Fellow Field: Visual arts

In a state of emergency, one is called on to prioritise, provide a cold assessment of what it is that matters the most. The subject finds itself caught up between the impulse to defend the collective mode of existence and the desire to preserve what, on a personal level, it considers as acquis. This conflict renders the individual vulnerable, causes it to hover over the edge of the most schizoid moment of capitalism. Familiar space is transformed into a menacing field with unclear boundaries. What is it that matters the most? How can we measure it? What do we leave behind and what do we grab hastily as we flee? What ought to survive?

As part of 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture, Athanasios Kanakis presents an installation titled State of Emergency (2023). The work is inspired by the disastrous and historically unprecedented flooding which hit the western suburbs of Attica in 2017, drawing from the personal experience of the artist and his family in Mandra, Attica — Kanakis’ birthplace and one of the main areas affected by the disaster.

Athanasios Kanakis, State of Emergency, 2023, photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Mandra is a suburb that lies at the foot of Mount Patera, northwest of Eleusina. The surface it covers is said to comprise the area west of the ancient Rharian Field (a land blessed by the gods with the first cultivation of barley) as well as the cities of Eleutherae and Oinoe, both of which were important sites for Athens and its surrounding areas and linked to the cult of Dionysus. Throughout the centuries, local populations were engaged in agricultural work. However, with the dawn of the modern Greek state, the area gradually began to attract commercial and industrial interest and house worker populations. Today, a quick web search reveals that Mandra is “the largest logistics area” in Attica. On the satellite map, around the more densely built part of the city that grows next to the edge of the forest, one can perceive huge, irregular expanses of warehouse buildings dotted with sparkling sheet metal and all types of construction materials scattered through vast plots of land, as well as deep trenches, i.e., the national road network extending all the way to the sea.

Athanasios Kanakis, State of Emergency, 2023, photo: Stathis Mamalakis

Athanasios Kanakis has always worked on the notion of space, whether inhabited or uninhabited, as well as matter and the traces they leave behind. His installations are explorations of different versions of space, in which the imperceptible human presence is witnessed as memory, gesture or intention. Almost — and often entirely — architectural, his works render places abstractly familiar, but also unexpectedly broken down into their constituent parts. Room outlines, frames and parts suspended in time articulate points in space. It is unclear whether these environments are the remnants of a past habitation, the ideal conditions for a new one, or the contours of a utopian projection. Up to 2017, Kanakis’ site-specific works were subsequently torn apart, dismantled or transformed — or even remained on the site.

On the 15th of November 2017, the city of Mandra was flooded. Torrents submerged the area in mud rising up to two meters from the ground level, resulting in 24 officially reported human deaths, the loss of dozens of animals and tremendous material damage. The floodwaters entered many homes, including the artist’s family house. A few days later, he found himself washing the mud off the remaining household items, sorting through objects belonging to him and his family that had been mixed with random things and other families’ unknown heirlooms tangled up in the debris.

Athanasios Kanakis, State of Emergency, 2023, photo: Stathis Mamalakis

State of Emergency is the result of an urgent emotional response and a highly charged artistic investigation emanating from the personal experience of disaster and the desire to preserve memory. Through the work, collective trauma becomes a means through which to reflect on the relation between modern economy and nature. Athanasios Kanakis brings to an old machine works of Elefsina, located just a few miles away from Mandra, a selection of glassware, part of which, against all odds and completely incidentally, managed to be salvaged in some of the houses. Elegant forms, glossy surfaces, high necks, delicate “bubbles”, shiny sets of glasses, pitchers and jugs, formal tableware. Thanks to their fragility and sophistication, these items were usually placed behind display cases or in chests of drawers, always on the highest shelf, kept out of the reach of children and, as it turned out, mud.

After experiencing the devastation, the mourning for the loss of the archetypal home engraved on his family’s memory as well as the process of reassembling and re-inventing the hearth, the artist addresses the community of Mandra. He meets residents and neighbors, revisits the collective trauma, listens to stories and tells some of his own, observes and connects with the mechanisms developed to recover from the event and to assimilate precarity into everyday life. As tokens of the fragility offered to the artist, some of the residents give their own glass objects salvaged from the flood.

The recipients Kanakis brings together constitute a fragile monumental topography, subject to constant, threatening oscillations. The resulting glass landscape is sensitive to external forces, ever changing, constantly vibrating, deteriorating, cracking, with parts of it being destroyed every day. What will be left after the destruction-exhibition? What fills the space between what we strive to salvage and what finally manages to survive? In the state of emergency, everything reverts to a single organic matter: the living, the human material, all crystallize into a volume orchestrating a deceleration of its cycle of existence.

Five years after the floods, the Greek courts ruled that the cause of the disaster was the criminal negligence displayed by certain people holding positions of power as well as some members of the business community. According to a scientific report, the key factors that led to the Mandra floodings were the following: reckless human intervention, inadequacy of engineering works, a complete lack of flood protection measures and the changes caused to the landscape following wildfires that had previously broke out in the area. State of Emergency stages the climax of an ongoing drama: the outbreak of a natural disaster and the exact moment of declaring the state of emergency — right when all other natural elements are seen as posing a threat to human life. The tragic realisation of a preordained mass retreat: the painful dichotomisation of a holistic ecosystem giving rise to an unbearably simplified juxtaposition opposing man to nature. The memory of the trauma of a violent separation, the sense of truly missing the time when we used to be “one”.

Athanasios Kanakis draws equally from both his capacities in this project, questioning the manifold ways through which narratives about the flood are produced both as a former resident of Mandra and as an artist. On the one hand, he produces a highly personal work, seeking his sources in his own relationship with space, his family, the land of the western suburbs of Attica as well as private memory records. On the other hand, he gives center stage and illuminates a series of political concerns relating to contemporary art, cultural institutions and artists as discourse-producing agents on environmental issues and communities facing precarity. Given that the consequences of land oppression affect mainly the working and impoverished classes, to what extent and through which process can the privileged field of art legitimately address the topic of disaster? State of Emergency is the story of an extended family, the protest of a community, the reverie of a resident, the intercept of an extraordinary event that returns as a wound from the past and a call to action for the present.

Christina Petkopoulou

The installation State of Emergency by Athanasios Kanakis is part of 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture. Duration: September 8 — October 1, 2023

Athanasios Kanakis lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics of the School of Engineering, University of Patras and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of the Arts Bremen (HfK, 2010, in digital media) and from Berlin University of the Arts (UdK 2013). He has been selected to participate in a number of international residency programs. In November 2020, he joined the artist-run space W-Atelier in Paris. In his artistic vocabulary, he uses a variety of media such as installations, sculptures, collages, photography and digital media. Taking space as his starting point, he explores notions of place and memory as well as the relationship between the familiar and the uncanny and identifies traces of lived experiences which urge us to redefine our relationship with our surroundings. He has exhibited his work in galleries and institutions and in public. He is a fellow of the Pépinières Européennes de Création Foundation (2015) and he has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).

Christina Petkopoulou (Athens, 1992) is a free-lance curator, researcher and writer based in Athens. She has studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne and completed a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the Panteion University of Social Sciences. She is a member and the in-house curator of the A-DASH team, a researcher and curator of the online art projects a time of her own by Zoe Chatziyannaki and Athens Report by Anna Lascari. She has curated exhibitions and public programs (Lipiu, 2020, Playing Ground, Automatic Transmission, 2019, Liminal Aristeidis Lappas solo show, Praxitelous 33, 2016, Choro-graphies-Points of flight, Artscape Athens, 2014 and more). Her texts have been published in several editions and catalogues (The ArtNewspaper Greece, Lipiu, Vera Chotzoglou, Bona Fide, State of Concept, 2021, Ammophila II, Under the Burning Sun, 2021, The Feminine Sublime, 2019 and more). She has worked for the Greek Contemporary Art Institute (ISET) researching and documenting its archive and she has also collaborated with several cultural institutions such as the Athens Biennale (2013, 2015), Art Athina (2014, 2015) and Archaeological Dialogues (2015). In 2016, she was chosen for the Neon Foundation curatorial exchange program in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and in 2019, she received the SNF Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.

“I step back from someone who is not yet there and, a millennium in advance, bowing to his spirit.”

(Heinrich von Kleist — quoted by Martin Heidegger)

In one of the most influential works of philosophy of the XX century, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger describes a phenomenon he calls “Temporal Ecstasy”. To give a full analysis of what he meant would require more time and knowledge I can offer in this text, however, I saw glimpses of a just that when I found myself recently going back to Stefania Strouza’s “212Medea”, a work I had the pleasure to follow from its very genesis amid the psychological challenges of the first lock down.

In short, the term describes a moment of being “outside oneself” in relation to time, a moment in which we can see time, not as a linear transition between birth and death but as an element on its own which allows us to unfold our “being in the world”. The asteroid, produced and frozen in its threatening position posing a mortal danger to our very existence on the planet, becomes the materialisation of time for the viewer. It is a gesture rendering time a physical element we can observe, something we are forced to reconceive and deal with rather than accept as a given measure.

212Medea (perpetual silence prevails in the empty space of capital) — as its full title reads — is not just a representation of this threat. It is a gesture which leads us, maybe even urges us, to think of the role of the Other, the role of the natural juxtaposed to our human condition and demands an answer from us as to whether this separation is still something worthy of notice and how we position ourselves in it. It is a work which both stands out for its visual impact and yet fits perfectly into Strouza’s long term research on othering time, on ways to question the role we assign objects as markers of its presence dividing ancient, old, present, and future eras.

Through a delicate and very personal material research, her works acquire characteristics which create a tension between natural and artificial, heavy and light, rough and smooth elements. These juxtapositions however are not an attempt to dissimulate their characteristics, nor do they have an intention of deceiving the viewers. In fact, often the forms created by Strouza let the material transpire in a conscious attempt to have the viewer create new associations, new understanding of the ways we perceive sculptural objects and their own relation to time. The material sensitivity is, in her own words, partially a result of her studies in architecture which have had a great influence in her work. Something I found especially fitting if we think of projects like The Condition of (Im)possibility, presented first in Edinburgh and later at the 6th Biennale in Thessaloniki. An homage to Bruce Nauman and a bridge to Gilles Clement’s Third Landscape, the work encapsules the attempt of Strouza to reflect on and create in-between spaces (and forms) through which we can reflect on our dasein.

212Medea unfolds several themes key to understanding Strouza’s fascination towards the iconic anti-heroin (leading also to her current PhD research on the mythical Colchian princess) first mentioned in Hesiod but brought to life by Euripides and crucially for her own research, movingly adapted by Pasolini in his 1969 film with the same title. Medea for Strouza is far from being only the destructive force we face through the asteroid much more, her figure becomes a tool to investigate the relation between the rational and irrational, science and nature, feminine and masculine world, and of course most of all otherness. This last aspect might, more than anything, resonate in Strouza’s works, something which indeed caught my attention from our very first dialogue in which we talked mostly about “She of the Jade Skirt”, a body of work she produced in connection to a residency in Mexico City. In this series, I could see how her interest in architecture and urbanism merge and interweave with myths. How these worlds can be brought together to create critical narratives challenging patriarchal world structures.

Through observing the works and listening to Strouza’s arguments I could feel Mexico City, with its frantic and unstoppable development smothering Chalchiuhtlicue, ancient goddess of fertility and rivers, who is now exerting her revenge by slowly sinking the city. While formally, much like in 212Medea, it is the material research which attracted me to this series, it was the feeling of otherness evoked by it that became the centre of our dialogue. What I struck me was how the work was able to conjure a deep sense of time through materials which were neither what I could have expected nor used as a simulation.

They were “other”, much like Strouza in our discussion, described her being “other” within a specific context but also towards the work itself. Not in a dissociative manner but in a very intimate and conscious way allowing the work to be other from and yet mediated by her. The works were a medium to talk about her own position within the (her)stories she evokes, a portal to a space in which time and matter are other from us as much as they are artificial, a window into her own state of mind trying to grasp a sense of time and the world which feels long lost. A sensation which emerges as an attempt of our mind to create an empathy towards the world around us, especially when we find ourselves in lands we feel foreign to. I wonder if it is something we need in order to understand our own position in the world, our own “being there”, dasein…

Christian Oxenius is a German-Italian independent curator, author and researcher living between Athens and Istanbul. His academic background in sociology and urban studies led him to pursue a PhD at the University of Liverpool on biennials as institutional model, during the course of which he established collaborations with Athens, Liverpool and Istanbul Biennial; during this period, he developed a particular interest in artists’ communities and storytelling. His research into experimental writing on art has resulted in a number of exhibitions and publications of international relevance.

Alexia Karavela is a collector. Not of art, but of traces of humanity. She goes about life, gathering objects, often relics, old images and stories in which a tiny glimpse of humanity can be detected, despite being veiled at first glance. Particularly when hidden under layers of politics, class divisions, social injustice and gender issues. The grotesque caricatures in her drawings, the ironic puns in her installations, the seemingly cynical critique of the past in her work, all carry a deep sense of empathy for the precedent, the finite, the already determined. Karavela’s gaze retrieves the universal human elements in the publicly demonized and previously ridiculed, in all that has been reduced into a one-dimensional cliché or diminished to aesthetically kitsch. Alexia Karavela has devoted her artistic practice to bringing light to the outcast, to finding the value in anything that the rest of us have given up on, to pointing out the humanity that can be traced in all things good and bad.

When talking to her about her artistic practice, all attempts to elicit any type of contextualization falls flat in the face of her obsessively repetitive response about her trials with different inks, pencils, colors, types of paper and her continuous search to grasp the notion of display. She dwells on the practice of art-making while the content pours out of her instinctively. It takes a rattled life to achieve such determination in the process rather than the purpose. Karavela demands to be judged on her merit. You get the sense that she almost needs to remain unseen behind her artistic process. She agonizes over the gesture that transforms the work from studio effort to exhibit. To the artist, the artwork’s trajectory from private to public carries with it the weight of responsibility. Could a frame be the vehicle that allows the painting to stand autonomously and be seen objectively? The staging of the artwork functions as an additional shield for the artist. Karavela seems to be protecting what must remain hidden in order to ensure that the work is judged for what it is. How much of the artist’s life can be exposed in this process? How can an artist shift the public gaze from how she is being seen to how she sees? This level of integrity could become crumbling and stand in the way of taking up space in the world.

Karavela’s paintings commence from a photograph reference sourced from her endless archive of images of the past, occasionally not even classified chronologically. They are in no way collected as a nostalgic account of the good old days. Each photograph in fact functions as the starting point for the deconstruction of a moment and a reassembling of its features seen in retrospect. Karavela places the emphasis on the universal and timeless drives of humankind rather than the events depicted. They represent an event that has expired and although was once commemorated as a milestone, either collectively or individually, is now rarely remembered and possibly even dismissed.

