Echoes

Echoes is a single-room installation that draws upon Ancient Egyptian myth, and research undertaken with biologists and zoologists, to stage a scene of luminous horror: an encounter between life and death in its purest form. Its walls painted with a lurid, yellow pigment containing deadly, black mamba snake venom, the room is conceived of as part-temple, part-laboratory – a speculative setting for the mass-production of an elixir for eternal life. Two white, abstract sculptures based on the god-hybrids Wadjet and Taweret preside over the space, as a looped track plays of Cleopatra singing a love song from her times A Cappella. In an act of resurrection and reinvention, Marguerite had Cleopatra’s voice – along with the nine extinct languages she spoke – synthetically reconstructed through the close study of historical accounts and the aid of vocal organs specialists and ethnomusicologists. As Cleopatra sings, Taweret oversees the live brewing of the elixir of immortality, tirelessly relaying hippopotamus milk and alligator’s blood through a circuitous network of tubes. A manifest expression of the dual properties of the pharmakon, the Wadjet (King Cobra) sculpture meanwhile administers 1g of King Cobra venom to itself, prompting its bodily defences to produce the poison’s antidote. Understanding myth as a pattern that appears through the varied re-tellings of a historical event, Echoes gives shape to the disembodied past to consider humankind’s longstanding preoccupation with resilience and regeneration.