Ephemeral Grounds

Ephemeral Grounds
A project by Ergin Çavuşoğlu
Produced by Sophia Baker and Ami Mehta
Audio: Excerpt from Invisible Cities (1972) by Italo Calvino (Copyright Harcourt Brace Jovanovish inc.)
Commissioned by the Art and Culture Development Foundation of the Republic of Uzbekistan at the 59th Venice Contemporary Art Bienalle as a part of the Panoptic Garden workshop. Guest curated by Sara Raza and Andrew Brinkmanis. July 4-9, 2022 in Venice
‘As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world’ (Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ 1967)
Ephemeral Grounds examines the border between the visible and the invisible, the ephemeral and the eternal, and the treacherous asymmetrical passages that lead us beyond simplistic return to origins, or the reach of ultimate destinations.
Thus, the game becomes a place of mobile transitions representing journeying over the patterns of a carpet that carries various connotations in relation to notions of home, place, and mobility. The work at large explores ideas about spaces situated between the private and public domains.
Thus, the representation of journeying over the patterns of a carpet in the game becomes a place of mobile transitions that carry various connotations to notions of home, mobility, liminality, and place. The work at large explores ideas about spaces situated between the private and public domains.