Ermina Apostolaki ‘Citao’ / Greece

On April 21, 2020, Charles Melman, in his article Intellectual confinement between others, writes: “We have never been able to decide what is the cause of good, but instead we usually agree on what is the cause of evil. Well, today, who’s going to deny the obvious that this is called “virus.” Invisible in the field of representation, if nothing but the damage it causes, by intruding unknowingly, master of the game to the extent that he orders behaviours, isolating everyone in the privacy of his uniqueness, decides on life and death according to his whims and without knowing how to flatter him.” ( transl. Giorgos Dimitriadis)

Sigmund Freud used the term scopophilia to describe, analyse, and explain the concept of Schaulust, the pleasure in looking, a curiosity which he considered a partial-instinct innate to the childhood process of forming a personality. Other psychoanalytic theories proposed that scopophilia practices might lead to madness, which is the scopophilic person’s retreat from the concrete world of reality into an abstract world of fantasy.

Based on the above, with my sound work Citao, I’m wondering if “evil” leads us to a prolonged process of looking, how do we define pleasure, discomfort and deprivation? What does hope mean, after all?