ρεi Start story

ρει Start Story) is the visual narrative of the art project
ρει Start (pronounced restart), by Greek artist Marianna Lyra set in a deserted garage, actually an iconic building of the 1920’s, whose past history was uncovered while creating the project in situ.
Fusing past and present in a transformative journey the film takes us through time, space, the artworks and the history of the building itself.
The starting point is a painting (1995) depicting a scene in an imagined city where twelve characters seated around the family dinner table are struck by lightning.
By re-activating the frozen scene and giving them a new lease of life, the artwork follows the trajectories of these characters as they are launched out of the canvas into 3 dimensional space in search of a new existence.
Through the interaction of paintings, sculptures, installations, digital prints, audio-visual animations, light and shadow, sound and live performance, a story of displacement, migration, loss, remembrance and renewal emerges.
The title ρει Start, a play on the Greek verb “ρει”, meaning “to flow”, found in the Heraclitean axiom “All is flux, nothing stays still” and the English word “start”, reflects the essence of the artwork, which is to bring the creative flow of universal time into the present need for renewal.