The series of paintings Political Events from the 90s, 2012, inspired by news media documentation photography includes works entitled after their respective photo caption: Hundreds of thousands of people attended the funeral of Andreas Papandreou, N. Athini-Tsouni slaps D. Liani twice for embarrassing the female gender, A. Samaras giving back the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Prime Minister K.Mitsotakis and Approximately 1000 people protested against the validation of the Schengen Treaty. Such events were both formative and telling about the culture in which the artist was raised but seem to have lost their momentum and even gravitas in the public eye. They are now a collection of moments that have been obscured by the passage of time. Filtered through the knowledge of today, the perspective in which they are seen is reevaluated as nothing particularly noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. Similar to a vanitas still life, they only highlight the ephemerality of life events and the preservation of humankind through them.

In her series of paintings entitled 1989, a seminal year for European history and Greek politics, later known as the Dirty 1989 or Catharsis, Alexia Karavela includes two vastly different events. Ironically named, Trial of the Century (Koskotas Trial), 2019 is a birds-eye view of the full courtroom in which the Koskotas case was tried. The composition of the image, then widely reproduced by national newspapers, is comprised of three layers of authority: the judicial representatives of the Greek higher court elevated in their stands, members of the press crouched down photographing the accused and opposite them, one of the defendants and former member of the government. This trial was the first and only Greek trial to be televised nationally. In the same series, Karavela also includes Détári transcription, 2019. This work depicts a large, overexcited crowd of Greek football fans being controlled by the police as they cheer the welcome of international footballer Lajos Détári to the Olympiacos team, then owned by Koskotas. Détári’s transfer to the Piraeus-based team was marked at the time as the most expensive price paid for a football player, second only to Diego Maradona. The two paintings signify different but interconnected ways in which Greek national identity was being configured at the time. 30 years on, barely anyone recalls either of the two events. Instead of being indicative of a nihilist view on life, this stance functions as a mechanism for survival, a way to achieve continuance.

Similarly, her oil on paper series Offer (Sausage), 2016–2018 comes from an archive of 91 photographs of a single event. Each painting depicts a different individual that has lined up to receive a sausage on a stick by a catering waiter. The nature of the depicted event remains unknown and rather unimportant. The series acts as a collection of portraits of diverse people connected only by what they are being fed. Studying the group of people in these portraits anthropologically seems futile as they vary in age, gender, race and all attributes that reveal social standing. The reactions in their faces though, cover the spectrum of human emotions from joy, laughter, disgust and even offence. By the time you see them all, you start to zoom in on the hot dog instead. In 2013, the artist painted a series of works capturing celebratory meals and the local food that was being served. Papoutsakia and Dolmadakia, 2013 or a portrait of a plate of stuffed tomatoes and pepers, alongside drawings of people dressed in their Sunday best dancing on tables all function as an ethnographic study of middle-class Greece in the 80s. Sustenance is the social stabilizer in both cases.

Alexia Karavela’s work is a visual representation of a tender tragicomedy. The intense colors and exaggerated forms highlight the short distance between joy and monstrosity. Always withholding ethical judgment, she allows what is considered evil and what is accepted as wholesome to co-exist and even interact. Her themes continue to peel off the social layers under which both public and private life are staged. Karavela’s acceptance of the duplicity of all things is gloriously manifested in her 2015 MFA graduate show at the Athens School of Fine Arts, entitled I Hira (trans.: the hand, in Greek, a homophone to the word widow). There, the widow is granted permission to patiently devote her time to weaving her loom in mourning, loyal to the tradition of Penelope, but at the same time also give space to her frustration for being trapped in the role she was cast to play. The artist describes the installation as “a brief monument to man as a machine and the machine as senescent man” attributing the human qualities of deterioration and elapsing even to the loom. A stoic memento mori reminder that all things, human or non, are alloted a short fading time and an unequivocal expiration date to serve the perpetuation of humanity.

Evita Tsokanta is an art historian based in Athens who works as a writer, educator and an independent exhibition-maker. She lectures on curatorial practices and contemporary Greek art for the Columbia University Athens Curatorial Summer Program and Arcadia University College of Global Studies. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues and journals and completed a Goethe Institute writing residency in Leipzig, Halle 14.

*A loosely translated verse from the Greek popular song, Molyvia by Roma singer Manolis Aggelopoulos recorded in 1988.

Lately, when I’m walking around Athens and I feel increasingly threatened by memory loss. The cause is not my age, neither my missing brain cells. The flow of time and life itself is not the same in the city I grew up. The fluidity of space is reminiscent to the fluidity of online images and information. I find myself trapped between hotels, luxurious boutiques and shops of similar aesthetic, which have replaced small businesses. I don’t know which way to go. Everything seems so alien and yet so homogeneous. The construction and building sites together with the tables and chairs on the pavements make me feel constantly surrounded and displaced. As the connections and trusting relationships I used to enjoy with Athens, its people and its spots begin to fade, I grow more and more disoriented. I see the city overflowing with pretentiousness, signature drinks and gastronomical experiences, while becoming deprived of its reference points, human input and social capital.

The commercialization and gentrification of the city’s every inch[1] are demolishing all aspects of its past, its joys and its victories, and erasing the diversity and unique character I once knew. Its impetuous neoliberal transition[2] from the old to the new, ignores the residents’ most urgent needs and turns the search for belonging into an extremely vague and stressful process. Athens is now a place where local initiatives about the right to city are becoming a progressively more frequent occurrence in many areas. Under these circumstances, participatory/socially-engaged artistic practices seem to emerge as a deviant activity that can defend our ability to experience public space as a free territory. How can art become the means to express our opinions about the kind of city we wish to inhabit and coexist? In what ways do public artistic expressions reveal, demarcate or challenge neoliberal urbanization? Since the 1980s, the relationship between artists and urban gentrification has been considered controversial, as there have been instances where artists have, whether unwittingly or not, contributed to its advent. However, there are exceptions committed to accomplish the opposite.

Collectif MASI, Tichnos, Collective exhibition Stimoni, MISC.Athens, Αthens, 2023, Photo: Georges Salameh

The work of the Collectif MASI[1] could be perceived as such. The group was founded in 2018 in Paris by Madlen Anipsitaki and Simon Riedler. The core of its members’ work could be defined or described in many different ways, yet the common denominator is the combination of their knowledge and experience on sociology and architecture. Before moving to Greece, Collectif MASI left its imprint in Paris, Guatemala City, San Jose, Lima, Valparaiso, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Pereira, Bogota and Mexico City, using a variety of mediums. To this date, it has created ephemeral installations in public spaces, assemblages, site-specific interventions, in situ environments, colorful sculptural constructions, scenographies of social intevention, performative and participatory happenings, video works, etc. Depending on the location, its visual language is reconfigured and adapted to the social context, reflecting the local conditions. Occasionally, it even makes use of—and gives second life to— found objects (objet trouvé) by adding materials and vivid colors on them. Each object it chooses is a carrier of past human experiences, interpretations and utilities, and its reuse and imaginative rebirth is determined by new assumptions which derive from the group’s experience in a particular setting. The relationships Collectif MASI fosters with the elements, objects and communities which determine any given space, redefine the strategy of the creative composition it chooses to adopt.

Collectif MASI, Persephone, the red carpet, Fertility, Eleusis, 2023, credit Joshua Olsthoorn.

The group’s heterogenous methodologies and approaches are designed to offer alternative, less hierarchical forms of co-existing that can broaden our perspectives on the construction of cities and their communities, as well as diversity, multiculturalism, collective identity and intercultural exchange, and help us recognize the needs of displaced and vulnerable social groups. In the project A square with a view. Renewing the Self-Image of a Square (2021), created for the Station One AIR 2021 artist residency program by Victoria Square Project under the theme Hippodamia in Context, Collectif MASI activated a series of interactions in Victoria square, a part of Athens heavily marked by social and class divisions, that allowed space for improvisation and spontaneity. Taking the neoclassical statue of Johannes Pfuhl as a point of departure, which refers to Hippodamia and adorns the square, the group initially came up with a variation of the myth which proposed a more empowering ending for the character of Hippodamia. Contrary to the events of the original version, in the Collectif MASI’s version Hippodamia succeeds in saving herself. In order to disseminate this narrative locally, the group worked together with the residents of the area. The residents offered their hospitality to eight different sheets/paintings that depict images produced to visualize Hippodamia’s alternative story, by placing them on their balconies. Aside from the sheets/paintings, the group also collaborated with refugee children frequenting the square, and crafted four mobile sculptures out of reusable materials, in which Hippodamia transformed into a bird. Soon after, the sculptures were used as vehicle/toys by the children and developed into a counter-proposal to the static and detached nature of the existing public monument. Furthermore, the project facilitated additional gestures of public connection and inclusivity in Victoria square. For instance, passerby and those who displayed the sheets/paintings on their balconies started a “greeting” game, thereby revealing a common need for communication, expression and social awareness.

Collectif MASI, Persephone, the red carpet, Innocence, Eleusis, 2023, credit Joshua Olsthoorn

Two years later, in the context of the 2023 ELEVSIS European Capital of Culture, Collectif MASI organized the participatory performance entitled Persephone, the red carpet (2023), which was inspired by the titular myth. For 30 consecutive days, the group unraveled a 40-meter-long and 1.5-meter-wide red carpet on the streets of Elefsina, as a symbol of the land’s death and fertility. Prior to the repetitive performance, the group had reached out to different neighborhoods and Roma communities, in order to gain insight into how the lived spaces of Elefsina are socially produced by the subjects that inhabit them, but also in order to invite the latter to participate. Rather than being simply placed on the ground as it is customary on official occasions, the carpet was transformed into a “sculptural” object whose volumes and plasticity were determined by the movement, mood, cooperation as well as the route that the participants—both locals and visitors—followed. The carpet was carried through and rolled out in different parts of Elefsina, in a procession that resembled a spatial occupation and was dissociated from any kind of divisions. The trumpet of Andreas Polyzogopoulos as well as dances and songs performed by members of local associations (Asia Minor Association οf Elefsina – Museum of History and Folklore, Elefsina Association of Peloponnesians, Thriassian Plain Association of Epirotes, Elefsina Chiot Union and Dresden Symphony Orchestra) accompanied the procession. As a result, it was transformed into a healing ritual with unifying and reconciliatory properties, which identified the area as a living organism and acknowledged the importance of social interaction and shared responsibility for the preservation of its vitality. Joshua Olsthoorn and Collectif MASI documented the performance, and it will be soon presented in the form a film under the same title.

Collectif MASI, The Acropolis has left out plate, Collective performance, Eleonas 2023 – Chtonian and Anthropocene, Athens, 2023

Throughout the same year, Collectif MASI worked in the deprived and neglected area of Eleonas, specifically in the Marconi neighborhood, for the exhibition Eleonas ‘23 Chthonic and Anthropocene. After spending a significant amount of time in the neighborhood, the group together with the locals built the performance piece The Acropolis has left our plate (2023). The piece playfully shed light on the needs and pressing issues that affected their everyday life. During the performance, residents of the area set up a table outside the door of their homes. On every table, they had placed a plate of asphalt and tar found on the mountains of rubble, that replaced the Acropolis vistas they used to enjoy before and constitute their current view, as an offering to passersby. A large number of visitors stopped at each table and struck up conversations with the residents, who in turn shared their stories and their requests for substantial state support. Thereupon, all tables were joined into a common one, and residents gathered there in order to smash the rubble with hammers as a sign of protest but also an act of emotional release. This was followed by a dinner they had prepared, to which everyone was invited, and where the discussions continued. The essence of this performance piece is found on one hand, in the formation of the necessary conditions of intimacy and safety so that dialogue could arise naturally, and on the other, on the fact that it offered a glimpse of a democratic deliberation that represented different voices and brought a political issue “to the table” in a more informal manner. Managing to ensure people’s collective involvement, whether in art or in social processes, is admittedly a great challenge. It is worth noting that two weeks later the rubble started to be removed.

Collectif MASI may not count many years of artistic activity in Greece, yet the social and artistic impact the group has achieved is far from negligible. As is evident from the aforementioned works, what characterizes its practice is the utilization of different spaces and modes of sociality, with discretion and respect, and the inventive activation of all those structural elements that can build a truly open, prosperous and unified society. Obviously, in times like ours, such practices cannot replace political action, social struggles or the critique of the existing state institutions. They cannot save a city or ensure the prosperity of its residents. They will not automatically bring about justice and systemic change. Yet, they can shield us from cynicism, awaken us from apathy and mobilize us. They can be turned into a political experience and transform inertia into self-reflection. They can help us discover empathy, recover our tenderness and preserve our memory so as to be able to invoke these qualities on a more regular basis. And lastly, they can remind us where we are headed and for what purpose, like a compass.

Collectif MASI (2018) was founded by the architect Madlen Anipsitaki and the sociologist Simon Riedler. Their project entitled A thread network in the urban fabric (Central and South America, 2018-2019) focused on urban scenography and social art projects, while they have exhibited archival artworks at Espace Voltaire, Cité Internationale des arts (Paris, 2020), Steinzeit Gallery (Berlin, 2022) and as part of the Evia Film Project (2022). They have also experimented with creating connections between private and public spaces in the Residency Ateliers Médicis (Pouillenay, 2020) and in the framework of the Crossing Walls project (Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2021). Their collective performance 1 km as the crow flies (Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, 2021) was described by Francis Alÿs as a “magnificent act of resistance to the pandemic”. They have collaborated with the Victoria Square Project for the projects A Square with a View (2021) and Trikiklo (2022); with Greenpeace for Klepsydrogios (SNFCC, 2022); and with 2023 ELEUSIS European Capital of Culture for Persephone, the red carpet. Also is 2023, MASI was selected to present their work at the following exhibitions and fairs: Salon de Montrouge (France), Eleonas 2023 – Chtonic and Anthropocene, Stimoni (Misc.Athens) and The Platforms Project (Athens). Madlen Anipsitaki has been awarded by ARTWORKS and is a Fellow of the SNF Artist Fellowship Program (2020).

Mare Spanoudaki is a researcher, cultural manager and curator who works in broad arenas that relate to social movements, identity politics, folk and popular culture, institutional critique, communality, intimacy, archives and exhibition histories. Her education includes a BA in Communication, Media and Culture from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences; an MA in Cultural Policy and Management from City (University of London) and an MRes in Exhibition Studies from Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London). She has worked for various cultural and art institutions in Europe, is actively involved with the production, communication and organization of cultural events, and has curated community projects, art publications and contemporary art exhibitions in Greece, the UK, and Germany. She is a fellow of the Start – Create Cultural Change program (2017–2018) for her work as a cultural manager and has been awarded a Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS for her curatorial practice. In 2023, she was selected to participate in the UNIDEE residency program ‘Neither on Land nor at Sea’ (Module IV) in Italy. She has contributed texts and essays to exhibition catalogues, contemporary art journals and art books. Since 2017, she is one half of the two-person female artistic/curatorial synergy This is not a feminist project, whose work has been exhibited at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall (Thessaloniki); 2023 ELEUSIS European Capital of Culture; A-DASH space; and at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. She is also a founding member of the Union of Workers in Contemporary Art, an amateur photographer and DJ, and an archival material and vinyl collector.

[1] Prime examples of this situation are the Great Promenade project, Omonoia square, the parks Pedion tou Areos and Akadimia Platonos, the transfer of several ministries from their central Athens locations to a “government park” in the PYRKAL buildings, Strefi Hill (which seems to be salvaged after all thanks to the interventions of the locals), Exarcheia square, the neighborhood of Metaxourgeio, the closure of the iconic IDEAL cinema, etc.

