Eugenia Raskopoulos | Embedded Bones | 03-26 October 2024

In her new series, Embedded Bones, Eugenia Raskopoulos turns the body inside out. For the first time since 1998 she is using classical Greek statuary, on this occasion inserting X-rays of her feet, spine, pelvis and skull into the corresponding sculptural fragments. Her internal bodily structure becomes both exoskeleton and is clothed in stone. There are complex conjunctions and disjunctions here, as there are with the two neon works, both titled Self-portrait.

Dissecting, scrambling, recombining, Raskopoulos treats language, words, letters as she does the body. Because of the way neon is generally used we may assume meaning is being emitted yet we must work at comprehending the English and Greek words, in this case the words roughly corresponding to ‘other’. Here, there are two scripts, five letters each, mirroring each other, yet not. They represent two distinct languages which have an ancient relationship. The one is considered to support, indeed be ingrained in, the culture of the other. However, understanding either or both also mirrors the difficulty if not fallacy of comprehension and direct translation from one sign, medium or culture to another. 

Raskopoulos reveals language as a convenience rather than an authority. Full of missteps and stuttering, language is multiple, and it can be altered to make other kinds of sense, considerably more urgent in meaning. Just as the ‘skin’ that clothes us is inevitably culturally determined so is language. Raskopoulos is ‘other’ but what is other?

For Svetlana Boym, in her discussion of the possibilities of other kinds of being in the world, ‘…otherness is constituent of the very experience of freedom, of discovering potentiality or inner plurality…’. 

The vast and ongoing displacement of humans over the last one hundred years has forced successive reckonings of what it might mean to be ‘at home’, to be ‘free’, to have any understanding of what any individual or community is or might be. The yearning for a sense of stability and ‘home’ collides with the restlessness of those for whom such notions have ceased to exist. To survive there has to be an ability to explore and invent. To be other has ceased to be distinct and can potentially be enabling.

Raskopoulos works with diverse mediums united through their play with light, with illumination. Neon, X-rays and photographs explicitly need light to come into being. Neon, the noble gas coloured with mercury to make an electric blue, emits light. A form of intense radiation, X-rays pass through the body making images of bones. The bones appear nearly white because of their density whereas soft tissue appears in shades of grey, fragile surrounds to the bones. The bony insides of the body can be examined forensically without the need for dissection. Each fragment, like that of stone, yields its history of location, strength, or otherwise. 

Photographs can be made in many different ways, always with the action of light. The medium’s proximity to the real world continues to make us believe in its veracity yet it is its variability that makes it exceptional. Raskopoulos uses photographs to show possibility, and to compare herself with her ancestry. The small photograph of the artist’s foot mirrors that of a monumental sculpture, as though the living foot, tiny and childlike is confronting the massive inertia of history.

The horizontal X-ray of the artist’s spine is almost alien in its otherness. The monumental spine is supine, rendered ghostly. Its function to hold us upright and steady, to protect our nervous system has been abstracted, toppled like the classical column it is now aligned with. The strange beauty of this image brings into question how we understand the world within us, as much as the word without. 

Raskopoulos’s work has always been both visceral and intellectual. Her own body is the constant support for her work; indeed, her body and mind are the work. While her early series considered the social and political treatment of those seen as others (migrants, women), her work has shifted to more particular examination of self as other. Given we are our bodies (as Trinh T Minh-ha and others have noted), what is a self-portrait, what is representation of the self? 

Representation like language is necessarily inexact, more compelling in its pursuit of comprehension than in finding any end result. Given this, mainstream society perversely prefers to elide difference, while at the same time reinforcing it. As a poignant example of such pressures Raskopoulos remembers, as a young person, that she ‘longed to belong’. Involuntarily, she was aware there was no equivalence, this awareness eventually leading to a third possibility—what Boym describes as ‘bilingual consciousness…a different state of mind altogether.’ 

The exploration of such possibilities can bring forth the chaotic, the inchoate. Anchored to the body the unthought becomes fleshly, sounds lead to words and some form of comprehension. The female body is always already othered yet not submissive. That body is always being constructed by itself, out of itself. 

‘Be what you are becoming,’ Luce Irigaray exhorts, ‘without clinging to what you could have been, might be. Never settle. Let’s leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don’t need it. Right here and now, our body gives us a very different certainty.’ 

Sources

Eugenia Raskopoulos, Vestiges of the tongue, Power Publications/Formist Edition 17, Sydney 2019

Luce Irigaray ‘When our lips speak together’, trans Carolyn Burke, Signs Vol 6 No 1 Autumn 1980 pp 69-79

Svetlana Boym, The future of nostalgia, Basic Books, NY 2001

Svetlana Boym, Another freedom: the alternative history of an idea, University of Chicago Press 2010

©Judy Annear

Judy Annear is a writer who lives on Djaara Country. She is Honorary Fellow at Melbourne University, School of Culture & Communication.