TWIN VESSELS

Installation views, Twin Vessels, 2024

15-06-’24 till 15-08-’24
BARATTO & MOURAVAS | TWIN VESSELS

INDEBT proudly presents Twin Vessels: a solo show by artist duo Nicola Baratto (1989 IT) and Yiannis Mouravas (1986 GR). Grounded in the duo’s artistic practice known as ‘Archaeodreaming’, Twin Vesselscontemplates the idea of dew harvesting as seen through the kinship between two mythical twin brothers: Hypnos and Thanatos, representative of Sleep and Death, both sons of Nix, The Night. In re-imagining the twin’s tale in the underground space of Indebt, the artist duo will showcase an installation anchored in two sculptural works, a bed and a sarcophagus. Thematically, the exhibition touches upon various recurring themes that run through the duo’s 8-years long collaboration composing of mythopoetic narratives that explore dreams, history, archaeology, the natural elements, alchemy, and the transmission of knowledge across cultures and centuries.

“Sunday 13th July 2025

I wake up around 8AM as a shiny beam of light bounces through the window sill. I had my recurring dream last night. It comes to me when I am lost and I struggle. I am in an open wheat field, it's still green, not golden yet, so it must be spring time. I am doing a workshop to learn how to fly with my bare arms. It's taught by a woman who reminds me of Naomi, but I can't really see her face clearly so it’s not certain. Every time I take off I flap my arms very hard and I manage to gain and maintain height. I fly over a hill and get faster as I follow its crest downhill, gracefully – I think. I then see a river, and I always feel I should follow its meanders – so I do. But the watercourse leads me towards a dark hollow, which I keep falling into. There I die. It's all blank, void, I forget, it's oblivion. There's a strong smell of sulphur, I imagine like the dust that burns in hell. There is something about this river I can't avoid following, but it leads me nowhere. Someone tells me it's Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness. And I think of a tune sang by a group of winter swimmers: ‘sea's waves told me that this is the last night, tomorrow who knows, come my love, let's go to Peramos, let's meet in Argentina, the sea sees the fires, happiness sees the stars, while the living dead of our memory, a flight through ether, in chaos and in dream, belly full of despair’. I thought about it while unearthing my father's corpse, and working on a psedo-Sarchopagus for an art show in Elefsina, the ancient entrance of the underworld.

The dream made me think about the story of Hypnos and Thanathos, the twins who live in the underworld and never see the light. They play and sing ashore a river, as they interfere with human life taking place at its bottom. Every time the brothers laugh, someone's dream is shaken, or someone’s life is taken. When they cry we have the chance of seeing morning dew appearing at dawn.”

Baratto and Mouravas believe that when all signs of social orientation seem lost, shifting attention onto dreams is the beginning of self-transformation: an inherently therapeutic process. Considering dreaming as a form of healing, the duo refer to archaic practices of dream medicine. In ancient Greek times, pilgrims would visit the temples of Asklepios, the ancient God of medicine and healing, to perform a ritual called incubation. During the night, the God would appear in the dreamers’ sleep, usually in the form of a snake, and gift the dreamers a suggestion or prescription on how to heal or deal with their issues.

In Twin Vessels, sleep and death are materially mirrored by the magic of dew. Beneath its poetic surface lies a political reflection on the pervasive sense of an apocalyptic world's end, exacerbated by the profound crisis of imagination in contemporary times. Their blend of poetic and political intent draws inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini's use of myths as connective tissue between archaic and contemporary culture. A key reference is Pasolini's L’articolo delle Lucciole (The Article of Fireflies), where he subtly critiques post-WWII fascism through the poetic image of “the disappearance of the fireflies.”

Nicola Baratto & Yiannis Mouravas work and live in The Netherlands. The duo graduated from the Dirty Art Department, Sandberg Institute Amsterdam in 2016, where they also worked as research fellows in 2021. They exhibited in Am Ende des Tages - Düsseldorf, Museum of Contemporary Art Alcamo, HotWheels - Athens, as well as in multiple group exhibitions in the Netherlands, in Italy and in Greece. In 2023 they were part of the group exhibition A Rave Down Below, as part of the European Capital of Culture in Elefsina, Greece. For 2024, they are selected for the 5th edition of the renowned “Una Boccata d’Arte” by Fondazione Elpis.