Opus Vermiculatum

These mosaics are pieced together from
borrowed ancient tesserae, which were held
in storage at the Archaeological Museum
in Nicosia, Cyprus. Panayiotou was granted
permission by the Cyprus Department
of Antiquities to borrow these unidentified
elements in order to create this series of
new wall mosaics. The three pieces are
programmatically created and specifically
conceived for the wall, in the tradition
of raised floor mosaics. They follow the
tessellation methods of antique Cypriot
mosaics, for example, Fundus (Field)
interchanges two colors used normally to
represent the image’s background. In Opus
tessellatum the stones are organized by size
(as was often the case in ancient mosaics,
larger sized tesserae would be placed
perimetrically to smaller sized ones) and in
Opus vermiculatum warm colors are
concentrated in the center thus giving the
impression of an “emblem”. The resulting
pieces are composed as ephemeral artworks
that only exist for the duration of the
exhibition. Following the biennale’s closure,
they will return to the conservation
department of the Archaeological Museum
in Nicosia, to be dismantled and thus
de-created, fully reverting to their former
status as unidentified fragments.