It was difficult to adapt to feel that I am not in an Antique Greece city even if I am in the British Museum. Although there are many historical ruins in the British Museum, none of them as crazy as this idea: to reconstruct a temple in its real scale. I wanted to be in Xanthos in its real environment, to look around, to wonder about the remnants of the city. It gave me the feeling of being in different place at the same time.
With this work I will analyse the sense of belonging, our physical and mental interactions with the world.
Leach argues that design can aid the process of assimilation we go through when we adapt to our surroundings. Architecture, and indeed all forms of design and creativity—fashion, art, cinema, and others—can be an effective realm for forging a sense of belonging and establishing an identity. (Leach, N. Camouflage. 2006. MIT Press)
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History
The Nereid Monument is a very large and elaborate Lycian tomb dating from about 380 BC, an interesting mix of Greek and Lycian styles. It is the largest and finest of the Lykian tombs found at Xanthos, south-west Turkey. It is named after the figures of Nereids, daughters of the sea-god Nereus, placed between the columns.(http://www.lycianturkey.com/british-museum-lycia.htm)
The original place of many of the sculptures on the building is open to question and the reconstruction shown here is disputed. Freestanding statues of girls with wind-blown draperies thought to represent Nereids, daughters of the sea-god Nereus. Iris is a Messenger god and corresponds with Hermes in the left half of the pediment. She was winged, and her drapery was carved to suggest the rush of wind against her body during flight. It was previously believed that the winged women figures were harpies (monsters from Greek mythology with the head of a woman and the body of a bird). It is now thought that these figures may depict sirens carrying off the souls of the dead. (L. Burn, The British Museum book of Greater London, The British Museum Press, 1991)
Seventy huge crates of marbles were packed up and taken to England aboard the surveying British naval ship the HMS Beacon. The exhibition of the finds caused a huge sensation in London, almost as great as that of the exhibition of the Elgin Marbles forty years earlier. Thousands came to marvel at the finds from Xanthos which included the monumental Nereid Monument, the Horse Tomb, the Harpy Frieze and other miscellaneous reliefs from the city walls.
