DESOLATION That the ruins of time, a favorite psychoanalytical metaphor for the unconscious, coined by Freud, is a site, that is, a spatial metaphor, gives a profound insight into the structure of temporality: Time is all what is being shredded by time, and abandoned, the debris of an ancient relic. Yet the content of this vessel, remains unknown to human beings; we have only ever seen the aftermath, and so is with the history of Being – what is sought after is its significance, not its meaning. The interpretandum in Valentine Korzhov's series “Desolation” (we refuse to call it metaphor, for that would imply one thing being the meaning of another, and hereby we are concerned with the possibility of the absolute) is the Platonic dodecahedron, a polyhedron with twelve flat faces, that according to Plato's theory laid out in the dialogue Timaeus, constitutes the shape of real solids (primary constituents – air, water, fire, earth): “the god used it for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven”. The Aristotelian “aether” which is the quintessential matter of the universe (equivalent to our astronomical dark matter) was later considered one of these solids. Through kinesis, the different dodecahedrons – of which there are twelve basic forms and infinite complex forms, stand in agreement with Plato, mimicking the mechanics of heaven with their motions and sounds. A sense of latency pervades through the material – bronze juxtaposed by hollowness – that is yet ready to awake anytime but doesn't. The most salient feature of the dodecahedron, discovered by Pythagoras, however, is that although much theorized by mathematicians all the way to Euler's topological proof, its use has never been found. When meaning has already been lost, how do we reconstitute ourselves? How do you return to the place of origin when the referents have been erased? In the desolation, after time (time is always ending or has ended), when the metaphysical space has been erased into arbitrariness, our voice resounds through a hollow mask.