yannis kyriakides

The Story We Sell Ourselves In Order To Live
What is left of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron today?

Death and dissipation, alternative lifestyles and alternate loves, gentle ballads and vital choices, noble hearts and instant cynics. Our once enchanting world has now become global, in aspect but not in spirit, because everything seems to have remained the same. Just refreshed and updated like a program with its never-ending uploads.

In uncertain times, as humans, we continue to escape from reality, taking shelter in whatever way we can, usually in the easiest way provided us. In order to nurture our spirits and allow our senses to explode, the virtual component of reality has led to a version of ourselves we believed we had more control over.

It has proved an illusory sense of control, one which is quietly spinning out of our hands, while we flee from the harsh realities of the modern world that have led to an increased presence of death in our lives and a constant insecurity; a lack of community values and safety nets crushed by an overwhelming capitalism and a consumer society in its current phase of resignation and dependency. Reality itself flees from us, evading us so insidiously, that most of us no longer see a need for it at all. It is the instant that counts and whatever it is we are telling each other (and ourselves) right now that dictates.

Boccaccio’s stories cannot help us to escape from the eternal “loops” we currently find ourselves in: but we continue to tell ourselves, to « sell » ourselves, stories in order to move forwards, to keep going, where exactly we do not know, all of us exiles aware that we have no real place to escape to, within or without, on or off-line, the important thing is to keep questioning ourselves and our stories, and to keep telling them.