Video “Bed-line”
Text by Evangelia Ledaki
“…The animation Bed-line of Efi Spyrou brings us into a dystopian, institutionalised setting inhabited by awakened objects. Two dozen metallic camp beds lined up in a remote perspective space come to life and start a repetitive motion, which accelerates until the sound becomes deafening. This is a coup d’état by the objects, which take over the field where their users had become inactive. Sick, wayfarers or inmates, the users are absent. Without knowing whether the users have recovered, left or eliminated, we can assume that the cots won the contest and are now left to celebrate their victory. Like rewarded executives – accountable to another system – the beds become a metonymy of dominance. They parade noisily and uncontrollably, choreographing the microphysics of power in a boisterous crescendo of disorder. In the institutional setting of Bed-line the absurd reigns triumphant, without semblances of consent.
Spyrou reproduces an illusory non-place that resembles a surveillance theme park. Non descriptive and resisting any explanatory details, she cryptically presents the paradox as a fact and employs the folding bed as the humble symbol of human lying-down: not of sleep, not of lovemaking but perhaps of physical pain, of decay and loss, of the dream that turned nightmare…”
E. Ledaki
Optical Anthropologist|Curator