Christina Mitrentse presented her work “The Secret School” within the context of Μeta-Εvent “Terra Extremitas: The End of the Earth” in NDSM-werf venue in Amsterdam in August 2008. Mitrentse’s work, as she herslef states, has been formed as an experimental laboratory.
The manifestation contains drawings, found objects/sculptures, photography and installation, which when personalized within the laboratory of the everyday, become a presentation, inviting a debate between the scientific narrative and the museological approach. Mitrentse’s work seems to propose the deconstruction of our conceptual mechanisms.
By re-contextualizing groups of objects and recreating imagery from books, Christina disrupts conventional readings, suggesting poetic ensembles ranging from the personal to the universal. The artist brings all the artifacts together in a nonhierarchical setting to question the process of observing, collecting, recording and displaying in terms of how data is circulated in a number of institutions such as school, library, church, academia, gallery and museum.
The “Secret School”, originally located as solo project site-specific installation in a World War II bomb–shelter in London, is now expanding through the Terra Extremistas myth-making notion. As the artist herself notes “The ‘secret school’ manifests itself as an interactive montage of artifacts derived from the Greek myth of the Secret School and debunks the credibility of historical discourses. It acts as an ‘esoteric’ space which has a fictional attribute while it becomes a carrier in which the questions of how we perceive knowledge can be communicated”.
