The Diving Horse and Other Mythologies

In the endless disarray that is the Internet, you can find photographs, informative videos, witty texts, lists, suggestions, horoscopes, historical resources, academic treatises, lectures, performances, and safety demonstrations. Everything heaped messily on top of everything else, in tottering piles. We collect some such images for various reasons, organizing them by year, in folders nested inside other folders, giving them peculiar filenames, to make use of them perhaps at some point in the future.

Konstantinos Papanikolaou has fished five images out of the disparate libraries that populate his personal computer. Five documents plucked from the dance realities of times past: forgotten dances and lost practices. Brave girls gallop into the void, couples dance themselves to exhaustion under the greedy gaze of an insatiable audience, ethereal ballerinas sacrifice themselves at art’s altar. Taking these five photographs as his starting point, Konstantinos contemplates dance practices that time set on a trajectory of decline, pondering both their origins and any traces of them left in the present.

He leaves the interpretation of documents to the historians. He does not study them, but rather muses over them. He does not reconstruct history, but rather tries to come to terms with the present. He builds small and fleeting bridges from his premise towards each source.

Is the past perhaps not formed by the facts / events themselves, but rather by the ways in which we survey and interpret them? Moreover, what tools can we construct in order to understand both the things bequeathed to us, and our long-lost distant relatives / ancestors? That is, the very roots of our practices?