Artwork of the month - video (59 sec).

Stèle - self portrait of the artists as skiapode people

Year	2023
Size	42 cm x 26.5 cm x 6.8 cm
Materials	blue clay, engobes, ceramic glazes
Edition	1/1
For Sale	Yes, contact our gallery Fred&Ferry (Antwerp, BE)
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Frank&Robbert Robbert&Frank have been working with symbols, folklore, rituals, and magic ever since they started collaborating over a decade ago. During the COVID time, the artists discovered the sciapode in an old book enlisting a series of mythical creatures, such as dwarfs, cyclopes, goblins, and phoenixes. This stele is the result of a fascination for this book and our personal addition to the growing number of ‘fake’ sciapode phenomena initiated by Mark Manders (see below).

Monopods (also called sciapods, skiapods, skiapodes) were mythological dwarf-like creatures with a single, large foot extending from a leg centred in the middle of their bodies. The names monopod and skiapod (σκιάποδες) are both Greek, respectively meaning "one-foot" and "shadow-foot". They are described by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (AD 77): “…another race of men, who are known as Monocoli, who have only one leg, but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Sciapodae, because they are in the habit of lying on their backs, during the time of the extreme heat, and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet.” Reference to the legend continued into the Middle Ages, for example in the books ‘Etymologiae’ by Isidore of Seville and Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), which describes a race of the "Uniped" in Iceland. Umberto Eco describes a sciapod named Gavagai in ‘Baudolino’, and C. S. Lewis features monopods in the book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a part of his children's series The Chronicles of Narnia.

In his acclaimed lecture Dangerous Memes, cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett refers to Skiapodes in relation to the Cartesian theater and points out that "most Skiapodes hold their leg as a strange, uncanny object, a thing that seems not entirely part of their body and therefore their mind.” Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud linked the leg of the sciapode with the penis. This giant penis feels estranged and distant, almost object-like; symbolizing the idea of males fearing their own future babies, of having their sperm generate a conceivable misfit.

But most of the information about Skiapode that is to be found online is created by visual artist Mark Manders, who has been researching the skiapode as part of the project ‘Room with all existing words’. “The interesting thing about the myth of the Skiapode is that it never really took off. It appeared and disappeared in different periods and regions of our world. It just never made it big. It is a failed myth. I decided to make ‘fake’ Skiapodes by different artists and from different periods, and now the majority of the Skiapodes were made in Ronse over the last few years. These fake Skiapodes were gradually edited into reality and published online. It is a very scary thing, if you think about it, how easy it is to add fake information to our world and how quickly this information seems reliable. It shows how vulnerable our minds and our society are.”

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