The “Documents of Breathing” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, with the support of the Onassis Culture

According to the ancient Egyptian texts, breath symbolizes the desires and needs of the deceased in the afterlife. The “Documents of Breathing” exhibition seeks to collect in an almost associative manner fragments that, when brought together, revive histories. Archival traces, family relics, historical documents, comprise the “Documents of Breathing” and invite us to discover them breathless.

The Egyptian “Bible of the Dead” is a comprehensive manual with instructions for the passage of the dead to the Otherworld. The funerary texts of the Ancient Egyptians are but splices of smaller texts found inside the burial chambers: spells and magical invocations to the gods for the journey to the Kingdom of the Dead. At many occasions, they are called ‘Breathing Permits.’ The English word for the act of remembering, ‘recollection,’ combines the prefix ‘re’ (again) with the gesture of ‘collecting.’ Therefore, the “Documents of Breathing” exhibition comprises an attempt at collecting fragments that, once put together, ‘revive’ History, documenting the end of time. These fragments of life compose the “Documents of Breathing.”

A dark forest, a sea, an abyss, a child’s laughter. Images with archetypal, cryptic or allegorical meaning, are attached through their captions to a very specific moment and condition, such as the clashes at Skouries, the loss of the refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, the December 2008 riots, the fire at Mati, or a certain family story. All these may converse with a historical monument, a hugging couple, a magical ring, stills from a 70s soft porn movie or a romantic picture story. Anything can be a historic document and a family relic at the same time – even the sky. The contradiction and misalignment between photography and caption, image and speech, signifier and signified, and after all the dialectical tension between the historical and the imaginary, the personal and the collective, the material and the immaterial, the sacred and the profane, are the very elements that give a breath of life to the exhibition.

Horror vacui (‘the fear of the empty’) was the point of departure for this project, as a certain void was struggling indeed to be transformed into something, to render itself anarchic. A crypt of meaning as such is experienced as a birthplace, especially when juxtaposed to speech: the Black Hole before the Great Fragmentation, a safe and ineffable place, always impregnated.

The project bears references to the book “The Arcades Project” by Walter Benjamin, a collection of experts from writings by himself and other thinkers from the hotbed of Paris during the 19th century, and “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), a sequence of images from the antiquity until the writer’s own era, which highlights continuities of patterns, gestures, symbolisms, cultural traces, and their visual representations in the history of art. What both works have in common is that, despite their predominant gesture of collecting fragments, they were never completed.

Thus, the “Documents of Breathing” have started from the idea of a book and are classified in ten incomplete chapters: The Last Version, Chronos, Dream City, Denkraum, Logos, Pathos, Sacred & Profane, Pothos, Death, The Afterlife.

The following excerpt is included in the “Documents of Breathing,” which are presented in the form of an exhibition that contains the original ark-book:

"If this book is made for him, then he will breathe like the souls of the gods forever and ever. Hide it! Keep it secret! Do not let anyone read it, since it is effective for a man in the god’s domain so that he might live again successfully millions of times. May he write for you the Book of Breathings with his own fingers. May your soul breathe forever. May you see with your eyes, hear with your ears, speak with your mouth, and walk with your legs, your soul having been made divine in the hereafter so that it can assume any form it desires. May your soul breathe any place you want. May you endure in life, prosperity, and health, having been established upon your throne in the Sacred Land. May you spend the night in life. May your face live and your form be beautiful, while your name endures every day. May your odor be as pleasant as a young man’s. May your soul live by means of the Document of Breathing".

– “The Hor Book of Breathing” (funerary text from the Ptolemaic era)

Exhibition duration

March 19 – May 7, 2022

Supported by NEON Organization for Culture and Development

With the kind collaboration of the Municipality of Rethymnon, Hoteliers’ Association of Rethymno, and ANEK/Blue Star Ferries.