MARIOS STAMATIS
SLOW FADE (w/ Lea Collet)
INSTALLATION, 2018
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In an age of automated eroticism, the dissolution of love does not lead to any tragic outcome as it does to a slow fading away. Online platforms take over the sexual sphere and pornography intensely invades popular culture. As a result, love, sex and eroticism are decentralised from intimate matter and instead become a public domain. The ritual of courtship enters a heavily mediated domain and finds itself enveloped within a technologically constructed environment. In late capitalist society, “sexuality is everywhere except in sex”, Jean Baudrillard concludes in Symbolic Exchange and Death. Rather than leading to its liberation, the constant hyper-stimulation of desire seems to have led to its atrophy: A general desensitisation and apathy. However, as Slow Fade by Lea Collet and Marios Stamatis suggests, the slow process of fading, love and eroticism do not simply disappear, but rather reappear radically mutated and loose from their biological substratum. No longer are bodily contacts and physical sexual encounters a necessary condition of erotic experience. Love enters a political sphere as it is denaturalised and becomes open to design, creating a multitude of spaces for new possible narratives to unfold and take form.
In collaboration with Lea Collet.
Solo show at Gossamer Fog.
Curated by Sayori Radda and Felice Moramarco.
London, 2018.
