“Climate catastrophe is like weather: everywhere and always, the
lifeworld made sensible.” 

The day before the western wind is Despina Charitonidi’s
first solo exhibition in Cyprus and to date. Within the gallery space, the
artist creates an environment that reflects on ideas of beauty and destruction,
life and death, presenting the seen and unseen natural and artificial mechanisms
that motivate human actions and have prompted the climate catastrophe. Her
poetic installation combines painting, sculpture, and performative elements
that come together to form a critique of the climate emergency and how it was
caused by humans.

In the Anthropocene era—in which humans have become
geological agents, changing the physical processes of the earth— a time of climate change and chaos, a time of late capitalism,
global pandemic, and extreme urbanisation, humans have experienced subsequent disasters
with unprecedented results and long, significant grief for the loss of natural
environments and human lives. In The day before the western
wind, Charitonidi presents a new body of work continuing her
focus on nature, human intervention, and the game of power between man and
nature. Notions of balance and power in the time of climate change are
presented to the viewer in the context of a post-apocalyptic environment with a
floral landscape made of black clay combined with found materials, collected in
the aftermath the major fire in 2018 in Mati, Attica, the deadliest urban fire
in the history of modern Greece.

Charitonidi transforms pieces of cars that have been
burned in the fire into a forest that grows (or decays) from a series of
canvases laid on the floor. Artworks and visitors are exposed to UV lights that
gradually transform the surfaces of the blank canvases which have been treated
with photosensitive chemicals, changing the canvases. By doing this,  she
positions the process at the centre of the exhibition, affecting and
transforming the visitors’ experience. It is a decision that both reveals the
artistic process – making it part of the show rather than some invisible effort
that precedes it – while simultaneously exposing the visitor directly to the
threat and danger of the UV light, bringing the harm of climate change to the
forefront of the project. In the gallery’s courtyard, two half-moon sculptures
lead the visitors toward the main installation, attempting to alert them to
what they are about to encounter. A crystal sculpture on the exterior wall
presents the fluidity and the fragility of human nature and of our natural
environment.
 

Over the past few years, Charitonidi has developed a
distinctive personal artistic language that transforms elements found in
construction sites and other places through a process of examination of and experimentation
with their properties. The resulting sculptural gestures reconsider the
environmental impact of human action. She constructs a world made of earth and ashes
commemorating nature and expresses her personal preoccupation with the
environment, inviting viewers to reflect on our climate’s future.