FROM VENUS

In 2023, I went to the Greek island of Milos to make work. Sarakiniko, on the island, has large areas of white rock and very little vegetation. The landscape looks like the moon. It is also where the famous sculpture Venus de Milo was found.

Sarakiniko didn't feel like ordinary nature to me. It felt like the end of the world, or another planet. So for me, Venus is both the figure shaped by culture and history, and the planet Venus. It made me imagine a distant, unfamiliar planet.

I brought a green-screen cloth, about six meters long, to Milos. I wanted to cover the white rock with it and set it against nature. But at Sarakiniko, facing the huge white rocks, the sea, and the sky, the six-meter cloth suddenly seemed very small. Something from the artificial world of image-making couldn't cover nature. Instead, it was surrounded and absorbed by the much larger landscape.

Besides the green screen, I also used polyester to make costumes and characters. A beetle, a crocodile, a monkey, and a running Venus appeared among the rocks and along the coast. I began to wonder: if Venus left the pose of the sculpture and took off the clothes that culture and history gave her, what would she become?

In the end, I let the green cloth hang down from the white rocks into the sea. Before leaving Milos, I washed it in the seawater.