Artissima, Torino, 2025: Elli Antoniou

Cob Gallery presents a solo installation by Greek artist Elli Antoniou that evokes a speculative cosmological environment, reflecting on our planetary condition amid global crises. Drawing inspiration from science fiction, philosophy, and astrophysics, Antoniou repositions Earth not as a fixed point of origin, but as a shared vessel - ever-drifting spacecraft journeying through the vast, unknown cosmos. Building on Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth,” the artist invites us to reconsider our reality from a cosmic perspective, imagining Earth as a fragile, self-sustaining ecosystem in constant motion and transformation.

Antoniou’s work delves into the multifaceted concept of ‘the virtual’ and the boundaries of sensory experience. Employing a hybrid technique of gestural drawing and abrasive tools, she subtly alters the surface of steel panels, transforming their reflective properties. The resulting metallic drawings and sculptures, animated by natural and directional lighting, evoke fluid cosmoi in perpetual motion. By drawing with power tools, Antoniou’s process becomes both physically demanding and evocative, blending violence with precision, tactility with illusion.

The artist explores the invisible yet omnipresent forces that govern the cosmos—gravitational pulls, magnetic fields, cosmic explosions, and the swirling arcs of celestial bodies. Informed by research into curvilinear movement in outer space, her compositions capture speculative moments of energetic transformation: light-altering explosions, thresholds crossed. Antoniou’s metallic drawings blur the lines between sculpture, drawing, and installation. The artist’s process not only evokes the energetic forces she seeks to represent—but also serves as a meditation on the act of creation itself, exploring how invisible energies can be rendered tactile and visible.

Antoniou’s project concept embodies her fascination with the Milky Way-Andromeda collision, known as the Milkomeda merger, predicted to occur in 4-5 billion years. Science fiction also plays a crucial role in the project—not for escape, but as a speculative tool to reimagine the future. Antoniou imagines Earth as a spacecraft adrift in the unknown, asking what it means to be unmoored from our familiar stars. In this speculative reality, based on real astronomical projections, the Milkomeda collision may one day eject our solar system from the galaxy entirely. The Sun would continue to shine, and the planets would orbit as usual, but the night sky we know would be lost. This possibility—both terrifying and wondrous—becomes a metaphor for our current state of planetary precariousness, where humanitarian collapse and technological advancement are not opposing forces, but simultaneous conditions.

The installation responds to this speculative moment of cosmic transformation: a slow, luminous collision in which galaxies pass through one another, altering gravitational fields, trajectories, and the fabric of space itself. At the heart of the presentation is a monumental

sculpture suspended from the ceiling like a mobile. Formed from concentric layers of carved sheet metal, this dynamic Helix structure resembles a coiled galaxy. Suspended by threaded rods bolted together with common hardware fittings that are intentionally left exposed, the installation manages to maintain a sensation of weightlessness in-spite of the use of these common construction-type materials and fixings that are conventionally observed as dense. The positioning of the panels create a sort of mirage as the metal planes dissolve as they come into eye level, establishing this essence of levitation and metamorphosis, like the individual pieces have a magnetic or gravitational force to one another. The sheet metal layers are embedded with pearls to represent the nuclei of these two imagined galaxies - holding the central forces that attract one to another. This, encompassing the notion of the black hole at the centre of each galaxy, and in tandem with the grinded surfaces, envisages the impressions these forces would imprint on the environment they leave behind - rendering the invisible forces visible to immerse an audience into this prophetic atmosphere. Capturing the debris, shapes and matter that celestial bodies are comprised of - allowed by the artist to be frozen in a space we inhabit to be examined and felt in the flesh.

Surrounding this central structure are miniature works on steel panels, forming a refracted horizon line that encircles the booth. These pieces—abstract, zoomed in viewpoints on the projected collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda—are created using Antoniou’s hybrid technique, combining gestural drawing with the physical abrasion of steel. The reflective surfaces shift with ambient light, creating the illusion of animated forms within the installation in real time. These works are not static depictions, but fluid, scaleless cosmoi—portals into speculative realities both intimate and immense. Together with the large-scale sculpture, the smaller works create a dialogue between macrocosm and microcosm - and offer different observations of a colossal cosmic event.

Antoniou’s installation invites viewers to reconsider their existence on Earth—not from the grounded certainty of the terrestrial, but from the unstable, vertiginous perspective of the cosmic. It speaks to a collective, ontological condition of becoming—where borders dissolve, directions invert, and everything is in motion. Through metal, light, and space, Antoniou opens up a speculative realm in which collapse becomes a site of creation, and drifting becomes a mode of knowing.