floor. Behind them, on either side, sit two leopards. Further back, at the edge of the water in the middle of the pool stands a tiger. The three of them face us, their mouths opened in a silent roar. Their shadows are projected on the tiled walls and their reflections mirrored on the ground. Wildlings, guarding the site, feline and strong, they seem immobilised by some spell which may be broken by any disrespectful intrusion. Magnificent and merciless, they demarcate the impassable limit.

Standing at either side of the pool, two columns each composed of three video monitors emphasise this architecture of the Here-and-Beyond. The images they display - apparitions of the Angel - are paintbox variations of the original photograph, wonderfully interplaying granularity and various shades of grey.

Beyond all this, at the very back of the room, slides are projected on three huge screens suspended as a triptych above the pool. They are reflected in the dark water-mirror. In the rhythm of cyclic, low, and obsessive music ^[6], the Angel appears, disappears, glides, doubles her-him-self. Radiating with bright blue, yellow, magenta and cyan, with stars, textures and flames, S-he calls for a pride as intense as the one S-he represents.

You stop in your tracks as you enter this sacred space. Full frontal impact of a mysterious figure rising beyond a void. Your common habits as a spectator are useless here. Watching is not enough: your whole body is affected. You walk in rhythm to the music, as innocently naked as the young boy in his booth. A wanderer through a labyrinth that is not totally unfamiliar. The Angel becomes the messenger of a world long occulted: the nocturnal realm of the imaginary ^[7].

Thus, Knossos or the temple of Ishtar in Babylon could be remembered; the felines sitting there in the dark, between air, water, and fire, will not contest. This visionary mise-en-scene of androgynous forces shares something with this ancient strength, as loved by Artaud: a representation grounded in the immemorial rites of the Mediterranean World, celebrations of the flesh and its transcendence united by ecstasy. This damp night that enchants us and frightens us is similar to the ‘cave of wonder’ ^[8] where the body moves backwards through time. The initiation journey necessarily rediscovers the primordial androgyny.