Mechanosia
30.10 / from 19h / Opening
06.11 / 18:30 - 20:30 / Finissage
ististist project / Athens

Mechanosia is a collaborative project produced by Rokolectiv and is on view at ististist project space in Athens October 30th through November 6.

The artist-run project space ististist project presents the multimedia installation Mechanosia by the artistic duo MarksMara.

In 1901, a crew of sponge divers salvaged a mass of bronze from a Mediterranean shipwreck, an object later known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Long before glowing screens captured our gaze, this ancient analog computer was already preoccupied with a distinctly modern obsession: the outsourcing of human consciousness to technology. Within the context of MarksMara’s project, titled Mechanosia, the Mechanism returns to Athens not as a historical artifact, but as a temporal glitch.

While at the National Archaeological Museum its oxidized fragments are codified as relics, and at the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology they are reconstructed into functional replicas, inside the space of ististist project, Mechanosia wanders through the hazy thresholds between history and fiction—a chaotic fluidity that, after all, haunts the very discipline of archaeology. Combining performative and sculptural gestures, video projection, and sound, the project arrives in Athens, having as its departure point the field research conducted by the artistic duo on the island of Antikythera, as well as its initial presentation at the cultural venue Rezidenta9 in Bucharest.

In this new version, the installation condenses its visual material into a single video projection which—along with the sculptures—challenges the anthropocentric approach and constitutes an autonomous system of thought; a conceptual dialogue between the computational logic of Ana Logia, the embodied, earthly intelligence of Biobaby, and the networked, omnipresent void of Ghosty. Within this framework, the Mechanism is approached as a blueprint for the Western extractive logic that followed. Much like the mechanical clock fragments the flow of time, this device already carried the silent, embryonic seeds of a techno-capitalist reality, one where the living world is flattened into manageable data.

Set against the mystifying soundscape of Lea Bertucci’s music, MarksMara move away from mere documentation to wire a strange, animistic game. Born from the encounter between machine and life itself, Mechanosia leads us to the point where the boundaries between technology and nature dissolve; a place where intelligence is no longer a human monopoly, but a collective contagion welling up from our shared subsoil.

Opening: 30.10.2026
Venue: ististist project, Athens

Concept & artistic direction: MarksMara (Jared Marks & Mara Ploscaru)
Soundtrack: Lea Bertucci
Director of photography: Boróka Biró
Video editing: Dominique Mantilla
Color grading & graphic design: Nona Inescu
Sculpture & animation: Mara H. Grigoriu
Sculpture: Larisa Sitar
Costumes: Resi Bender
Performance: Eliza Trefaș & Jared Marks
Sound recording & editing: Patric Catani
3D modeling: Joshua Williams
Voices: Michelle Cheung, Elif Demiroğlu, Lucas Pagès
Poem by Dorin Ploscaru (translation Mara Ploscaru)

Produced by Rokolecitv
Co-financed by AFCN

With support from SHAPE+ platform. SHAPE+ is a European platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art co-funded by the European Union and Pro Helvetia. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

This project is co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not to be held responsible for the content of the project, nor for the ways in which the results of the project might be used. Those are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the grant.