[2] Including factors such as the privatization and redevelopment of entire areas, housing insecurity, the rise of short-term stays, the explosion of rents, the reduction of green areas in parks and squares as well as the failure to comply with legislative provisions. Public consultations are overridden and calls to tenders for architects are restricted and/or not issued at all for the benefit of tourist growth. When urban planning becomes subject of private donations, then automatically the right to shape the city is granted to the discretion of benefactors who are not residents of the respective area, architects, or even experts on the subject.

[3] The name Masi in French is pronounced “mazi”, which in Greek means together.

An essay by Georgia Manolopoulou about the interdisciplinary research project “TELL ME” by Yorgos Maraziotis

What are those voices behind the isolated post-industrial buildings at the heart of the urban network of Patras? Which is that liberating creative speech that depicts the productive and lively activity?

The architectural and industrial shells of this city are seeking their own voice — their “speech” — their re-use within an artistic dialogue with the city and its people that shaped them. Which, one may wonder, can be the reason that structures both the notions and the accounts of the nowadays inert city?

Social sculpture

The interdisciplinary research project TELL ME is making an attempt to provide an account and — both artistically and in a semiotic way — overturn the post-industrial landscape of Patras by recalling and converting individual and collective memories which have shaped the modern city. Through the creation of a contemporary type of sculpting by the artist Yorgos Maraziotis, the co-formation of a new artistic imprint in terms of “social” sculpture including as mediums the notion of speech, the human being, as well as the dynamic of expression and the individual and collective memory, under the shell of the public open space. The purpose of the social sculpture is not only to condense the speech within the material but also the transcendentalism of abstract thought aiming at an optical comprehension of values — mainly of experiences and emotions of a productive generation: that of Patras in recent times. It is an artistic intervention in the city from a different perspective — both artistically and in terms of research — which has nothing to do with that of mere compilation, citation and presentation of material documentation but it is connected — through its reference — with the sphere of the immaterial such as the oral speech. This is an account of stories whose target is to activate critical thought, emotional charge and social reinforcement.

Is it, perhaps, viable and realistic to talk about artistic composition, exhibition, interpretation and version of immaterial documents through innovative artistic forms within the architectural shell?

The desire of the project team, under the inspiration and guidance of the artist Yorgos Maraziotis himself, is precisely this: the lively and illuminating representation of language through contemporary materials that may take by surprise and cause a turmoil in a pleasant and unexpected way, to the visitors of Patras through unusual and unknown streaks. The objective is the activation of the mind along with the sensitisation of emotions.

The incorporation of art within its everyday dimension

The experiences and life memories of the workers of the BESO soap and oil factories, the Mills of Saint George, the Skiadaresis company of Turkish delights, the Municipal Carnival workshop and other units of production are all at the very heart of the TELL ME multidisciplinary project. Their speech is thus materialised into a bright artistic sight within the central urban network depicting, in this way, their own personal sensitivities along with their own visual experience. At the same time, there is an attempt to project the identity of a certain community in terms of their work accompanied by particular accounts within a free, open and unbound dialogue. The voices of the factories, the human dimension of the landscapes of the city’s past productive process acquire, as it were, sound and light: that sound and light of the artistic vision and the upheaval of the public space in the city. And, as the artist himself mentions, the project upon discussion “will be viewed as a post-industrial portrait of the city in its making’’. The idea is to create artistic interventions which will render the memory and the oblivion of a post-industrial city — now seeking its past and future — to its local, cultural dynamic.

Public sculpture is inextricably influenced by the notions of space, individual and collective memory as well as the emotional charge which is diffused in the social landscape of the city. Nowadays more than ever, art is called upon to actively participate in the recreation of cities through an aesthetic reformation and, thus, reassuming its supervising role as a defining factor towards the formation of the identity of the citizen of the world. Art, with its holistic interventions — either artistic or sculptural concepts — is bound to be out there: in buildings, in public squares, in schools. It has to become a part of everyday life within our indifferent cities entailing a range of individual and collective memories or creating new, contemporary accounts or simply creating the long-desired euphoria. Not only artists but also the cultural society of the citizens in total are morally bound to promote the meaning of the city as a living cell, both in terms of memory and as an open-air museum where people and public exhibits will interact on a daily basis.

Art does have a unique way to intervene, overturn, co-shape and to structure the innate human tendency towards beauty, according to Joseph Beuys¹. Social sculpture, from my own point of view, is exactly that human-centred, moving power of art to sculpt, to aesthetically break our individual and public genetic material using noble chromosomes which carry cells of cultural intelligence. In this way, it enhances the character of art through an intense positive sign and reinforces notions and values such as aesthetics, solidarity, consciousness, acceptance of the different, responsibility, creation of cultural education as well as social awareness. After all, is it not true that those are the very values that strengthen the role of a society including a healthy democratic state?

One such excellent example is that of the Greek artists of the Hellenic Diaspora², who managed to leave their own unique artistic imprint in the contemporary “social” sculpture within the public space of France under the value code: “Art as a public good”. Art comprises a dynamic agent of messages, values and symbols which embody human experience and feed our everyday life. It is a source of creation of social capital in terms of political, social and cultural intelligence that, under the present circumstances, is bound to stand out as a definitive factor for social cohesion, harmonious co-existence and dialogue as well as create a psychic euphoria which will, thus, teach cultural multiformity and democracy within the terrain of public sphere.

The peripatetic dialogues

TELL ME is based, to a great extent, on field research, experiential dimension in relation to the structure of the buildings, architectural interventions as well as the possibilities of both exploitation and activation of the “secret spots” of the selected units, as the artist himself mentions, according to his initial proposed concept. In addition, the peripatetic dialogues, the planning of special routes covering both the past and present entrepreneurial activity of the city, the study of sources, the interviews held with the working community, the documentation, the bibliographical endoscopy along with other multiple informal discussions with people of the city who are well acquainted with the artist himself, all gave life to the project as a whole. The project was also empowered by visits at the Press Museum of the Union of Daily Newspaper Editors of Peloponnesus, Epirus and the Ionian Islands, the Chamber of Commerce, the House of Kostis Palamas, and the Labour Union of Patras. Moreover, a certain part of the research was dedicated to the development of the themes under discussion as well as to the discovery of additional records in order to reveal both immaterial and material documentation which will structure speech and will transform it into an artwork.

The peripatetic dialogues held at public places in the city — especially during a difficult period, in the middle of a pandemic — functioned in a redeeming and creative way for all the collaborators of the project. After all, according to Aristotle’s Poetics our natural community is the city; it’s unique objective is its wellbeing, its interaction along with its social cohesion: an ultimate ideal for a good life. The total should always precede its part. Today’s Patras, having as a compass its rich cultural heritage and an intense contemporary activity within all forms of art does have all those promising options and perspectives at its disposal. The challenges are endless.

Patras, our city, is a restless, impatient and enthusiastic city. It is a creative place, a unique meeting point where East meets West. These are elements which are engraved in the genetic code of everyone whom the city’s womb accommodate. The capital of Western Greece traces its identity through the passage of centuries and claims its position, that belongs to the modern framework of social and cultural making. The city of Patras is considered as the economic, commercial and cultural centre of Western Greece, with direct access to the West, as its port lies at a pivotal point in relation to other European ports. Due to this fact the city has been inhabited since the prehistoric times and already enjoyed a great boom during the Mycenaean period, reaching its glorious peak in the Roman times, as it was a Roman colony, and was thus transformed into a cosmopolitan centre with an economic and cultural development. Patras has always been a centre with a multinational character and a huge commercial and cultural activity. Its significant geographic position as a gate from East to West has definitely determined the city’s history.

However, Patras has not limited itself within the influential bounds of its geographical position including its open-hearted landscape and its atmospheric aura but, mainly, focused on the action and coherence of its social network. The existence of social cohesion for many years along with the creation of strongly populated communities with an international feature have both functioned successfully in the city for a very long time. During the 19th and at the beginning of 20th century, Patras, once more, finds itself taking the booming lead. It is a continuously changing topos, an urban centre where historical, social and economic changes take place because of the special circumstances of this time period.

The upgrading of its port due to the enormous exports of black currants to Mediterranean destinations along with a great industrial activity that was accompanied by neoclassicism — the dominant architectural feature for the erection of public, private and religious buildings for many years — blew a fresh air to the city. Most of its inhabitants came, apart from the indigenous population, mainly from Eptanisa, from the provinces of the Ottoman Empire such as Epirus, Chios, Constantinople, Smyrna, Crete, as well as from the communities of the Diaspora: Livorno, Trieste and Vienna. At the same time, there was a settlement of investors and grand traders, in the city of Patras, who came from England, Germany, Italy, and who took charge of the industrialisation of the city. Thus there is a creation of a multicultural urban centre, a small mosaic-work of cultures, language and religion with the inhabitants being the small tesserae.

The city-port of Patras follows a full-scale development in terms of industry. The city constitutes, above all, an important transporting and commercial centre because it is the gate of the country to Europe by means of its port as there is a considerable amount of importing and exporting products. This economic prosperity contributed towards the physiognomic change of the city, the industrial activity development, the social life and the creation of a newly-formed urban class: a cosmopolitan city, in an attempt to align the local market with that of the rest of the world. Bavarian, Danish and Greek architects and urban planners (Zilller, Hansen or Kleanthis Voulgaris among others), according to the vision of Governor Kapodistrias, will take over the construction of the urban network of the centre following the Western-European schemes.

The researcher of the industrial history of Patras, Nikos Sarafopoulos, characteristically mentions in his pivotal publication, Historical Album of the Industry in Achaia 1825–1975, that the history of Achaia is interwoven with economic and productive activity. The golden age of Patras is the period 1840–1940. Several years later large units operate with great prosperity until their final cessation. Today in Achaia and the wider region of Western Greece there is an optimistic dimension, that of growth, innovation and recent business activity, which is now evolving through start-ups with the parallel training of young people in mediums of healthy entrepreneur venture having culture as a developmental tool. The cultural industry is an important part of the scheme in the area. And as the drafting of a new development strategy in the field of culture has an international character, it is now considered imperative the need to formulate a new cultural strategy in the city of Patras, in order for it to respond culturally and at the same time developmentally to this new era. With two poles; the purely humanitarian, in order to contribute to the cultivation of creativity, critical ability, aesthetics and sensitivity, but also the purely productive, creating pillars of economic prosperity.

TELL ME artistic research project coincided, in terms of time, with the important European initiative: New European Bauhaus³. A creative, interdisciplinary platform which began in January 2021 and whose target is to create new meeting points as well as to design future ways and attitudes of public and private life with the co-existence of art, architectural culture, social inclusion, science and innovation. It is a unique chance for the collective attempt to encourage us to imagine and build a future that will be viable without exclusions, adopting creativity within our everyday life.

Our city includes a great number of buildings which are an integral part of its historical heritage in terms of both architecture and art. The list of such constructions may include monumental complexes or representative industrial units, which have retained important features within their architectural and structural design. In the context of a successful strategic policy — with reference to the projection of their cultural value, the diachronic course of the city and not excluding modern creation — there could be a series of initiatives being under way in order for the citizens to become acquainted with their relatively recent past but also contemporary present. We envision a “rebirth” of abandoned historic buildings through their holistic redesign, but also of the public urban fabric, with contemporary artistic installations and interventions, along with the creation of a new cultural structure; a center for contemporary art in our city.

Let TELL ME become the starting point of a dynamic initiative in Patras in order to overturn and sculpt its architectural and anthropological relief with modern and lively stories in the way they deserve to be told | tellme.

Yorgos Maraziotis is a visual artist and SNF ARTWORKS Fellow (2020). His multidisciplinary practice focuses on conceptual processes that translate visual languages through mediums such as dialogue, oral histories and common materials of the plastic arts. His artworks often gain a sensorial narrative and attempt to co-exist strong antithetical notions, such as private-public, pleasure-discontent, danger-safety. TELL ME is the multidisciplinary project by the artist Yorgos Maraziotis that studies the notion of oral history as a medium for understanding domesticity and public space. www.tellmepatras.com. | www.soundcloud.com/tellmepatras

Georgia Manolopoulou is a PhD Cand. in Cultural Diplomacy, Department of Political Science and International Relationships at the University of Peloponnese. During the last ten years she has been working at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture as a curator of Public Engagement at the Archaeological Museum of Patras. She is an owner of Scholarship IKY / Grundtvig European Program at the University of Manchester Museum and a Fellow of the NEON Curatorial Program in London. She is an author of published international papers and articles in conferences related to Cultural Management and Diplomacy, an elected member of the board of DIAZOMA and a council member of ENA Europeana. She holds a B.Sc. in Philosophy at the University of Athens and she is actively engaged in Cultural Management through her working experience in the Ministry of Culture and via an MA followed at the University of Athens.

¹ Beuys, Joseph. Social Sculpture, Invisible Sculpture, Alternative Society, Free International University. Gerpinnes: Éditions Tandem, 1988

² https://www.hellenicdiaspora.org/home/documentaries/

³ https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/about/about-initiative_en

One of the first films made in the Balkans — if not the very first — in 1905 by the cinema pioneers known as the Manaki brothers records the spinning of wool in the village of Avdella, in Grevena. Trying out the new technology that they have just brought from London, they document a few seconds of a far older technique practiced by a group of women. Yet the coexistence of these two machines, the camera and the spinning wheel, is bound by a strange complicity, a shared choreography. This very first record of an otherwise everyday activity — which the Manaki brothers, as men, would remain forever observers of — seems to obey the rhythm of weaving, participating in it indirectly, and vice versa. Film and wool are both rendered recording tools, intertwined with two different epochs: the first consumed with the faithful rendering of reality, and the second, through its materiality, a symbolic representation of the customs and conditions of a certain culture.

In 2013, in the context of the exhibition Anew — A Generation of Greek Artists [Εκ νέου — Μια γενιά Ελλήνων καλλιτεχνών] (curators: Daphne Vitali, Daphne Dragona, Tina Pandi) at the Athens Conservatoire, the former location of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, the artwork Oiko-nomic Threads by Maria Varela, Afroditi Psarra and Marinos Koutsomichalis was presented. A custom-made weaving system with a DIY feel — an outdated household loom connected to two computer screens — was activated by the artists over the course of the exhibition. Linked with labor statistics from the Greek Employment Organization (ΟΑΕD) shown on the first screen, an algorithm converted the sums disbursed to the unemployed during the period 2008–2013 into a sequence of shapes inspired by patterns originating from Greek folk tradition that appeared on the second screen. The artwork developed continually according to the algorithm, in an interdependent relationship between the weaving machine and computer, but also artist — for it was only in the artist’s presence that the weaving machine could function and convert the digital shapes into woven thread. The coexistence of traditional patterns, open data, and the artists’ performative act — an act that raised questions about their status and identity as laborers — pointed out this socially and economically difficult condition through a symbolic prism. Reference to unemployment figures in an exhibition held during the economic crisis, one which sought to showcase a new generation of artists (born in the 1980s, between 1979 and 1990), was no coincidence.

