ORDER TO CHAOS Hanya Elghamry and Eleni Maragaki
2022
SELF
Our skin can remember by the mutations of the moments it has suffered. Even though it does not have the same recalling techniques and abilities as our brain, it does remember the trauma, damage, and wounds that it has worked to repair.
Without even telling it what to do, your body and mind are assessing whatever is going on around you and determining your survival options. It explains why the body and mind conspire to protect the Self from an overwhelming awareness of what had happened, denying it the truth and reality to protect it from the terror of the experience. In their own way, they are sustaining the Self.
drawings: Eleni Maragaki text: Hanya Elghamry
drawings: Eleni Maragaki
Skin remembers no matter how many years go by, Skin has lived, adapted, morphed, and became.
Skin knows what happened, and it knows how and why it happened. But there is a power dynamic that lies between Skin and Memory, Memory knows how attractive it is to forget, it knows it can seduce Skin and make it forget. But what Memory does not know, is that the power is in the resistance and that Skin might decide one day to remember.
drawings: Eleni Maragaki text: Hanya Elghamry
drawings: Eleni Maragaki
STRUCTURE
The modern city that develops over hundreds of years, where a variety of shapes, forms and structures are combined, becomes a human-made social environment that derives from a geometry of randomness. Despite this seeming lack of order, architecture is in constant dialogue with the landscape. In the process of building culture and society, humankind interprets the landscape in various manners. It observes it not so much in its organic unity but as a network that provides space for settlement. The notion of nature becomes inseparable from the element of interpretation and order. Humankind’s relation to the natural environment is fragmentary as it needs to identify itself with human-made things. This knowledge is always limited, oblique and partial.
This desire to reveal geometric order across the natural, is part of our effort on critically understanding ourselves within it. This way, humans strive to become part of nature’s broad totality. The fundamental and universal need to identify ourselves in relation to our surroundings becomes a selective cultural process. We aim to bring together the organic and the structural, as a way of perceiving nature, a pre-existing entity that seems so different after human observation and research.
drawings: Eleni Maragaki text: Eleni Maragaki
The lines between ground and sea, refined and unrefined land, artificial and natural, order and chaos are regarded as a first step in comprehending and domesticating the environment.
Humankind projects the elements of continuity and structure, on top of an unrefined and chaotic landscape. This simultaneous existence of the platonic notions of the Physical and the Ideal expose the essence of how we interact with these indispensable parts of the world.
drawings: Eleni Maragaki text: Eleni Maragaki
drawings: Eleni Maragaki
The idea of failure is a constructive departure point. It is a place where the apparently disconnected come to interact in such compelling dynamics that they end up shaping the world instead of representing it. This honest inadequacy indicates humility in the face of the larger transcendent scheme of the natural. Creative resilience, reshaping and the idea of defect are valuable factors to embrace the human element in representing the world. Error is of creative importance and its acceptance is an opportunity that leads on re-evaluation. If the flaw is pre-determined it is no longer a flaw. This way, we become free of the burden of representation and focus on interpretation attempting to bridge the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial.
text: Eleni Maragaki
close the book and flip