June 18 - September 30, 2019
Kiki Smith
Memory
DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece
The slaughterhouse connects the goats to the sea by their blood and entrails being offered. The Capricorn is a goat climbing a mountain whose snake-fish tail enters the sea. The milk is an offering to the goats and the sea. In the Hydra constellation, similar to the island and to the old island’s flag, sits the owl, the cat, the crow, the sextant and the offering chalice.
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“When the sky comes down from heaven and the blood shall fill the sea.”
That has been happening for time immemorial.
A woman yesterday told me she remembers as a child summering in Hydra the sea being red as blood.
I was once on the Island of Bequia, of St. Vincent and Grenadines, where they hunted whales from small boats and slaughtered goats. One day a goat’s entrails floated in the water as we swam, and then washed up on the sands.
I made photographs and drawings of the organs, which got me drawing again after several years of not doing so.
Later that month, a hurricane came and took away two or three meters of the sand beach.
Bring an offering to the Greek sea from New York.
The rooms should be bathed in pink light.
The basin can have water instead of milk as it will catch the pink, also.
Rubio Pink glass is the heaviest glass as it is made with gold.
The sea goat appears 21,000 years ago.
Primordial god of the sea.
Vocation.
North Star to guide.
The goat insides offered to the sea or disposed of into.
Give the blood and organs to feed the fish.
The fish, along the way, acquired the body of a goat, to allow it to span both realms, where somewhere along the lines between heaven and the sea, the snake of the earth maybe visited.
Hydra, the water snake, is the largest constellation.
The crow (Corvus), the owl (Noctua), the chalice (Crater), the sextant (Sextans) and the cat (Felis), all accompany her through the sky.
I made films of the East River in New York in 2005 of glints of light on the river. I made them into cyanotypes this year and from them into flags to fly back at the sea on Hydra.
Small elements will accompany the travel. One donkey, one clowder of cats, one owl, one observation look-out to the sea, and hopefully a lighthouse of sorts.
© Kiki Smith 2019