According to this above protocol created by the artists, the woven fabrics resulting from Oiko-nomic Threads constitute a kind of visual representation of Greece’s domestic economic policies at the time. Without being aware of this protocol, it is almost impossible to make sense of them, or to come to some conclusion about the economy. How are they to be understood today? Can a social condition be symbolically depicted? And how can its shape become a means of understanding it? On both an individual and collaborative level, Maria Varela’s work is fundamentally concerned with an attempt to define a visual language that, in incorporating technologies from different historical periods, is capable of depicting current societal and artistic conditions. The participation of Oiko-nomic Threads in international exhibitions (No Country for Young Men, Bozar, Brussels, curator Katerina Gregos, 2014 and the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo, curator Solange Farkas, 2015) despite its focus on Greek circumstances demonstrates its resonance but also its wide accessibility. In the end, can the artwork itself constitute a language?

Recently, Varela’s research and practice has focused on loom-based weaving techniques such as the upright loom she became acquainted with during her visit to Amazigh womens’ communities in Morocco. Rather than being anachronistic, this choice arises from a desire to enable continuity and connection with current-day conditions, as well as re-use of the medium outside of its usual context. In traditional contexts, the need to give shape to a certain condition is often depicted in a way that is symbolically associated with reality, just as the symbol “X” represents fertility, and a woman’s open body, in the Amazigh vocabulary. In the case of Maria Varela’s work, the shape usually originates in a constantly updated database, which evolves in ways that are deliberately beyond her control. On a piece of paper on her studio desk, the artist has drawn a grid whose squares correspond to each day of the year. She then fills each square with a color resulting from a personal assessment of the day based on predetermined social criteria such as mood, work, and health, eventually transforming its final pattern into a hand woven textile. This process, which appears to be the artist’s personal ritual, creates an atypical database revealing her need to give shape to time. Contained within this exercise is a desire to discover the shape which a certain circumstance can take without the artist’s complete aesthetic intervention, as well the desire to comprehend it in a more visual but also tactile way. The grid refers to the loom’s frame, on which the final “narrative” is woven, just like the digital square — the pixel — which is both information and a part of a larger image. For Varela, the internet constitutes an unregulated collective archive which she processes with an open data approach, perpetuating the interdependence of speech and image, as well as chance itself. In Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (FRMK #7, 2016), for example, she uses images she finds on the internet after entering words from the poems in the eponymous poetry collection by the Syrian poet Ali Ahmed Saïd (Adonis) in search engines for open data digital repositories.

At the same time, while studying this communal way of living and working, Varela integrates it into the process of defining a contemporary artistic identity. Traditionally, the performative character of the collective weaving process is a form of socialization around which more or less formal rituals develop — stories, songs, gossip that are produced in parallel with the process of weaving, and are given equal value. This process also suggests a collaborative form of labor and economic production that the artist incorporates into her practise through collaborations and alternative economic models. Faced with the reality of the arts scene in Athens where she found herself after her studies in London, Varela co-founded the self-financed platform Frown (along with Konstantina Vafeiadou, Angeliki Chatzi and Marianna Chrisofi) as a space for the exchange of knowledge centering primarily on the use of digital media and crafts in the creation of ephemeral collectives. By continuing to organize seminars and presentations even after the conclusion of the platform in 2014, she seeks to investigate our relationship with tradition and technology within a framework of self-education, with emphasis placed on the process itself.

Working with human contact, and simultaneously with the impersonal nature of the internet, Varela addresses the present in order to regenerate it through her own experience, coming to terms with it through the invention of arbitrary rituals that express the pathologies of the contemporary individual. In her recent artworks, she seems to increasingly want to portray individual and collective experience as it unfolds, spinning the present as she remains both behind and in front of the camera, in the position of both director and his subject, inventing new tools on the spectrum between documentation and abstraction. As I ask her a series of questions about techniques I myself am unfamiliar with, I consider whether the process of transmitting a language through a dialectical process is perhaps more important than comprehending it. Is not artistic practice itself a dialect? And beyond decrypting its meaning, should we not simply enjoy the way it sounds, appreciating our interaction with its one and only speaker, even more?

Εssay by Eva Vaslamatzi about the work of Maria Varela
Text translated by Jacob Moe

Maria Varela (SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2019) works as a media artist and workshop designer seeking to develop strategies of collective production.

Eva Vaslamatzi (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2019) is an independent curator and writer currently based in Athens and Paris.

ARTWORKS collaborates with Enterprise Projects and supports the making of the 9th EP Journal written by Ioanna Zouli (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2020).

Read here EP J9 “FLOATING IMAGES”

“I spotted the animal as it exited its nest.

From that moment onwards, I started observing it.

I was impressed by the way it emerged,

Quite clumsily and abruptly.

Then it acted naturally, perhaps a bit suspiciously.

Then normally.

Only by the time it re-entered the nest did it behave strangely again,

taking too long.”

Excerpt from Dimitra Kondylatou’s video installation The island — living room.

In 2012 I saw Dimitra Kondylatou’s graduate show at the Athens School of Fine Arts entitled The island — living-room: an installation with eight videos in which a female figure was persistently performing. She herself was this figure, but she was not exactly recognizable, as if she were transformed from a woman to a child, from a human to a savage in a game that seemed serious. Going through various roles, the artist carried out actions in an effort to appropriate both interior as well as public space; she used her teeth to carve a path on a transparent surface like cellophane that covered the entire area of ​​her living room, wrapped herself in a hairy animal-like costume in front of a projection of a map on the wall, or used her body as a surface where her friends wrote places they had visited together.

The island which is also a living room, isolated and connected at the same time. The cellophane which is also the sea. Man, who is also an animal. The city, specific places, spots on a map, body marks. The feeling of claustrophobia in an open space. The mouth as a violent boundary of the body, in which the inside and the outside coexist. Almost a decade later, as I watch this work again with Kondylatou, I feel that she discovers it again with an intermittent sense of shyness as she sees herself performing, going beyond her limits and transforming into something else.

The process of transformation became even more apparent in her video performance works titled Zozefina or a couple of things we know about her, completed for the first time in 2014 but revisited more recently, in 2018 and 2019. As Franz Kafka tells us in the story of Josephine the Songstress or the Mouse Folk (1924), Josephine is a mouse that sings. The people who enjoy her song do not understand exactly why Josephine is so influential; but at the same time Josephine is who she is only because of the people who support her. Josephine is Dimitra, but also many others who decide to do something different as artists, a decision that could often lead them to be in conflict with the rest of the society. “No one sympathises with her. And she believes that no one can understand her,” says Dimitra, transformed into a mouse, addressing the camera in the video. Dimitra becomes Zozefina, just as Gregor Samsa becomes a cockroach, and through her new animalistic identity she revisits her environment experiencing the different reactions of the world towards her, and hers towards the world. Kafka had already been a point of reference in her graduate show, in which she used parts of his novel The Burrow, which relates the story of an animal living in its nest while in the process of coming out. How unfamiliar can we suddenly feel in a seemingly familiar environment?

Kondylatou’s works often contain female figures at a pivotal moment of their existence, whether they manifest themselves as herself in a video performance or the protagonist of the film LUXENIA which she directed more recently in 2021. In the latter, we watch a woman working as a receptionist in a hotel, following the daily routine of her work as she disciplines every necessary move. Suddenly — without any clear reason — she reacts. She takes off her work clothes and starts eating a pineapple in a strange, uncivilised way — and that’s the last scene. What will happen to her after this shift? What keeps us in our place, in our daily life, in what we define as ourselves? What needs to be done to push us beyond all bounds? What is capable of transforming us? If this transformation ever happens, will it last?

The passage from the living room (graduate show) and the public space (Zozefina) to the environment of a hotel is not accidental. Hotels are spaces that are forever trapped in a limbo between warmth and unfamiliarity. For practical reasons, after graduating Kondylatou also “transformed” from an artist to an employee in her family’s guest house in the island of Lefkada, becoming acquainted with these liminal spaces. Her mother and she, as women, were to take care of this space. The irrational profession of the artist / animal is succeeded by a normal full time job. On this island, transformed every summer by tourism, Kondylatou interacted with the local community through research on women working in the tourism industry (which led to video work including interviews with them) and by establishing a self organised residency from 2015 to 2017. Entitled The island — resignified, the residency was a natural extension of Kondylatou’s experience with hospitality, but also an experimental platform for understanding the multifaceted landscape of Lefkada through interaction with local people and structures.

Now the island is no longer a living room. The passage from the nest to the outside world is complete. Or is Lefkada the artist’s nest where instead of leaving, she decided to invite others in? In the same sense, as is inevitable, Kondylatou’s work has also transformed in time, passing from an esoteric artistic practice to something broader. Shifting roles from artist to hostess and caretaker, she constantly redefines her identity, exploring both the inside and the outside — this time collectively.

Dimitra Kondylatou (SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2019) is an artist based in Athens, Greece. She experiments with various media and forms, including narrative videos, video essays, digital drawings and projects of hospitality.

Eva Vaslamatzi (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2019) is an independent curator and writer currently based in Athens, Greece.

Rrose Sélavy, the feminine alter ego of Marcel Duchamp, is a phonetic play on words of the French Eros, c’est la vie that also reads as arroser la vie (translation: to make a toast to life) in the tradition of Dada sound poetry. Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp dressed as a woman, posed as a Hollywood star for artist friend Man Ray for a photography series in the 1920s, a century ago. This playful collaborative practice could be considered a foreshadowing, or better yet a precursor of the discourse that took off years later, concerning postmodern queer studies and their gender identity politics. Perhaps what is even more relevant to this article would be how Duchamp and Man Ray articulated the objectification of the artist’s subjectivity. Portraits of Rrose Sélavy acted as the acknowledgment and legitimation of a culture in which the artist’s image becomes the focal point, the artwork itself, elevating him or her to the status of a celebrity.

Maria Kriara (b. 1982), an architect and PhD candidate in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has staged three solo shows until now and participated in several distinguished group exhibitions, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2006), Tinguely Museum, Basel (2013), 5th Thessaloniki Biennial (2015) and Kunstverein Herdecke (2017). Her solo show entitled Cogito (.) or I think therefore I am…a Rhinoceros (2014) referenced Albrecht Dürer’s 1515 infamous woodcutting print illustrating the animal that the artist himself had never seen.

The exhibition consisted mostly of pencil drawing pairings, diptychs and triptychs of seemingly unrelated images that create a type of story-telling reminiscent of the disorienting but also liberating fragmentation of instagram scrolling which fosters the dialogue of multiple synchronous subjectivities and their respective projected selves. Endless ahistorical meta-texts are triggered by the observation of Kriara’s triptychs. Most of these readings require an encyclopedic knowledge that is today easily accessible via Wikipedia and the obsessive investigation of hyperlinks. The curatorial character of their composition reveals the limitless potential of intertextuality in the digital age or simply put, an everyday google image search. Whitechapel Gallery’s curator, Emily Butler writes in the exhibition text that “Kriara is asking us to think about how these visuals are perceived once released back into the world in a wholly different context”. Each work individually reveals a drawing ability of such rarity that one cannot help but wonder if they are actually black and white scans of Xerox copied printouts. However, their Benjamin-defined aura makes these pencil drawings read as a hyper high-definition version of Man Ray’s photographs of Rrose Sélavy.

Kriara’s latest solo show, Pawnshop, 2017, a title that occurred after the 9 years of crisis in Greece that conditioned the widespread re-appearance of pawnshop transactions, was a simulation of these dynamics in the spatial context of the gallery. In an interview Kriara states: “the very moment a certain object passes through a pawnshop’s threshold it is immediately stripped of its previous connotations and turns into a commodity that is being reevaluated almost strictly according to, either it’s material value, or it’s utilitarian capacity.[1]” Such an attempt urged a re-consideration of the nostalgia assigned to personal or even historical memorabilia and the posing of yet another rhetorical question: “what is worth keeping?”

This ontological quest is depicted in a series of pencil drawings, digital prints, including text-based work, processed newspaper pages, a neon-light installation and even an audio piece in loop. The aura of the unique artwork seems to have turned into a non-issue as traditional drawing is curated to equally co-exist with mediated reproductions of various sorts. The most prevalent work in the space was the audio loop repeating the words: “Hoitines pot’este chairete! Eirēnikōs pros philous elēlythamen philoi” (ancient Greek for: Greetings to you, whoever you are! We come in friendship to those who are friends). The sound-quote is the Greek contribution recorded in 1977 for a time capsule that NASA sent off to interstellar space on the Voyager spacecraft in hope to communicate the diversity of life and culture on earth to extraterrestrial life. President Jimmy Carter said of the purposes of this time capsule: “We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours”. The time capsule, including the rather puzzling ancient Greek utterance as the sole representation of Greekness, already travelling for over 40 years, is estimated to outlive human civilization and earth’s lifespan. Kriara mentions about this particular work: “it’s not just her own nostalgia and complex identity this particular Southern European country has to deal with, but also the nostalgia of others, and both old and newly constructed mythologies they project, or sometimes force, on her”.

As I write this text a single word keeps re-entering my mind, almost compulsively: the first part of Maria Kriara’s exhibition title: Cogito (.) the René Descartes Latin half-quote and the unmentioned, but implied, second half: ergo sum. The cogito: I think, therefore I am, a pillar of Western philosophy and the foundation of knowledge production, acts as the reassurance that thought, including doubt, even the doubt of one’s own existence, is the proof of the reality of one’s own mind. In other words, a self with the capacity of a mind is a prerequisite for and evidence of existence. Brain in a vat is a rather elemental thought experiment used in philosophy studies. It hypothesizes that “an entity (e.g. a machine) might remove someone’s brain from their body, suspend it in a vat with life-sustaining liquid and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer”. The computer then would “simulate reality for the disembodied brain which would go on to have perfectly normal consciousness and experiences” as if it were still existing in a physical body. The purpose is to make one wonder if and how corporeality is necessary for existence. Brain in a vat has been widely appropriated in science fiction cultural texts.

If Man Ray’s portraits of Rrose Sélavy exposed the objectification of the artistic subjectivity, could Maria Kriara’s pronounced ellipsis of “ergo sum” with its replacement by a full-stop in parenthesis for her show’s title, be manifesting its subsequent dematerialization? Could Maria Kriara be a Rrose Sélavy of the artistic subjectivity in the digital age? Has the identity of the artist morphed from celebrity to inexistence?

For the purposes of this article I was asked to interview Maria Kriara. As she is based in a different city from me, the discussion would have to take place via skype. Due to several, quite real practical issues, mostly related to time and our inability to synchronize in real life, I instead preferred to email her the questionnaire. Ultimately, I decided to limit the interview to a single question: Do you exist?

Evita Tsokanta is an art historian based in Athens who works as a writer, educator and an independent exhibition-maker. She lectures on curatorial practices and contemporary Greek art for the Columbia University Athens Curatorial Summer Program and Arcadia University College of Global Studies. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues and journals and completed a Goethe Institute writing residency in Leipzig, Halle 14.

