Lost LABYRINTH Of Egypt Scanned

Art & Science



In the Mataha expedition, contemporary archaeology meets contemporary art. A cutting edge research featuring the relations between art, science and archaeology. The Mataha expedition is a total project mixing geophysicists, archaeologists, geomorphologists, artists, egyptologists, communicators, art curators, authors, aerospace and civil engineers, to create an innovative way of research. Louis De  Cordier felt that both the artist and scientist share the common believe in the impossible. Although these professions appear to be on the opposite side of the logic-creativity-spectrum, he recognized that they often use a similar language to communicate their ideas: they are both highly visual, comfortable with the abstract, and focused on the unknown. Fueled by the desire to express change, Louis De  Cordier realized the cooperation between the Ghent University and the NRIAG, which found enormous value in incorporating contemporary art as a catalyst to their traditional scientific process, inciting the evolution of the archaeologic research field. On balance, the historic relation between art research and archaeology is very close. Archaeology as a discipline has always been a department of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. In the last decades archaeology evolved to a hard science by working together with departments like geology and geography. A great evolution bringing along technics as radio carbon dating and geophysics, but gradually loosing the factor of the artistic imagination. So inherent to understand long lost civilizations, which left us mainly...Art. The realization of the Mataha-expedition founds its origin in the imagination of artists dating back to the Renaissance period. The Renaissance stimulated rising interest in Antiquity, and brought back into circulation classical authors such as Herodotus. As a result, once again authors and artists were the first to be interested in the Egyptian Labyrinth. The scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680 CE) produced one of the first pictorial reconstructions, based on the accounts in Herodotus. In the centuries to follow, the legendary labyrinth of Egypt continued to inspire Romantic artists and artistic explores to search in Egypt. Like Paul Lucas, artist and antiquary of king Louis XIV of France. Reaching its peak with the exploration of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte, who realized an expedition constituted of artists and scientists forming one team of "savants which localized the Labyrinth in Hawara.

In this state of mind the artist Louis De Cordier continued the labyrinth story on a contemporary archaeological way. Devoted to the preservation and investigation of Egyptian antiquities, Louis De Cordier started the Mataha Expedition with a series of private lectures, funding the project with the sale profits of the Golden Sun Disk. A timepiece designed by Louis De Cordier to ignite the global fire of comprehensive awareness and awakening. The vision of the Mataha-expedition by Louis De Cordier is not a solitary experiment, but an early foray of a holistic movement to enable research and innovation through the cooperation of varied art & science disciplines.