Pyrgos, Santorini, Greece - Daphne is a site-specific installation situated within the tunnel stairway that interplays with the notion of concealing and revealing the ancient interior surfaces of the tunnel leading to the peak of Pyrgos. Made entirely of self-supporting paper panels, Daphne creates an enclosure that intervenes the visitors' perception of the existing conditions as a container of conglomerated memory as the paper panels age and take their shape accordingly to the local condition.


The Past. History, Time, Memory and Nostalgia:

A village is a vessel of memory, and reaching to the highest peak at Pyrgos from the main village square is, therefore, an excursion to its past memory where every surface of the village contains a history.

During the excursion to the Kasteli, visitors will have to encounter a tunnel stairway that leads to the destination. The history of the tunnel may be unknown to visitors and the space of the tunnel may seem insignificant to the passers by at first.

Daphne is an intervention that makes a mundane moment of procession through this enclosed space into highly charged space that will celebrate the coexistence of past, present and future. A trace of Daphne will appear at the entrance of the tunnel around middle of the stair procession. Starting from a few panels at the foot of the stairs, it will increase in the number of panels as it enters into a tunnel surface that encapsulates the interior surface of the tunnel, only maintaining its key element to wrap the space and juxtapose the "past" with the "present" intervention.

The interior illumination will accentuate the space from dusk to dawn that can be of an emphasis on how the existing materiality can coexist with new materiality to suggest uncanny, yet, mesmerizing possibility.

Further impact of environmental condition will also play an important role in this installation. The wind and humidity condition as well as passerbys interactions during the endurance of Santorini Biennalewill affect the aging of the material. This inevitable and also unpredictable factor of the paper installation and this process will illustrate how the transformation of paper textural and color quality can bring phenomenal conditions of time and space. These latent effects of material expressing this ephemeral condition will become a key factor, in which the "past", "present" and "future" all will be contained.