[1] https://www.yatzer.com/maria-kriara?fbclid=IwAR3mVTQ5nHDXQ0wFmx8RAgdKeFR8CRzq4bsXfX46Lw4acstYotbTBIOgs_s

Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Eleni, we first met a couple of summers ago at a beautiful olive grove in Lesvos. You participated in a program of Hermitage Sykaminea focusing on community-making. Do you have any good stories from your stay there?

Eleni Papazoglou (EP): Hermitage Sykaminea is a special place run by the most incredible human, Andreas Sell. It was amazing to meet so many practitioners and have time to talk, think, and share. We ran workshops and rituals ranging from felting, writing collectively, building stairs, and considering loss.

I think meeting Andreas was a revelation. He is so rigorous about playing; something I resonate with. I have a great appreciation for him and his practice. Six months after the residency, Andreas and I were in a bar, and I told him I was bored. He challenged me to do an exhibition right there and then. In about 24 hours, Andreas, Theodoros Tzannetakis, and I organised “I Love You Forever,” a show that took place under the highway bridge of Leoforos Athinon. It included artworks by Alex Zakkas, Panagiotis Tzannetakis, Konstantinos Giotis, Giorgos Athanasiou, Anna Rose Stefatou, Vincent Meyrignac, Irini Stamatiadi, Dimitris Theodoropoulos, Andreas Sell, Iria Vrettou, Chnoubis, Ariadne Strofylla, Alkis Hadjiandreou, Theodoros Tzannetakis and myself. People came through to see the show, and we had tangerines and beers. Iria did a reading. It is still one of my favourite projects.

Eleni Papazoglou, Untitled [Holding], 2022, Vinyl on found signage, 700 x 540 mm. Prizing Eccentric Talents 2, P.E.T. Projects, Athens [GR], curated by Angelo Plessa and George Bekirakis.

NV: It’s fascinating how your research addresses collectivity and participation in diversified contexts, ranging from self-organized to institutional ones. Is there a common line that traverses the exploration of these themes?

EP: Working by, with, and for, or alongside others is always a powerful experience, no matter the context. It involves exchange, alignment, and friction. Negotiation, camaraderie, affect. I am interested in the systems we use to relate to one another, and they exist everywhere. Sometimes those are top-down or inscribed in policy; in other cases, they are practical, necessary, faceless, self-initiated, historical, or circumstantial. Looking at different contexts provides a wide range of lenses to study the same topic.

NV: You’re originally from Athens, and you’ve decided to stay in London after your studies there. Would you consider returning to Greece at some point?

EP: London has a dynamic and vast community I love being part of. I work with different collectives and groups, the most important for me being Crit Club, a closed group of artists that meets once a month to provide peer-to-peer feedback as well as technical support and mentorship. My studio is in a building of 500 artists — another generous support network. There is a lot of energy floating about, even if it’s a tough city to live in.

At the same time, I have been considering moving back to Greece… I am trying to have the best of both worlds and balance the back and forth. In London, I have found ways to support myself through my practice. I’d like to find ways to make this possible in Athens. If you have any thoughts on this, please share — I am curious to know how different practitioners make it work.

Eleni Papazoglou, Untitled [part of Signage for the In-between], 2022, Engraving on trolase, 148.5 x 210 mm. Exhibited at the Collector’s House, Athens [GR], curated by David Kransky.

NV: You should ask this question to the network of the ARTWORKS Fellows; I’m confident this will set up an inspiring conversation. But let’s return to you. So, your background is in illustration and graphic design. In which ways does this knowledge intersect with your artistic practice?

EP: I think in everything! In my opinion, graphic design is integrated with notions of publics. It is everywhere, everyday, and for everyone. It feels closer to today’s world than art; in its application and methods of production. As my work often explores day-to-day systems we share — such as work, language, commerce, and spaces outside the gallery — graphic design is a tool relevant to such contexts.

Graphic design is embedded in storytelling, individual and collective identity, and guidance. It is the visual language of [information] exchange — a reactive process in itself — a call and response between context and visual, status quo and proposed alternatives. When approached critically, it is a system of negation.

Eleni Papazoglou, Curving Kata Fssiiiing [documentation of performance], 2021, Movement with acrylic props, 15 mins. Documented by Jordan Mouzouris

NV: I enjoy how your projects often consist of playful experiments in the realms of sport, work, and transport. What is your idea of performativity?

EP: I use performativity to enact propositions. I was working with instruction-led choreography, re-enactment, clowning, and team-building exercises. I then started making sculptural ‘tools’ to perform with and producing subversive manuals.

Performance in the 1960s Western Europe and North America arrived to disturb notions of value by opposing the commercialisation of the art object. Today, we are all performing: labour, gender, class, knowledge, wokeness, and on social media. What was once a tool for resisting assigned value has become an integral part of it. The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism and its power seems inescapable. But so did the divine right of kings.’’ What does resistance look like today? I think enactment (def. the process of putting an idea or suggestion into practice) might be a good start, and it might include performative elements.

Eleni Papazoglou, Alongside [as opposed to against], 2023, Performative intervention. Exhibited at How It Feels, SET, London.

NV: Besides being a visual artist and designer, you also work as a lecturer. What is your experience with education?

EP: Education can mean anything from learning, empowerment, self-organisation, university, having transformative experiences, academia, and certification. I have been teaching at university level for 5 years. Learning environments, like everything else, are not a level playing field; there is a lot of work to do to address inequalities.

I am interested in how we can share. Learning processes have taught me to acknowledge, to not know, to witness, and how much that can mean, to allow, and set boundaries. I am fascinated by how we can co-create environments of trust that allow taking risks.

Eleni Papazoglou, Fsiiing Half Price and Fsooom For Sale, 2021, Acrylic, steel, screen-printing, custom stickers, polythene sheet, tape, found packaging, 850 x 300 mm, 1200 x 380 mm Exhibited at Squeezebox, Collective Ending (London, 2021), curated by Georgia Stephenson, Elliot Fox and Ted Le Swer.

NV: What are you currently working on? Is there any new project you could share with me?

EP: I just finished two projects: an exhibition in and about an ex-evangelical church and community centre with Grace Black, Maddie Banwell, and Daniel Gatenio. I also produced “Rear View,” an exhibition and series of events that took place in the artist reference library Biblioteka (South London). I showed some new assemblage works and invited trusting mechanics [aka Rhoda Boateng], George Lynch, Oisín Roberts, Camille Yvert, Conor Ackhurst, Romeo Roxman Gatt, Nina Porter, Leah Walker, and Georgia Stephenson to share readings and moving image works, responding to the work.

At the moment, I am working towards a body of work that might take the form of a book inspired by general store packaging. I would like to approach my favourite general store to host the presentation of works.

NV: I love this idea and I’m curious about what’s on your reading shelf. Any book recommendations for this summer?

EP: I am reading: Thing Theory (2001) by Bill Brown, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925) by Marcel Mauss, and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986) by Ursula K. Le Guin. I am not sure these are exactly books for the beach. So here is one more: After the Sun (2018) by Jonas Eika. Enjoy enjoy. Thank you so much, Nicola!

Eleni Papazoglou is an artist, designer, and educator that lives between Athens and London. By using assemblage, writing, and performance, Eleni explores value, systems of exchange, and the structures around them. Recent exhibitions include: Rear View [solo], Biblioteka (London, 2023), How It Feels, SET (London, 2023), Prizing Eccentric Talents 2, P.E.T. Projects (Αthens, 2022), and Alternate Realities, Sheffield Documentary Festival, (2022). She was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (Athens, 2021–22) and the SET Studio Award (London, 2020–21). She was part of the group residency Peer Forum 2020 researching collective affection, hosted by Camden Arts Center (London, 2020–21) and acted as the educator-in-residence for Supersmashers, a weekly art session for looked-after children in Southwark hosted by the South London Gallery (London, 2020–2021).

Nicolas Vamvouklis is a curator and arts writer. He is the artistic director of K-Gold Temporary Gallery and has curated exhibitions at Mediterranea 19 Biennale, 7th Thessaloniki Biennale, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Since 2016, he has served as senior curator at the Benetton cultural panorama. He has also collaborated with Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Marina Abramovic Institute, Prague Quadrennial, and Triennale Milano. Vamvouklis contributes to art magazines and publications, including The Art Newspaper and MIT Press. In 2021, he was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Teaching a workshop at the Architecture School Paris-Malaquais (8–12th of February 2021).

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

In Fairy tales, Francis Alÿs unfolded his pull-over’s thread in the city. Fairy tale, idea, limit, bond, trail, the thread makes up a light and ephemeral architecture in the city.

Context and objectives

The confinement reveals the need for public spaces to meet people outside one’s “strict family nucleus” or even strangers. Biopolitical power (i.e., power over the lives of individuals, cf. Foucault, 1975), leaves the door open to an “exit zone” of a radius of 1km around one’s home. How can we enter it, explore it, re-signify it not as an arbitrary limit but as a necessary opening to the other?

This workshop, after the project “A Thread network in the urban fabric” that we developed in Latin America, is our second attempt to concretize an aspect of Madlen Anipsitaki’s architecture thesis. In her project “The Parisian passage in the XXIst century: Networked passage through a block”, she develops the utopia of a passage that connects the common spaces of an existing block (courtyards, corridors, staircases etc.) and passes through the apartments, creating encounters between inhabitants and passers-by. This networked passage is a manifesto for human relations in the face of the fact that we can exchange with people at the other end of the world without knowing our neighbor.

The urban scenography interventions, “A Thread network in the urban fabric”, rarely took the thread through apartments. Instead, it developed in the public space where the two of us, Simon and Madlen, developed relationships with local actors who invited us into their private spaces. In this way we often became an extension of the thread, an invisible thread.

The thread

It was the thread as a simple and flexible material that made the trajectory possible, the connection of different spaces and people. In Fairy tales, Francis Alÿs writes:

“Here is a fairy tale for you

Which is just as good as true

What unfolds will give you passion,

Castles on hills & also treason

How, from his cape a fatal thread

To her window the villains led”

Francis Alÿs, Fairy Tales

The act of unfolding the thread conjointly gives passion, castle and betrayal as well as a path for the villains to the window of the beautiful one.

The poetic plurivocity of this act, unrolling the thread in the city, was embraced by our one week-long workshop “1 km as the crow flies”. We invited the students to a simple and playful performance related to the situationist drift. If the objective is to “let oneself go to the solicitations of the field and the encounters that correspond to it” (Debord, 1956), it is also to solicit the field and its actors in order to achieve its objective.

The performance and its documentation

The idea is to place a totem object representing one’s home (e.g. observed: coffee cup, computer, window, box, dance shoe…) at the center of a circle of radius 1km, to tie a 1km spool of thread to it, to choose a “vanishing point” on the perimeter of the circle of radius 1km, and to make the thread follow the straightest trajectory possible to reach this vanishing point “as the crow flies”. Before the thread, the students went back and forth between the map and the field, confronting their project of the passage of the thread to the “already there” and its surprises.

The fact that the students are not all at the School but in different places gives us the “privilege” of following diverse trajectories in parallel, almost out of time, from the Corsican mountains to the density of a city like Paris. Here are the 8 groups formed by the 17 students, self-designated by a bird name:

Hummingbird (Paris 5), Pink Flamingo (Paris 13), Albatross (Paris 19), Hoopoe (Montreuil), Raven (Drancy), Eagle (Poissy), Blue Jay (Toulouse), Seagull (Speloncato, Haute-Corse)

Colibri states: “Like a bird that eventually gets out of its cage, I’m off. I go to meet places and discover people. This ordinary thread is like the key to the cage. Not the one to the house but the one to my conscience. It is a reason to speak, to receive others, to hear them speak to me, to smile at them”.

With “1 km as the crow flies” we perceive the thread as an ephemeral architecture, capable of connecting public and private space by crossing spaces that are between the two (for example a courtyard, a balcony). The thread becomes capable of piercing, of bypassing spaces, of sliding from one space to another. What is the purpose of this connection? The crossing of visible and invisible limits makes us able to feel them.

“It was during one of her cold afternoons, that the thread snuck through the neighbor’s house, warming a part of her body.” Blue Jay

The thread was kept on the ground, lassoed to high urban elements; shopkeepers, building janitors, residents allowed to cross a street from balcony to balcony, a block from courtyard to courtyard, private spaces…The Parisian groups pass through building yards, the Seagull (village in Corsica) passes its thread through several houses and then over the mountain. The Eagle (Poissy) digs the notion of “almost public” to describe a sports field and a residence of closed nature but passed by. The Raven (Drancy) comes up against the closing of the park and the Hoopoe (Montreuil) against a construction site before climbing on the roof of an abandoned industrial building…

Performers and documenters, the students elicit double-edged reactions: “Being dressed all in red, and unrolling 1 km of thread in Drancy, it wasn’t easy, but when you detach yourself from the looks and from the reflections, you quickly realize that it’s an incredible experience.” Raven (Drancy), followed by the Eagle (Poissy) : “With many burglaries taking place in the neighborhood right now, people are suspicious and pulling a thread a kilometer long can look fishy.” The Eagle caricatured the reactions of surprised passersby, the Blue Jay tuned into a familiar route and captured the sound.

The Albatross group chose to focus on the reactions of passers-by and made the thread speak by quoting their reactions on their “imaginary map”.

Albatross collected the expression of the children of the neighborhood thanks to papers and pencils hung on the thread which allowed the drawings.

The intensive ended with the creation of a common imaginary map, made through the superimposition of the individual paths. The restitution took place in front of a multidisciplinary jury (performance, choreography, architecture, drawing, sociology).

Here is the extensive documentation of the students :

https://paris-malaquais.archi.fr/ecole/f/intensifs-intercycles-2021_2_intensif-1-km-a-vol-doiseau/

Tracks of reflection

The anguish of nothingness and death provokes the need to leave a trace of one’s passage on earth. The world in the Covid-19 era radiates death. The passage from point A to point B reassures by its boundaries, within which students were free.

“Finishing by joining the two parts of the thread while crossing the deserted construction site proved to be a very liberating experience. We were alone on this huge, empty construction site in broad daylight and I started running, jumping, making big gestures.” Hoopoe

“This is not a thread but an idea, a movement, memories, a story, a desire! This thread claims a freedom lost for a year. It gives us a thirst for freedom like Jonathan Livingston The Seagull.” Seagull, who left the center of the Corsican village to climb the mountain with his thread.

The group Pink Flamingo traveled in time through dance, hanging the thread from the RER station of Cité Internationale to the abandoned one of the disused railway around Paris called “La petite ceinture”, or “the Small belt”, a duality translated by photomontage, video and pursued through writing. Pink Flamingo says : “The red thread, a metaphor for a continuous flow that makes its way through the frenzy of the street”.

There is a common characteristic to handwriting and drawing as well as walking, Ingold argues. When traced on a solid surface, the linear movement embodies the “flow of life”. The thread materializes this flow, it orders the micro-situations in the heterogeneous spaces encountered by the students into a common narrative between different stories. These united micro-situations are something that already exists through walking, without the thread. The thread makes them exaggerated and it becomes the tool to better distinguish them. By observing situations more closely through the thread, we can understand difficulties and obstacles and act on them.

