UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE
"Uncertainty avoidance“ is a series of small size paintings named after one of five key qualities or dimensions of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, a framework for cross-cultural communication that measures how cultures differ on the amount of tolerance they have of unpredictability.
In an attempt to cope with the uncertainty brought by the pandemic, I started looking up at how different cultures, throughout space and time, react to an unknown situation and I stumbled into the story of the altars dedicated to the Unknown Gods (Agnosthos Theos)
This tells that about 596 BC a plague ravaged the young city-state of Athens. When the priestess at Delphi invited the athenians to purify their city, they brought Epimenides from Crete, a High Priest of Zeus, in order to stop the plague.
Epimenides encouraged reforms and he took some black sheep and some white ones, and led them up to the Areopagus, and from there he let them go wherever they chose, having ordered the attendants to follow them, and wherever any one of them lay down they were to sacrifice them to the god who was the patron of the spot, and so the evil was stayed. As the Holiness of these new spots were unknown before, the Athenians couldn’t know which God or Goddess was filling with his/her Energy the Specific Spot. Therefore they set Altars to The Unknown God/Goddess , a placeholder for any gods or goddesses who may exist.
The plague began to recede, and Epimenides sailed back to Crete. Life in Athens returned to normal. Epimenides was celebrated by Plato and Aristotle. Apollodorus, Philostratus and Pausanias wrote about the Unknown God as well, and altars dedicated to unknown gods or goddesses have been found throughout ancient Greece and Rome.
This serie is about the power of a story that becomes truth, when believed by many. In light of this thought, I have recreated these altars, extrapolating them from their original space-time location,to deliver them to our current dimension. Thus, paintinf the altars becomes an act of release: a mean to lift from my soul the weight of a reality I can not control and to surrender the responsibility to something external of me.
