1991

The idea for the Ark come into being when in 19..., I saw at the Petit Palais in Paris the exhibition of the Dumeneil collection. A collection containing examples of art from all cultures and from nearly all periods. I remember how inferior, how much emptier the works of my own generation seemed when compared with other moments of history and I decided to salvage, at whatever sacrifice, my own, my own personal boat, from the emptiness of the artistic currents of that era. I left Paris and returned to my own country, in quest of sources of vitality and reasons for existence, as primitive as possible, not caring what repercussions this activity might have on my career, or on the timeliness of my work. Since then, I have been trying to see things again from the beginning, reviewing, when needed, the past and using, when necessary, my achievements.
I think that no past triumph should be an obstacle to the future and no mixture of memories and means misleading.

In the Autumn of 1990, travelling on the ship taking me back to yesterday and looking at a calm sea full of mystery and threat, I remembered Noah.
And I said to the architect Nikos Chatzikyriakos how stupid that old man was to lug around all those animals with him, all those perfectly created forms of life, removing from nature itself the possibility of the unforeseen, the possibility of change.
And I said that an anonymous cell could contain unforeseen forms of life and that in all likelihood these forms would be better than the existing ones.
And I said, that after all, there really was no thing more mysterious than the egg, more full of life, nothing more suitable for use as a symbol of the future, than this thing produced by what is already past.
And I said that I believed that one egg would be enough to make life immortal, promising a new world all by itself.
And I told him that I wanted to make my own ARK, having just such a rudimentary and perfect form, and to conceal in it not the seeds of natural life but the quintessence of acts, thoughts, phenomena and events. An egg that could contain and one day bring forth an intellectual model of another reality (Words from the Prow).

However, Nikos Chatzikyriakos, fascinated by the idea, took it upon himself to study the feasibility of its realization.
I designed it, he came up with the static solutions and in the end entrusted its materialization to a company that made wooden structures.

Thus, for a time, the idea was surrendered to the hands of technicians, who were little concerned, or not at all, with the artistic outcome.
Their only concern was the solution of the practical problem – the structure itself.
Like a stranger, I watched the development of my work for three or four months, having almost completely removed myself from it, both from the moment of inspiration and my final hope.
Words, designs, thoughts and enormous pieces of wood structures became my truth.

Until the day its installation began in the Epikentro Gallery in Patras. Without an actual work, without any clear image of the outcome, without any certainty, I began to speak about my work again.
And then the enormous truck arrived and the difficult task of setting up the work began. The technicians didn't pay the slightest heed to my minor admonitions regarding the proper way to do the job. Furthermore, to them I was just an unknown character, a spectator – they all showed themselves to be more expert than me.
And it is magical and fascinating to watch your immaterial inspirations being materialized before your very eyes, as if by miracle, without your own participation.
Piece by piece these people who had nothing to do with art set up my work of art. And bit by bit they too began to see it as something foreign to them, as something that transcended them, that was uninterested in their labor, which erased all their endeavor.

As finished assembling, they felt small, insignificant and strange before the work.

At some moment their work came to an end. And I was alone, the one responsible for loading this enormous wooden shell with meaning.

Now it was my turn, naturally, to set them to one side and activate their imagination.
I knew that this vessel, this shell, of an egg had travelled. And that it had to bear traces of this journey.
I knew that life gives birth to sound. Silence is a sample of death.
I knew that accumulated energy creates light.
I knew, finally, that the inexplicable often gives rise to awe.

Colored bits and pieces from old, well-travelled rowboats were stuck on to the tar-coated surface as if they were parasites. Ancient voices of whales emerged from the belly of the ARK, voices that exist but are unknown to many, voices which converse only with the very roots of your existence.
The lights in the gallery were turned off, they disappeared, and the only light there was came from the inside of the ARK, through the opening left by one of the two mobile poles. Through this opening the visitor could also see inside the ARK.
We then built the large door into the gallery while the visitors' entrance to the room was through a smaller door, so one had the idea that he had found that strange and enormous object there. As if it had been born and grew up there. Wonder that touched on the edge of fear.

My work was handed over to the public, to a public moved, at a loss, silent. Tears from people who had perhaps never wept in front of a visual event before, were my reward.

Now my work has been taken to Brussels, as a symbol of understanding and respect for the ideas of others, and tomorrow when its interior is filled with the thought of 260 distinguished figures, it will be set up somewhere as a bearer of messages, a symbol of friendship. A testimony to our moment in history.

COSTAS TSOCLIS

Costas Tsoclis, The Ark, bilingual edition on the occasion of the exhibition of the work at Parc Tournary-Solvay in Brussels 1994, Diatton Editions, 1994.