Conversation in Chainispilios Cave

Today we visited Chainispilios cave, Kamaraki.

The conversations all day were SO interesting, they roamed around photography, material, process, history, mythology, geology, speleology, palaeontology, in fact all the ologies. But also academia, research, education, teaching, risk, and art. We talked about deep time, ancient time, cave art, ethics, permissions, ownership and ecologies.

I have a new vocabulary: the cave had amazing ‘decorations’: stalagmites, stalactites, curtains and drapery, helictites, moonmilk, stalagnate, soda straws and more.

How do we ‘capture’, the impossibility of capturing through image making. The seduction of the ‘decoration’, amazing crazy lights of each of us ‘looking’ as our head torches dart around the cave. We end up with footage that looks like a lighting crew were drunk. I buried five (I think) pieces of colour and B&W sheet film in the cave to be collected by Mark next week. Map below: