Absence is the highest form of presence

A graphic-thought-form campaign advertising the unmapped. A collective work in dialogue with COYOTE in the context of 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art curated by Maria-Thalia Carras.

The coyote is neither a wolf nor a dog, but an invasive species migrating from the New World, a metaphorical being cruising in-between night and day and cross-breeding with encounters. Inspired by this equivocal totemic figure within the Amerindian mythology, American author Roy Wagner repositions anthropology by displacing its objects of study onto the unspoken, the unheard, the unknown zones, on what is not there as much as on what is there. As a motif of the threshold, the coyote is a shape-shifter, a go-between, a trickster. The animal becomes a method for collective thinking, and a working tool for COYOTE. At the invitation of the ninth edition of Thessaloniki biennale of Contemporary Art, COYOTE expands its ongoing research on language as a method and a tool to investigate the city. As a multi-layered territory, a palimpsest of mixed geological, historical, ethnic, linguistic and religious strata, poised between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, Thessaloniki is yet a city shaped by the very idea of the nation state. It conceals invisible parts and doesn’t reveal its multiple narratives at once. By drifting from the Archeological museum to the Museum of Byzantine culture via the Islahane, the Pasha’s Gardens, the Yeni Mosque and the MOMus, one can evaluate the cultural diversity of the city’s past through the modern approach of separate and specialized disciplines, but then may miss some holes that make the city as a whole.
The proposal consists in hijacking the museums’ signage and occupying their liminal thresholds to parasitize their storytellings. COYOTE proposes to advertise some unmapped and missing fragments through an infiltrating communication campaign, made of thoughts collected from a bibliography on a critical genealogy of the monolithic nation state, as well as stories gleaned in Thessaloniki among city dwellers, and mythical tales from other time-spaces.