The thread as a tool. The thread as a pretext. The thread as an experience. The thread out of the ordinary. The thread as a provocation to create social links. The same thread passes from the Pantheon to Mathieu’s grandmother’s house. The thread, a confrontation of scales. The thread as a limit. The same thread crosses both neighborhoods and the reactions of the people around it change. The thread crosses the house and then the mountain. The thread offers a balance between the empty and the full. The thread acts as the rhythm of a trajectory in the city.

The thread of “1 km as the crow flies” for us is all of this at once, but something is still missing that I can’t define in words because there is a feeling when you unroll a thread that goes beyond the words I know. Something that the students tried to convey but that the force of the moment and the feeling itself were often impossible to communicate.

The result was finally summarized with words by Francis Alÿs, to whom we sent the documentation of the experience. He answered:

“Dear Madlen, Simon, Alexia, Charlotte, Antonin, Gabriel, Jeanne, Esraa, Myriem, Antoine, Bianca, Jeanne, Mathieu, Matthieu, Maxime, Shérazade, Cherita, Eve, Elena,

It’s light, it’s beautiful, it’s poetic, it’s sometimes funny, it’s sometimes profound, it’s always alive and above all, it’s a magnificent act of resistance to the pandemic!

Thank you.

Francis”

Collectif MASI

Madlen Anipsitaki (SNF ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2020) co-founded the MASI Collective with sociologist Simon Riedler. She is an architect and urban scenographer. With her in-situ installations in public spaces, she seeks to break into the everyday-life, generating the collective appropriation both of her artworks and of their environment.

On the day we meet, Petros Moris is waiting for me at the cafe in front of Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. A hundred meters away, many of the country’s most prized pieces of cultural heritage sit under protective glass. In the opposite direction, Petros’ latest exhibition, “The Gift of Automation,” is in the middle of its two-week run. There, in the garden of a 19th-century mansion, Petros has installed a series of sculptures produced using the latest 21st-century innovations: the composite pieces mix laser-cut marble with 3D-printed “copper-electroformed and chrome-plated” bioplastic, light concrete, stickers and, since we are in Athens, spray paint. The objects foreground the fundamental relationship between humanity and technology, and the juxtaposition of ancient methods with their contemporary counterparts invite questions about the ever-evolving role of machines in our society.

But Petros doesn’t want to get stuck on the comparison between old and new. Though he admits that he often finds himself bridging the worlds of art and science, even this dichotomy doesn’t satisfy him for long. Indeed, he is hesitant to rest with any one idea, or even a contrasting pair. He has a roving intellect and an expansive range of interests; as if to prove this point, shortly after I sit down, he hands me the latest issue of AM, a small zine of poetry, theory, and literature that he co-produces with his partner, the artist Lito Kattou “in the hours before noon.” The contents run the range from Homer to Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx to a Japanese folk tale. He then begins to tell me about a PhD he is pursuing, hosted at the University of Thessaly’s Department of Architecture, which will explore the multiple meanings of the Athens subway system: infrastructure, archaeological excavation, network, public museum, non-place, and site of urban mythology. He settled on the subject precisely because it gives him another opportunity to bring together many disparate topics. But even here, we don’t linger; Petros wants to tell me about his upbringing and the origins of his artistic impulse, as well as questions about technology, history, and much more besides.

When it comes to these first two, there is an obvious story to tell: Petros’ parents run a mosaic workshop in Lamia, in central Greece. He grew up amidst craftspeople, raw materials, and the struggle to make a living from one’s creations. For all of his cutting-edge experimentation, Petros is happiest when working with his hands. His grounding in craft also taught him an essential lesson: “Historically, avant-garde artists have struggled with the paradox of financializing their work. Still today, it is ethically and politically not a simple question; it demands a navigation amidst desires and expectations, and I often examine this tension for myself. Even if I don’t understand art as something made in order to circulate the market, my early personal experience and involvement with craftsmanship taught me to feel at ease with monetizing my artwork in order to make a living.”

Carrying on the family legacy seems like an obvious motivator, then — but for Petros, it also feels too neat. He admits that leaning on his parents’ background makes his work, which is often quite cerebral, more accessible. It provides him with a narrative, which he knows is an important means to engage any viewer. He even opens up the idea of mosaics to put his parents’ craft within a larger conceptual framework. “Mosaics are objects that are produced through painstaking, small details but which only add up to a coherent image on a larger scale,” he reflects. “Each component is like a miniature sculpture, and the resulting whole is as complex as an architectural system.” Practically, intellectually, even emotionally, it is clear that he appreciates everything he learned from when he was young — he considers his upbringing a gift, really. But gifts are also burdens; in this case, such a strong inheritance comes with both expectations and limitations.

We turn away from what he calls the “psychoanalytic” — Petros wants to talk about his art. He began his studies as a painter at Athens School of Fine Art, but after five years of hanging around the studio, he felt the need to exercise a different part of his mind. He left Athens in 2010, at the very beginning of the economic crisis, to pursue a degree in curating in London. The timing was propitious: he was shielded from the worst part of the crisis by living abroad, supported by a scholarship. Still, he was by no means comfortable. He often found himself trapped in the shared kitchen of his tiny, student flat, demoralized by the city’s bad weather. As an escape, he locked himself in the library, working doubly hard to justify his distance from Greece; in his free time, he took part in various collaborative curatorial projects. But lost amidst this metropolitan grind was the time, space, and energy to produce his own artwork. From afar, he realized how essential this outlet had been to his happiness. Emboldened by this insight, he returned to Athens and to his artistic practice in 2014 with new zeal.

His work since then has followed an intertwined path that marries analog production with digital speculation. Born in 1986, Petros’ output reflects our uneven transition towards digitization. As a kid in the early 90s, he clearly remembers the world before the internet. Yet he is also young enough to have come of age alongside the burgeoning technology. He began first by reading about the subject; like a good curator, he was doing his research. “I got hooked as a kid by reading about video games, immersing myself in the lore of these worlds before ever owning a console. Then, I started collecting computer magazines, which at that time came with disks of demo versions of software. When I finally got a computer, I played a few games on it, but then I fully turned my interest to these demos. For example, I experimented with a very early version of Photoshop, as well as the second edition of 3D Studio Max, a computer graphics application. At first, I couldn’t figure anything out; each program was an entire complex world, governed by opaque rules and obscure interfaces. At the same time, the space of these softwares felt completely open, full of potential.”

As Petros grew older and gravitated towards the arts, he understood there was an area in contemporary visual culture revolving around the relationship between technology and art. He describes to me an early, seminal discovery: “I stumbled across the artist Paul Chan’s website — it was a work of art on its own. Chan did a crazy project using downloadable fonts that I’m still influenced by. In one, he replaced a single letter from an existing text using quotes taken from porn movies. For example, ‘a’ would become, ‘oh my god.’ Using this substitution, canonical texts became sexual manifestos. These were accompanied by simple GIFs of people fucking. At that age, it all seemed quite cool.”

Given his early and persistent fascination with computers, I asked Petros if he considers himself a “digital native.” Not surprisingly, he partially rejects the label. “My generation are considered digital natives, but I don’t feel that I take these technologies for granted. I always try to question them and retain some distance when dealing with these subjects.”

Petros traces back some of his caution to his time at the Athens School of Fine Art, where he had a transformative teacher, Zafos Xagoraris, who himself had studied at MIT. Petros says, “Xagoraris helped me establish a more complex relationship to technology. He insisted that any work I make could not be propaganda for these new tools. Later, when I discovered ‘new media,’ I felt the genre was, if not superficial, somehow insincere. Fundamentally, it presents itself as ‘new,’ but that’s never the case. I always doubt the messianic idea that art and technology will singularly provide us with answers. Every practice comes with a long genealogy; the idea of a blank slate or a clean ‘break’ is false.”

This is where we circle back to the question of history — especially loaded in Greece. Another gift, another trap. Sitting, quite literally, in the shade of the country’s archaeological heritage, Petros tells me, “This is the scheme of a gift: you take it, but then it becomes a burden. It implicates you, and you can’t give it back. Look at Greek identity today. It’s impossible to think about contemporary Greece without ‘the gift’ of ancient culture. Even if I personally reject this gift, it’s everywhere: in the country’s institutions and education system, visible in every public space. Since I don’t want to be so polemical as to boycott it, I turn our relationship to the past into an open-ended project. I shift the terms. For example, rather than looking at the long-celebrated Classical era, in my latest work, I focus instead on the Hellenistic period. The aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests was a much more imperialistic time. The capital city shifted out of Greece and the culture turned away from the human scale. In this moment, I find greater resonance with today, when we live on a global scope, and war and logistics shape both our technologies and our day-to-day realities.”

But once more, Petros doesn’t want to stop thinking. For all his activities — curator, zine publisher, PhD researcher, amateur Hellenistic historian — he feels most at home with the idea of being an artist. And this is because in his art, particularly in the objects he produces, he can avoid reaching definitive conclusions. “The reason I enjoy making objects is their mystery and multiplicity. It comes naturally to me to talk around my work — the research I undertake, the techniques I employ, the origins of forms and materials — but it’s hard to talk about the work itself. After all, that would be just one of its possible interpretations and, inevitably, there is so much that escapes a single perspective. For me, aesthetic practice and experience are defined by a productive process of interpretative openness, which is both a personal and collective endeavor.”

And thus, as our conversation comes to a close, I can see the balance that Petros is trying to achieve in his work. On the one hand, he harnesses the generativity of thought, the dynamism of an unbound imagination; on the other, he grounds himself in an object-based practice invested in materiality and form, dependent on a craftsperson’s set of skills in order to take shape. From this latter side, Petros reveals one final token of his inheritance. He tells me that the moments from art openings, exhibitions, and lectures he remembers most, “the really meaningful interactions, come from conversations with individuals who are not rooted in the art world.” For Petros, “those who are professionally embedded in art can, too often, maintain an ironic distance.” In contrast, when Petros engages with people who approach art objects with fresh eyes, he acquires more energy.

He tries to keep this latter audience in mind with each new project. As he describes it, “To reach these people, I have to be more generous.” He speaks of this generosity without a trace of condescension. After all, for a relentlessly critical mind, the gift of true art is when it finds the power to move us into a space beyond words, intellectual concepts, and our pre-existing judgments — a space that is open and free.

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Chara, it’s funny how we first met on a taxi from Rimini to San Marino, where you participated at the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale. We had this absurd conversation blending popular lyrics with Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories. Do you have any recollection of that ride?

Chara Stergiou (CS): Absolutely! We started chatting about our mutual interest in using popular culture while the radio paid tribute to Raffaella Carrà. It was her funeral day. What stayed with me was talking about this sense of guilt when it comes to taste-making, mostly in institutional frameworks such as the art world or academia. At that time, we were both working through “post-production” — as Bourriaud says — on the broader sense. Working with other people’s words, works, or even songs by making different playlists and producing new meanings.

Chara Stergiou, Listening to an Elusive Geography, 2021, performance, Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale — School of Waters, San Marino. Photo: Angeliki Tzortzakaki.

NV: That evening, you also presented a DJ Lecture outside Galleria Nazionale. Again, it was a thrilling momentum with this vibrant sense of freedom right after the quarantine. Could you tell me more about this new format you’ve developed? Do you consider yourself a DJ?

CS: The DJ Lecture belongs to this kind of endeavour that combines the essay form with other media, this time with the sonic. It all started — sarcastically enough before the COVID outbreak — sourcing from a feeling very similar to what we’ve lost or repressed during confinement: the live sense of togetherness. So, in my very first DJ Lectures, I was led by this urge to mediate and transmit sonically to audiences a certain social experience I was talking about then. Montaging a weird mix of songs, voices, lyrics, recorded authorships, translations, bibliographical references, and citations while “sampling almost everything.” A pursuit to deploy theoretical thought to an embodied experience and connect it intrinsically to art practice.

I am certainly not a DJ in its common sense, but they are a very interesting persona. Both a magician playing with the feelings of an audience in a room, “a meta-producer,” or, as it has been noted, “the epitome of the post-modern artist” (Brewster & Broughton, 2014).

Chara Stergiou, Theory in the Remix, 2022, seminars, State of Concept, Athens. Photo: Temporary Academy of Arts.

NV: To what extent does this methodology relate to curating?

CS: I suppose that selecting existing material, inserting it into a new context, and in meaningful company with other works would be a point of convergence.

NV: Let’s brighten the mood — what kind of music do you prefer? Name your top 3 songs of all time.

CS: To be more accurate, I must rephrase your question: what artist have you listened to non-stop for the past few years? And the answer would be Florence Welch. Such a gifted performer, poet, and songwriter! She has greatly influenced me in many ways and inspired my latest research on the common living spaces where we exist together and the collective experience of audiences, the empirical and social spaces where audibility functions unexpectedly. She’s the definition of an audience witch. Thus, the list would be as follows:

1. What the Water Gave Me

2. King

3. Patricia

All songs by Florence + The Machine.

Chara Stergiou, Listening to an Elusive Geography (A Rehearsal), 2021, performance, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou.

NV: That’s a cool selection! Well, it’s refreshing how your multidisciplinary practice centres on the overlap between scientific and artistic research in surprising paths. What is your idea of hybridity?

CS: We often associate hybridity with an unconscious imperative for newness or strangeness. Instead, I see it as a radical act of experimenting towards categorical inconsistency. This remains quite critical both in creating and perceiving. But mostly in trusting your own ways of working. A fruitful — and sometimes seemingly chaotic — mode of engagement based on method, not the result.

Chara Stergiou, Undercommons in the Remix, 2022, radio streaming, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

NV: In the past year, you’ve set up various workshops on sound and design as expanded fields. How do you approach teaching in these cases?

CS: It is hard for me to use the term “teaching” as it is loaded with a coat of unbearable authority you must have on others. In the framework you described, I want to see my role mainly as a mediator, a moderator that forms a collective call to action and then takes part in it. I owe a lot to “Practices of Attunement,” a collective/study group with whom we participated in wonderful experiments while preparing and leading workshops or even when reading, walking, and studying together.

NV: I’m actually checking now on the encounters you led at the Athens Open Studio. Your first session was entitled “Alles ist Arkitektur” inspired by Hans Hollein. I’m curious about how your architectural studies inform your projects.

CS: I obtained my degree in an extraordinary school born from the significance of transdisciplinarity in practice. I’m referring to the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly, and I wonder how many of us ended up working in architecture. In the homonymous manifesto, Hollein does not advocate that everything is architecture. Rather, he challenges perceptions related to tools, media, and critical thinking to conclude that some issues will continue to be solved traditionally. However, is architecture the answer as we understand it? Such a manifesto has stigmatized me, and it feels like we can replicate it in almost everything. Replace “architecture” with anything related to tools, media, and a new world of different affect, to ask: do we still have adequate answers to respond to new conditions? Does this sort of response feel comfortable? This is what motivates me to delve into what I work on. At the same time, it gives you a sense of relief to think of such matters even when you don’t have the answer.

