In my studio (Iași, Romania – 2020 AD), I created a reproduction of the bust of Nefertiti (Amarna, Egypt – 1345 BC), which is currently housed in the Neues Museum in Berlin. The physical distance between me and the original work (along with its production process) is roughly 1,455 kilometers and 3,365 years. Accessing the visual information necessary for this project required several mediators: the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (the society that discovered the bust in 1912), photographers who documented the sculpture, the World Wide Web platform, and the pixel universe displayed on my personal laptop screen. These represent just a portion of the technical intermediaries involved.
Cognitive and cultural mediators, which are much harder to pinpoint, include animated cartoons featuring Tutankhamun that I watched as a child, commercial reproductions of the bust (candles, flowerpots, etc.), and cinematic portrayals of Nefertiti as a historical figure. Additionally, since the subject is a well-established symbol of feminine beauty, my study process was inevitably influenced by other icons of this beauty ideal—contemporary, modern, and classical alike.
This was the work that paved way for the Axis Mundi project.