Amaia Sánchez-Velasco and Jorge Valiente Oriol · Revisiting Titono

Amaia Sánchez-Velasco and Jorge Valiente Oriol are members of GRANDEZA STUDIO, an art and architecture collective co-directed since 2011 together with Gonzalo Valiente Oriol. Their work intertwines research, creative practice and pedagogy, and has been widely published and exhibited in Australia, Chile, Germany, USA, Spain, Holland and Italy. In 2019, they curated the Australian pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano, which won the Golden Bee Award. Their two latest works are on show at the Biennale Architettura 2023 in Venice.

Proyect

Revisiting Titono: Tentacular Geographies of Eternal Youth proposes a critical and contemporary revision of the Greek myth in which Eos, goddess of dawn, falls deeply in love with Titono - a mortal of dazzling beauty. In her desire to preserve her beloved's beauty forever, Eos asks Zeus to grant Titono immortality. However, Eos forgets to ask the father of the gods for eternal youth for her beloved. Thus, Titono gradually ages until Eos decides to free him (or himself) by transforming him into a cicada for the rest of eternity. From then on, every day Eos cries, producing the morning dew with his tears. The immortal cicada feeds on them while with his characteristic chirping he begs Thanatos, king of the night, to grant him the longed-for and unattainable death.

At the intersection between theory-fiction, critical mythology and audiovisual research, Revisiting Titono: Tentacular Geographies of Eternal Youth, proposes a trans-scalar (from hydra telomerase to mica mining landscapes) and trans-temporal journey (from Babylonian mythology to the debates around the Bold Glamour digital filter, via the theories of Russian cosmists and transhumanists) that will bring us closer, from a critical and informed perspective, to a distributed network of architectures - understood as the relations between bodies (human and non-human), laboratories, places of extraction, discursivities, technologies, climates, ecosystems and economies - in the service of the quest for eternal youth.

This re-signification of Titono's myth will navigate the past, present and future of our relationship with youth, ageing, death and immortality, as articulating vectors of human desire and terror. It is precisely the condition of irresolution - a never-concluded dispute - of myths (and their endless succession of versions) that endows them with the capacity to open up the political and ontological imagination towards vectors of affectivity, desires and fears yet to be explored.