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Lying still, on broken glass and asphalt is the latest iteration in Marina Xenofontos’s ongoing inquiry into the character Twice—a work that traces the ideological struggles of a teenager attempting to complete her tasks. Earlier versions shifted between digital renderings and CNC-carved sculptures; here, the figure multiplies, reappearing as a group of small-scale bronze mannequins frozen mid-gesture, suggestive of the discontinuous temporality of stop-motion animation.

The series presents a subject refracted across multiple selves. Their mirrored postures recall the myth of Narcissus and/or Lacan’s mirror stage—not as a tale of vanity, but as a study in the unstable mechanics of self-recognition. The installation’s rhythm is filmic, referencing The Apple (1998), the debut film by Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf. Based on real events, the film follows two sisters who, after over a decade of confinement, begin to encounter the outside world for the first time. Their tentative engagement with objects—mirrors, apples, other bodies—becomes a study in how meaning forms and how the self emerges in relation to things.

In Lying still, on broken glass and asphalt, selfhood likewise unfolds as a rehearsal: fragmentary, symbolically mediated, and shaped by the tension between inner projection and external constraint.