Mitos, thread, yarn, interlace, invention, crossing, web.

The history of the thread and its economic, political and symbolic uses is as old as human history itself. In the myth of the Minotaur,Mitos, Ariadne’s thread, led Theseus, the king of Athens, out of the Labyrinth.

Metis was Zeus’s first wife, the mother of  Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and of Poros, whose characteristic trait was creative ingenuity. Zeus coveted her fantastic ability to transform and combine miscellaneous elements, and her skill in attuning with kairos, the changing, contingent circumstances.So he swallowed Metis, the goddess of practical intelligence and unuttered knowledge.

After Metis’s disappearance inside Zeus’s belly, we are left to believe that wisdom, judgment and human creativity are products of cognition, as it is often the case with conceptualism and the relevant Isms, rationalism and intellectualism. In the well-known representations, Athena, Metis’s daughter, appears leaping from Zeus’s head.However, the birth of the goddess of wisdom would not be possible without the creative intervention of a craftsman, the blacksmith Hephaestus.

Cunning Odysseus, striving to devise a way out, to find a resource in penury, was also gifted with the extraordinary ability of artisanal intelligence.Animals, especially the weak ones, who have developed camouflage and transformation abilities to escape from their stronger adversaries in the battle for survival, are also gifted with metis.

Like in Yiota Andriakaina’s dreamy pictures of the wondering child wandering in the land of insects, birds and animals, in Metis’s world, humans and nature constitute a cosmos, a diversified unity.

A varied yet unified world where the high and the low, the animals, the gods and the humans, myth and reason, the artisan and the artist, Zeus’s belly and head have not forgotten their kinship and their opposition has not been established yet.