NV: That’s true! You may not have an answer, but I guess the work can evolve organically in an open, collaborative spirit…

CS: Sure, I really enjoyed the turn from the loner space of the DJ Lecturer to the collective address and the invitation to “remix” projects and seminars at State of Concept and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. From the seemingly passive lecture format to more comprehensive “sonic modes of study” and “sampling everything.” I am still working in this direction.

Listen to Chara’s Stergiou ‘Undercommonings in the Remix’ audio streaming, part of the ‘Commonings’ last edition of The New Alphabet School, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15–19th September 2022.

Chara Stergiou is a research-based practitioner and artist whose interests focus on a theory-through-practice approach. Dealing with knowledge production through possible artistic hybridities, she works independently in projects and programs affiliated with institutions and collectives while conducting workshops, seminars, and presentations of research in several organizations (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Swiss Artistic Research Network, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, PACT Zollverein, and State of Concept Athens). In 2020, she was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.

Nicolas Vamvouklis is a curator and arts writer. He is the artistic director of K-Gold Temporary Gallery and has curated exhibitions at Mediterranea 19 Biennale, 7th Thessaloniki Biennale, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Since 2016, he has served as senior curator at the Benetton cultural panorama. He has also collaborated with Béjart Ballet Lausanne, Marina Abramovic Institute, Prague Quadrennial, and Triennale Milano. Vamvouklis contributes to art magazines and publications, including The Art Newspaper and MIT Press. In 2021, he was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS.

Dear,

“A lone island is part of an endless free-thinking and lost imagination. However, an archipelago signifies relations of un-relation between each island. Humans often think each island in an archipelago resembles the others. It is not true. Although each island forms part of a terrestrial totality, they are not all the same. An archipelago creates conditions that function to justify exceptions.”²

I recently read this, and it made me think of our endless conversations about islands, a recurrent theme in our friendship in the past years. As we often spoke about ways to enact the abolishment of the deterministic approach to living, I thought that maybe islands can help in this work. What if we look at them as mutable bodies in constant movement within an archipelagic organisation? This can deeply challenge our relation to the world: as symbolic assemblages of bodies–in sync–they praise their dancing selves, connecting tissues in multiple relations. Although they do not resemble, the islands of an archipelago enjoy their potent capacity for reciprocity while the waters surrounding them are receptible of those powers and resistances, all in deviant connections. Archipelagos are worlds in process of unlearning. They defy the binarism of mainland/island and instead engage in island-island interrelationships³. Within their ecosystems, bodies like islands, are in continuous transformation, open to infinite possibilities that allow us to reinvent ways of making and sharing. Think of the word pelagic so commonly used in Greek to talk about the deep, abyss, sea.

Dear, our lives are interconnected through breathing and water in so many ways. Gumbs would say “It’s not the world on our shoulders, it’s the ocean on our hearts, on top of our whole torsos”⁴. While lying down, I imagine the ocean above and within my lungs, breathing between worlds: by allowing air or water to penetrate, we allow breakthroughs, or better a sense of euphoria, a burst of love (bouffé d’amour⁵). I encountered this sentence in Tremblay’s work: “feminists train themselves to keep inhaling without the certainty that there will be a world to welcome their exhalation”⁶. In the spectrum of collective feminist and queer healing practices, you can imagine breathing taking an exceptional position.

The archipelagic thought makes us aware that no/body is self-sufficient in its fluvial corporeality. Thinking with our transcorporeal selves we understand that matter cannot be disentangled from our networks but is bound in a swirling landscape of uncertainty⁷. How can we attend to matter and biology otherwise, leading to a new embodiment? You know the conflict between the — troublesome — biology with capital B⁸ and transfeminist studies has been a long one. Lynda Birke stretched out the need to rethink this relationship and look at the biological body as something changing, changeable and transformable. That’s why new materialist thinkers across disciplines are calling for a moving beyond the biologically essentialist (normative) and towards a new mutable understanding of things. They presume identity and difference as products of complex interactions between matters inside and outside bodies and between the social and environmental conditions in which bodies exist and situate themselves. Few years later, Luciana Parisi also added her layer on a molecular scale: her notion of abstract sex designated the potential of its intensive mutability. The latter develops across all layers and stratifications, offers pragmatics of encounters, abductions and contagions between bodies, laying out dynamics of sociability that emerges in situ rather than being determined by social positions⁹.

Once, in a lonely bar I heard a womxn affirming: “our struggle must begin with the reappropriation of our body, expand and celebrate its powers, individual and collective, articulate and striving for our being¹⁰”. Do you think our struggle can begin by restoring our breathing? I am puzzled by the contradiction of underwater breathing as a practice of resistance, unless we turn back to the oceans being archives of breathlessness (see: anti-blackness and white supremacy) following Christina Sharpe. Breathing with water can reshuffle the dynamics of our political assembly¹¹, and therefore its inexhaustiveness is not to be taken for granted. The weaponisation of air and breath within communities is made evident by its very nature: breathing became a parameter that physicalised the inequalities persisting even in spaces that yield coalition.

The archipelagic communities allow therefore singular (- plural?) and collective identities not to be fixed in time and space but to be constantly quaking and floating. Dear, a voice inside me is humming: “if you move, you disturb their order. You cause everything to fall apart. You break the circle of their habits, the circularity of their exchanges, their knowledge, their desire: their world”¹². There is so much joy in these words, don’t you think?

You were right about euphoria and pleasure being militant commitments towards a fierce togetherness in our tomorrows…Shall we turn towards the political value of pleasure? Maree Brown calls this “pleasure activism”: the work we (should) do to reclaim our whole and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions and limitation of oppression and supremacy, make justice and liberation a pleasurable experience.

In taking back our bodies to talk back with our voices, we have to fight against our alienation from them and from the oceans (are we there yet?) first. Our largely mediated perception of the ocean contradicts our essence as water beings. We are born in the ocean but have no memory of it. After all, how do we still ignore these signs of body alienation not only from ourselves but from matter overall? We do not have bodies, we are our bodies and we are ourselves while being in the world¹³. Archipelagos are created via explosive moments of desire among oceans’ and volcanoes’ myriads of micro-affective acts. Great time beings and knowledge bearers, they carry and forward their extreme energy potentials that give shape to vibrant ecologies. Archipelagos are not static gatherings but dynamic constellations. They can neither be tamed nor defined because of their fugitive essence.

Dear, do you see now how new epistemologies come to urgency? Halberstam’s book on desire and disorder is shaken by the prefix un-. Unnaming, untaming, un-art, un-world when going through the archives of sexual otherness. How do we go from the polarised for vs against nature to after nature?

We need access to other forms of knowledge, ways of knowing and not knowing and even forms of knowing that depend on not knowing¹⁴. Looking beyond the domestic “things” opens multiple doors to a larger world of matter, where vibrating life forms engage in ontological choreographies. These doors allow different possibilities of living and dreaming together where new and better pleasures are being enacted, where other ways of being in the world and ultimately new worlds come to the horizon. Queerness is what keeps this horizon at bay and runs to greet it¹⁵.

Perhaps one day, we will find ways of understanding ourselves beyond the universalised European definition of the human: abolish institutional sexism, lust criminalisation and science mystification. We shall call, look for, move towards the poetics of bewilderment, a continuous disruption of the human-burgeois-adult-male gaze.

But today, I leave you with Ella Finer’s words:

Let’s take the conversation into action and not wait for the citation to do the work¹⁶.

PS: islands can only exist if we have loved in them¹⁷

Yours truly, Angeliki Tzortzakaki

Angeliki Tzortzakaki (SNF ARTWORKS Curatorial Fellow 2021) is a curator, writer and editor, living in Amsterdam and Milan. Her current research looks into self-organization, hospitality, agency, storytelling and feminist economies of knowledge production. Since 2018 she co-organizes the artist residency bi- in liminal and rural areas favouring loitering and friendships. In Amsterdam she works as a studio coordinator of the artist Mercedes Azpilicueta and runs the reading club ‘Readings with friends (of friends)’. In 2019 she co-founded Scores for Gardens, a study group working on the intersection of performance and critical theory.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki was part of the curatorial board of Mediterranea 19 — School of Waters in the occasion of which, the current text was published among other curatorial essays with Archive Books (2021).

The 19th edition of the Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean takes place in the State of San Marino between the 15th of May until the 31st of October 2021, under the title School of Waters, as proposed by the participants of the third edition of A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programme (2018–2020) and will comprise of exhibition, film, performance, research and educational programs.
https://mediterraneabiennial.org/

1.Neimanis A., ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ in: Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

2. Tan P., Pelin Tan on an Island, Letters against Separation, e-flux conversations, 2020, accessed on 8/11/2020

3. Pugh J., Island movements — Thinking with the Archipelago, Island Studies Journal, Vol. 8, №1, 2013, pp. 9–24

4. Gumbs A.P., Whale Songs, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 18, Number 1, April, 2019, pp. 8–13 (Article), Duke University Press

5. Wittig & Zeig, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, Les Cahiers Rouges, Grasset; GRASSET ET FASQUELLE edition 2011

6. Tremblay J; Feminist Breathing. differences 1 December 2019; 30 (3): 92–117

7. Alaimo S, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self Indiana University Press, 2010

8. following Karen Barad’s science with capital S and Ehrenrich & English’s stance on medicine in Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers second edition by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010

9. Parisi L., Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, Continuum, 2004

10. Federici S., Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, PM Press/Kairos, 2020

11. Moraga C., Preface. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.

Ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. 2nd edition, Kitchen Table, 1983.

12. Irigaray L., When Our Lips Speak together, 1980, Feminist Theory and the Body, Routledge, 1999

13. Minh-Ha T.T., Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, biblioteca pirata, 2020 (1989)

14. Halberstam J., Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, , Duke University Press, 2020

15. Muñoz J.E., Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, U of Minnesota Press, 2013

16. Finer E., Composing Feminisms @ ResearchWorks at Guildhall, November 23 2020

17. Walcott D., Islands, In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960, Jonathan Cape, 1962

The streets (and walls) of Athens have been covered — truly covered — in graffiti for as long as I can remember. As a child visiting from the United States, I didn’t know what to make of these indecipherable tags and scribbles. More broadly, I remember how my feelings about Athens itself were consistently ambivalent. Sometimes I reveled in the city’s chaos; other times I was certain that it was the ugliest place I had ever seen. But as I grew older, and started to travel more widely, Athens’ particularities steadily became more striking to me. Not only did I begin to feel a deep admiration for its flagrant disregard of my opinion, but more specifically, I came to realize how the city’s graffiti contained multitudes. Visiting year after year, a neighborhood walk became many things: a political education (ΕΞΩ ΤΟ ΝΑΤΟ! — NATO, Get Out!); an invaluable source for vocabulary (perhaps best not rewritten here); and finally, a reminder of how a city that always felt both old and new, crumbling yet unchanging, could be the site of ongoing struggle and reinvention. Today, I see these tags and murals as inextricable components of the city’s fabric, as much as the venerated antiquities or devilish topography.

For the multi-disciplinary artist Alexandros Simopoulos, graffiti has also been a near-constant presence in his experience of living and making work in Athens. As early as high school, graffiti served as a creative outlet for Alexandros, establishing an underlying layer that he would later return to and cover over, again and again, in different ways. He continued to produce work while a student in university — where he focused on humanitarian law and international relations, both of which would also express themselves in his artistic work — but still, he could not get graffiti out of his mind. After university, he was once more drawn to the art form, producing graffiti-inspired t-shirts, skateboards, and prints. His timing was propitious: street art was having what Alexandros calls, “its second renaissance in Athens” amidst the growing financial crisis. He quickly realized that his adolescent hobby could become so much more.

Alexandros explains, “The story of graffiti and street art is complex and contradictory. Even the very terms of ‘graffiti’ and ‘street art’ have highly contested histories, which continue to generate intense debate inside and outside the community. In Athens, though, this story had a local twist during the height of the financial crisis. At the time, there were endless reports from major international media outlets about street art in the Greek capital [for example: How Angry Street Art is Making Athens Hip]. The angle was that there must be some key relationship between the country’s economic situation and the city’s street art. The easy narrative: graffiti as resistance, with its images providing an accessible aestheticization of the country’s problems, such as urban poverty, alongside a manifestation of its ‘brave spirit.’ But very few of these articles undertook any in-depth research; rather, I think graffiti provided a free and edgy illustration for their pieces. The crisis put Greece in the spotlight and street art became a handy example.” He then reveals, with a knowing smile, “I am pretty sure that some artists made political work on certain streets because they knew it would be spotted by journalists and later published in, for example, The International New York Times. Easy narratives can be manipulated by both sides…”

Yet as the old adage goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. As Alexandros explains, “Over the past decade, street art has also created tourism for Athens. Many people travel here to paint — or, at least, they used to — we call them ‘graffiti tourists’. In Greece, it’s easy to work outside, especially since making graffiti is not heavily criminalized and the weather is good. The popularity of street art has certainly contributed to the touristification of the Athenian center, for better and for worse. For my generation, it has certainly been for worse: the recent inundation of visitors, and Airbnbs, has outpriced us all when it comes to housing.” He then reflects, “But what’s important to remember is that there was plenty of street art and political graffiti in Athens before the crisis. Additionally, street art has been used for gentrification for quite some time, all over the world, Berlin being a celebrated example (though we see it in London, New York, Barcelona and other places as well). Artists move where there is space and where it is cheap. All of these phenomena are not confined to a few trendy neighborhoods in post-2010 Athens.”

Alexandros understands these complications better than most: he has engaged with the street art community on many levels, at home and, lately, abroad. In Athens, he not only produced his own work, but collaborated with Cacao Rocks, another prominent practitioner [as well as an inaugural SNFA Artworks Fellow], to run a gallery in the city center dedicated to street artists. As he tells me, “Several years ago, Cacao and I shared a studio in the building’s basement. The gallery was on the ground floor. There, we had more or less free rein to do what we wanted. For over three years, we invited people we knew and gave them a welcoming space to experiment with formats. We even flew in artists from abroad to do mini-residencies and exhibit their work, bringing international points of view to Greece. In addition, the gallery worked as a small arts school for the kids of the neighborhood. It was an amazing experience — at its peak, it was a vibrant hub for varied people to meet, collaborate, experiment, and the spark for many new projects. The gallery was at the core of a small street art scene that was growing bigger and bigger. I remember that Cacao and I once had a completely sold-out show — but no matter how many gallery exhibitions we held and no matter how much work we sold, we lived in a parallel world: we were definitely not part of the contemporary art scene in Athens, nor was it something which we were interested in joining at that time.”

As Alexandros looks back on this heady time, I can hear the mixture of pride and frustration that accompanies the position of the perpetual outsider. Being on the edge — whether as a street artist excluded from contemporary art or as an artist living in Athens, a place that remains on the “periphery” of the global art world — affords a great deal of freedom. But it can also be isolating. Regardless, Alexandros reminds me that periphery is always a relative concept. He refers to the example of the 2017 edition of Documenta to underscore how the art world is never monolithic: at every level, there are insiders and outsiders, irreconcilable narratives, and overlapping spectrums of power. He says, “Documenta portrayed Athens as a locality of chaos and crisis and, at the same time, rebirth and self-determination. It was a narrative drawn from many sources, which made it appealing for different people, especially artists. Still, the event ultimately came from the outside, and thus its narrative exoticized Athens. It didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, explore all the complexities contained here.”

