Ryts Monet

Pangea (In reference to Alighiero Boetti) takes the form of a hypothetical reconstruction in which the geopolitical plane collapses into the geological one.
The Earth’s surface as it appeared approximately 290 million years ago is reinterpreted by Ryts Monet through a division based on contemporary nation-states, redistributed across the Earth’s crust and represented by their respective flags, in an explicit homage to Alighiero Boetti and his renowned embroidered maps, to which the title refers.
However, the artist moves beyond the purely aesthetic dimension of the reference model: whereas Boetti entrusted the execution of his maps to Afghan embroiderers, in Pangea embroidery is both evoked and replaced by a meticulous graphic gesture, entirely drawn by hand using multicoloured ballpoint pens.
The result is a slow and rigorous process of execution, extending over nearly a year, which lends the surface of the work a simultaneously tactile and meditative quality. The temporal friction activated by the work – based on the layering of vastly distant chronological scales – highlights the intrinsic arbitrariness of political borders: territories now separated by vast oceans appear here once contiguous, while contemporary nation-states reveal themselves, in geological perspective, as transient entities dispersed across opposing hemispheres.