Limbs of a Mountain Devil; Inhabiting the ArchiveMixed Media, 250x260x240(mm), 2024The Mountain Devil came into contact with humans around 2000 years ago. Their uncanny resemblance to the human form terrified the people who first encountered them, deep in the terrain of Mount Chimera on the South East coast of Turkey. They inhabited a unique and dramatic landscape, beaded with unquenchable fires erupting from the cracks between rocks on the mountainside fed by a continuous underground source of methane gas1. Seen mostly in the misty mountains where they dwelled in groups, their elevation on the mountaintop afforded them the nickname ‘Messengers of God’. These mysterious creatures, despite their human-like silhouette, shared a form of communication unintelligible to the human race, displaying hieroglyph-like patterns on the helmet structures on their heads.
Gradually, climate changes and decreased availability of food and resources forced the Mountain Devil population to relocate their colonies further down the mountainside. Their slowly increasing proximity to the human population instilled a sense of fear and panic, and mass slaughter and enslavement of these once sacred creatures by their human neighbours ensued. With over a century of unimaginable trauma and oppression, the bodies of the Mountain Devils evolved to become larger and developed a hard outer shell. This poor entity evolved to survive and this shapeshifting repeated over several centuries. However, by 1992, the entire species had become extinct.
Since then, international research institutions have collected artefacts from various locations around the world that document the existence of this extinct creature. Archived samples of skulls, bones, and outer skin give clues to a life of accelerated evolution as resistance, while fragments of ancient murals depict scenes from a collective memory and imagination. The archive, which stringently and systematically documents their history, has become a habitat in which the legacy of the creature now resides - a legacy of fragmented remains of its existence, pieced together and accredited by its oppressors.
The Mountain Devil now inhabits the archive as a space of un-rest; dismembered pieces populate the cupboards and compartments which constitute a human-devised framing of their history. The archive cuts sections through the body and spirit of the Mountain Devil. Found limbs have become autonomous entities, each specimen with its own identity and registration, which dwell in this new spatial configuration. The dispersal of limbs throughout the archive is representative of the history of recurrent violence and centuries-long attempts to erase the traces of an entire species. History becomes a broken, obscured and incomplete narrative through which the screams of this creature can still be heard; a new form of imprisonment by their human oppressors.