DIMITRA CHARAMANDAS | OF GRIDS AND SERPENTINE LINES

Of Grids and Serpentine Lines
Text by Eleni Riga

The road trip emerges in Dimitra Charamandas’ solo show Of Grids and Serpentine Lines both as subject matter and as method: a way of moving through uncertainty, uncanniness, strangeness and encounter. It belongs to a broader constellation of practices, including walking and other embodied techniques, through which the artist approaches landscapes in their sensory as well as sociopolitical dimensions. Her recent ongoing research trips, including Volcánes, Mujeres y sus Amistades in Latin America in 2024 and KEEPERS – and the Weaving of Bonds in Greece and the Balkans in 2026, further shape these concerns.

The road trip as methodology is particularly evident in Serpentine Road, Invisible Moon, a large-scale painting that draws on motion parallax: the phenomenon in which objects closer to an observer appear to shift across the field of vision more rapidly than those further away. Perception thus becomes inseparable from movement, producing a continuously changing relationship with the landscape. Charamandas translates this perceptual condition into painting through serpentine or tilted lines, a recurring formal language in her work. Patterns appear to come together only to dissolve again, while the sense of motion extends beyond the pictorial frame. Movement becomes a means of tending to a place.

With this movement comes instability: strangeness, uncanniness, even a form of ecognosis, an intuition that one is embedded within systems that exceed conscious knowledge. We are asked to sit behind the wheel with the artist. What lies beyond the next corner remains unknown; we need to trust the process.

The road becomes a kind of strange loop, bending, twisting and tilting while different temporalities coexist. This strangeness is intensified by artificial light and the intensity of green color. Emerging from the experience of driving at night, the colour transforms the landscape, thinning the boundaries between the physical and metaphysical, the earthly and unearthly, the artificial and organic, the visible and the sensed.

This porousness resonates with ecological thought that challenges the separation of human life from the more-than-human world. Timothy Morton’s dark ecology confronts the intimate entanglement of human existence with systems and beings from which modern thought has attempted to distance itself. Similarly, Katrin Böhning-Gaese’s research on biodiversity and human relationships to other species points towards the consequences of treating humanity as separate from the ecological fabric of which it is a part. As biodiversity is lost, the weave begins to loosen, leaving the ecological and social fabric less densely woven.

This tension between connection and separation is materialised in the carpet. A domestic and intimate object appears on the side of the road, its floral patterns mimicking nature while remaining unmistakably artificial. It occupies the unstable territory of natureculture, where the distinction between organic and manufactured becomes difficult to sustain. Its displacement unsettles spatial relations: the interior is exposed to the exterior, the private enters the public and comfort becomes a trace of vulnerability. Weaving and painting become parallel acts of making, holding nature and culture together while reminding us that our relationship to the world is constructed, mediated and material.

From this collapse of spatial and ontological distinctions, a constellation of works emerges in which intimacy can also contain subtle forms of violence. A jackal found as roadkill, a child’s ribcage, a tortoiseshell: each introduces a different relation between body and surroundings, shelter and exposure. Life and death, protection and vulnerability, growth and decay coexist. The works ask what it means to remain within the ambiguity of these relationships, to surround ourselves with the possibilities of being otherwise.

Perhaps some of this instability can be attributed to the ambiguous presence of the two suns. Drawing on an inferior mirage, the image produces a reality that appears doubled, displaced or uncertain. Across myth, literature and science, two suns can signify altered states, excess, catastrophe and multiplicity. Here, however, they do not necessarily point to another world but to a deeper commitment to the one we have.

To acknowledge the extent of the damage is also to acknowledge our entanglement in it. The task might therefore be less to resolve uncertainty than to stay with it: to remain proximate to a damaged and changing world while attending to its capacity to sustain life beyond the biological, a form of entangled gestationality. Posthuman gestationality suggests another type of motherhood, but perhaps also sisterhood or grandmotherhood, extending care beyond the biological womb.

Eleni Riga

Read the comprehensive version of the exhibition text here.
Read the German version here.

Top image: Dimitra Charamandas, Serpentine Road, Invisible Moon, 130 x 300 cm, acrylic on cotton