Photos: Ugo Carmeni
A blue light source flickers from inside the drawer of a flipped over office desk. The light’s rhythm responds to SOUNDR’s sonic intensity. On the backside of the desk, a shattered red marble reflects a screen featuring a video game. In the game, a low poly blue gorilla wreaks havoc, turning against the very edifice that brought it to life. The more destruction it causes the larger it grows, pulverising classicist tropes and symbols of corporate lifestyle and culture that it encounters on its way out. As the gorilla breaks free, now tenfold in size, it finds itself in a field of butterflies and advances towards the shore, where its body fades out and merges with the water, facing the gleaming sunset, surrounded by a horizon of towers emerging from the sea.
Stationed at the main entrance of Imperio Properties’ diamond shaped high-rise ‘The Icon’ tower in Limassol, an edition of Orlinski’s Wild Kong sculpture stands as “a symbol of hope” representing the property development and management firm with “messages of optimism…such as the beauty that manages to defeat evil, the love that transforms humans.”* Marketing platitudes aside, the desk sculpture materialises in the space by congealing elements from the virtual space of the video game, while the blue gorilla becomes a virtual character in the screen with its own volition and desires. This double movement instigates a mode of voyeuristic pleasure that lusts for destruction while the ludic qualities of the video game ameliorates the destruction’s material implications, hinting at a certain participation in the ongoing speculation games and financial investments that attribute to the ‘ghostification’ of Limassol.
*https://www.imperioproperties.com/where-is-this-blue-gorilla-in-limassol/ (accessed: 09/04/2024)
Gaming Tower, 2024, Lower Levant Company (Emiddio Vasquez & Peter Eramian), in collaboration with Faysal Mroueh. Office desk, marble, concrete, sound responsive fibre optic ceiling light, acoustic tile, single channel video, 13’05”.
Presented as part of the exhibition On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… at the Cyprus Pavilion Biennale Arte, Venice, 2024.