Over the past few years, Alexandros’ own path reveals his efforts to bridge these many competing approaches and gaps — between street and art, politics and space, Greece and abroad. As he tells me, “What’s so special about street art, more than anything, is its directness. It can reach people in their everyday lives. I’m interested in working across worlds, not just speaking to curators and critics. I want to create work that communicates with everyone.” In pursuit of a more legible visual language, Alexandros first left Athens to study illustration and visual arts in London. He then returned, now with a wider focus on making work that deals with the idea of public space — not illegally but as an invited guest. He tells me, “I’m not painting outside much anymore. I don’t even consider myself a street artist at this point. Instead, I am contending with the difference between what I thought I was doing and its perception from the outside. Conceptually, I am thinking about questions such as ‘What happens in your body when you paint graffiti? What happens in your mind? What kind of narratives do you come across, what kind of people, how are they communicated — and how has all of this transformed cities around the world? Concretely, my expanded point of view means I now work with a greater range of people, all of whom have widely disparate perceptions of street art and public space more broadly. Through these interactions, I am exploring my relationship to public spaces from other people’s perspective. I try to actively engage them in the creative process or even make them part of the work.”

As a former student of humanitarian law and international relations, Alexandros’ broadening point of view continues to ripple outward, well outside of Greece. For example, this past summer, he spent three months in Berlin and, prior to that, six months in New Mexico as a Fulbright Fellow. He also received public commissions to paint murals in locations ranging from Hungary to Portugal, and even Greenland. He reflects on the privilege, and challenges, of extending his work in this way. “Traveling creates a global community and network of artists who can exchange skills and ideas. This has always existed in the street art scene — while a piece might not travel, the people who make these public spaces are able to move and bring their knowledge with them to new settings. This does present some complications, though. When I travel to make work, I am confronting a place I’m not from, where I might be unaware of specific tensions or histories. The only way to overcome this deficit is to spend as much time there as possible before making any work and to meet and interact as sincerely as possible with people from different communities. Wherever I go, I try to respond to those around me and make the art meaningful for everyone involved. This has become the most challenging and rewarding part of the process for me.”

Alexandros’ new perspective has not only helped him with his work overseas, but to look at Greece with fresh eyes. This was evident in Still Here Tomorrow, the Artworks group exhibition held at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation last summer. In the show, Alexandros’ piece effectively juxtaposed views from inside and outside, embodying his desire to understand other points of view while retaining his local roots. The installation, titled Best served old (Anti-austerity artists are impressing the tourists), mixed street art motifs such as pigeons and stray dogs with aesthetics taken from ancient Greek art — red and black-figure vase painting and portrait statuary — as well as the pan-Balkan blue evil eye. According to his artist statement, the entire installation was meant to evoke the pandering displays in tacky souvenir shops. But beneath the dark humor, Alexandros had a positive message. “Many of the images on these ceramics relate to stories of tradition. Tradition in Greece (and elsewhere) has been the basis for countless horrible, nationalistic, and extremely conservative narratives. But, in some instances, it can also point us towards more radical ideas. For example, tradition can help foster a connection to the land, by which I mean the actual soil — something that has become revolutionary again today since it runs counter to so many globalized forces.”

Still, as we discuss how to synthesize such opposing views, it seems fitting that we end our conversation on the subject of land. After all, street artists are ever-rooted to their physical surroundings. And so we conclude by returning to the city of Athens one final time, with Alexandros saying, “In so many places in the West, public space is tightly regulated: you go to your work and after you go to designated places to enjoy yourself in very predetermined ways (bar, restaurant, theater). In between, public space is used only as a passage, with few actions produced there. But in the words Martyn Reed, I like to think of streets as ‘repositories of meaning for those who occupy and move through them, as places of contested perceptions and negotiated understanding.’ We can see this in Athens, where public space is chaotic and put under many competing demands. People, bikes, cars, and café tables fight over finite space. It’s not always pleasant, but I love the plethora of communication that happens in these increasingly squeezed plots of land. It excites me to see Athenians using every bit of public space available to them; you find people everywhere. The city’s residents continue to spend a large amount of time outside, together. Here, there is an intensity of community that I don’t find in other cities in Europe or the United States. For me, that’s the essential quality of Athens, that’s a big part of what makes it special.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.

Nana Seferli’s studio is situated near the Southern suburbs of the city, and that, in Athens, means it can be found within the dense urban tissue, yet a breath away from the seacoast. In the broader region of Kallithea, the artist found a store space, bright and calm, among other small businesses and family houses. The wide street allows the sunlight to enter the room, where she paints among large canvases that brim every available surface. An enormous pink Bougainvillea tree consumes the front window and the entrance of the studio and seems to be enjoying the sun, nearly as much as does the artist, who spends most of her day there, behind that facade that resembles a vibrant summer house.

Seferli started working there after the former resident of the studio, a friend and artist, moved abroad. She explains that her working hours in the studio are more fruitful in comparison with those in her apartment, where she used to paint before. Her house, not very far from Kallithea, is already filled with paintings, material ideas, sketches, drawings and her favorite objects, while it also provides vital space for a cat, two parrots and herself. Beyond being “busy”, her private space functions more like a dynamic ecosystem of affection, comfort and safety for the artist and her loved ones. After all, she tends to establish her painting work in such holistic, non-hierarchical, organic terrenes.

Nana Seferli, Wheat Boat, 2022, acrylic on paper, 32 X 24 cm

She studied at the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences of the University of Ioannina and that progressive, decentralized department allowed Nana to explore her subjects, experiment with natural materials and envision the elements that were meant to reappear in her practice: organicity, textures, light, color. The calm and the uncongested environment of her student years in Ioannina is still present through her preferable working state: serene, yet approachable.

However, as part of her discipline and in absolute coherence with the principles that are suffused all over her work, Seferli has recently decided to expose herself in the challenging conditions of collaborative work process. With painting as a vehicle — probably the most lonesome artistic practice — she is currently in a creative dialogue with her colleague and artist Nicolas Simantirakis, sharing the same canvas’ surface. The result is a painting series in progress of monumental compositions, where conflict and unity can be both of great value. The fact that she confronts her tendency to work in isolation, not only challenges her off path, but also liberates her. In parallel, she is part of an alluring initiative, a closed weekly sketch session of a group of women artists that is taking place on a weekly basis at Olga Vlassi’s and Anna Zissi’s studio in Neos Kosmos. There, the participants draw using as models one another, in a healing and empowering process. Seferli is grateful for both experiences, and I find her passionate way of overcoming the challenges of co-creation is exquisitely inspiring and profoundly influential to her work in terms of practice, form and content.

Nana Seferli, Moose Hunt, 2013, ink and acrylic on canvas, 300 x 200 cm

Since her graduation, Nana was intrigued by the power relations between human and non-human entities within ecosystems, representation in patriarchal schemes and the invention of an abolishing iconography, as a response to the above. In her degree show, under the title Simulacra (2013), scenes of hunt intertwine with emblematic authoritative figures, hunters and armed women. Among other scenes and abstract portraits, she visualized an encounter between a moose and Theodore Roosevelt. The American president was a pillar of the belief that nature exists in favor of mankind. Incarnating a patriarchal and mechanical perception of the natural world, the president is here presented hunting the same animal that he used as his own, masculine symbol during his political campaign. Until today, Seferli investigates this arbitrary attribution of meaning — even speech — to silent and precarious subjects by those in power. In 2022, she published her limited self-published edition Metazoa, where she designed the whole Greek alphabet portraying an animal for every single letter.

Nana Seferli, Bird crying, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 X 50 cm

Seferli’s animal figures are not wild, nor tamed or enslaved. They are wise, emotional and self-actualized, but not human-like, as her painting is a reflection on an organic, autonomous and unified world. Cats, birds, dogs and plants project a realm of circulation and undisrupted flow, to which they contribute with their own special character and emotional imprint. At the same time, layers of gesso, acrylic and aquarelles form mountains, bring rivers and pulsing arteries into the third dimension. An idealized animistic utopia is very far from her inherently haunted compositions. Enigmatic animal figures, dominating vegetal organisms, scattered undefinable bodily forms evoke a sense of agony, they imply an obscure silent threat. The world as we know it, is at stake. It is not about the death of nature, it is, however, the end of the reign of structure, duality and force.

Nana Seferli, Makkuro, 2023, oil on canvas, 18 X 24 cm

Interestingly, as I am writing these lines about Seferli’s work, an article is going viral: orca whales have been witnessed to be attacking vessels in the ocean, driven by the urge to take revenge for the loss of their babies due to interventional human activities. According to a team of scientists, it seems as though the orcas witnessed a repetitive phenomenon that activated an instinct for defense against extinction. One, of course, cannot argue with certainty that this behavior is entirely mechanical, at least I prefer to think it isn’t. I like to read this behavior as an emotional response to a collective, as well as personal threat. Seferli’s depictions of the natural world incorporate this sense of subliminal lack of safety. The viewer cannot easily choose their subject of identification: are we the endangered ones or the danger itself? The figures of cats and birds have always been used in the classical tradition to evoke feelings of affection, admiration and calmness or even as symbols of high ideas, or people of power, divinities and political personalities. In Seferli’s work, animals govern their own life, and her visual language is not appealing, cute or easy to read. It is, though, as beautiful as a flock of orcas floating in the Iberic sea, seeking for revenge.

As I am leaving the studio, I notice that the closed store next door is a former butcher’s shop. A sign on the glass window informs the business is on sale, along with the store and its equipment. I peek inside: everything is white and clean and the room is nearly of the same width as the artist’s workplace on the other side of the wall. Nothing suggests the slaughter that was once exhibited there. Nothing but the shiny, clean blade lying on the wooden cutting surface. I imagine Nana sneaking in there one night, with her parrots perched on her shoulders, using her magical paintbrush to resurrect the animals and set them free into the wild once again.

Christina Petkopoulou

Nana Seferli (b.1989) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences of the University of Ioannina and continued her studies with a postgraduate degree from École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Quimper, France. She has presented her work at festivals and art venues in Greece and abroad. Selected group exhibitions include: Ammophila Vol.3 There Was Land Here Before (Elafonisos, 2022), Imago Mundi in Venice in 2015; PEINDRE # 2 in MICA Gallery, Rennes (France, 2014); 7> 5 in Quimper (2013); Thrills and Chills at CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery (Athens, 2013); and Kodra Fresh 2013 Floating Walls, part of the Action Field Kodra festival held annually in Thessaloniki (Greece, 2013). Together with Lucie Ferezou, she has co-curated and participated in the duo show Under the Luna, presented in Booze Cooperativa (Athens, 2018); and with Akis Karanos in the duo show The Way the Dog Ran Away, held at Galaxias Municipal Cultural Centre in Nea Smyrni, Attica (Greece, 2016). From 2014 to 2020 she worked as an art teacher in special and general education. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).

Christina Petkopoulou (Athens, 1992) is a free-lance curator, researcher and writer based in Athens. She has studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne and completed a master’s degree in Cultural Management at the Panteion University of Social Sciences. She is a member and the in-house curator of the A-DASH team, a researcher and curator of the online art projects a time of her own by Zoe Chatziyannaki and Athens Report by Anna Lascari. She has curated exhibitions and public programs (Lipiu, 2020, Playing Ground, Automatic Transmission, 2019, Liminal Aristeidis Lappas solo show, Praxitelous 33, 2016, Choro-graphies-Points of flight, Artscape Athens, 2014 and more). Her texts have been published in several editions and catalogues (The ArtNewspaper Greece, Lipiu, Vera Chotzoglou, Bona Fide, State of Concept, 2021, Ammophila II, Under the Burning Sun, 2021, The Feminine Sublime, 2019 and more). She has worked for the Greek Contemporary Art Institute (ISET) researching and documenting its archive and she has also collaborated with several cultural institutions such as the Athens Biennale (2013, 2015), Art Athina (2014, 2015) and Archaeological Dialogues (2015). In 2016, she was chosen for the Neon Foundation curatorial exchange program in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and in 2019, she received the SNF Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.

“ Feel then that I’m near springs, pools and waterfalls, all with abundant waters. And I free.
Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world.”

Clarice Lispector. “Água Viva”.

We start with a body and its skin, a boundary, a way of detaching oneself from the rest of the world, or a porous membrane, an opening of fluid exchanges with it. We align ourselves with a flow of thinking, which creates the context we live and act in. The body as an enclosed sea -Mediterranean- channelling through the rivers and undercurrents and a landlocked state of existence, permeated by torrents.

It is the flexible outer tissue of my fingers that separates me from being effused onto the plastic keyboard I am using to write this text, or my paper notes — preventing me from turning into soft pulp- but it is the aqueous reciprocation with all that surrounds me that affects and moves the writing.

The body lives because of water and is co-constituted with its connections. It exists in a process of cognitive evapotranspiration. Our water relations submerge the western individual entity myth. To channel Neimanis (2013), we drink and weep, perspire, discharge, ejaculate, release, and absorb liquid. The percentage of water in our bodies reacts to other watery materialities and thus creates stories and memories. I flow with the thoughts and the existence of other critters and my entrenched personal pronoun is diffused with and among them.

As Haraway argues, this is not to say we are connected with everything (2016, p. 31), our fleshy and digital water exchanges happen somewhere. This specificity is important for the limits of its rippling effect. We are here and not there, or we are here and there but not elsewhere. We are connected to something that is connected with something else, and consequently the net of connections untangles.

Thinking with water, what if we read our geographical location as this porous membrane instead of a border? What if this difference is also transmutable and exchangeable? What happens to the notion of the self or the nation-state in this wetland?

As Neimanis argues, to think with water is to both think the substance and the semiotics of water (2013), the materiality and its metaphors. Water as a source of life but also as a cause of death, liquid metaphors of togetherness and sexual fluidity, waves of feminism, but also neoliberal hijacks of watery terms, the commodification and exploitation of water and the terraqueous necropolitics (Presti, 2020). This is to think about care and danger.

To think with water is to think (and live) in more than human worlds (De la Bellasaca, 2017) with other animals, machines, organisms, objects, forces and their forming relations. We do not start and end with the human. The story must change (Haraway, 2016, p. 40). This phrase echoes Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Ursula Le Guin, Jason W. Moore, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum¹, the earthbound² and the biotariat and many others in this journey. New stories are coproduced human and extra-human, conditions of unpredictable plurality are embraced.

In these new conditions, feeling and thinking is not restricted to the human body the skin and the fingers. Another exchange is introduced with slippery epidermes, transparent mesoglea, tentacles making attachments and detachments…patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here and yet to come (Haraway p.31). Myths are recreated or rerouted towards a multispecies alliance, where all become collaborative interspecies. As algae, fungi and yeast we form lichens and articulate them with punk punctuation (ahoy Milne)³

To go with and beyond metaphoric language is to provide jet propulsion for efficient locomotion. We create our myths in solidarity of algae, in the symbiotic alliance of lichen. The sonic pulsation by Drexciya moves us and aligns us with the deep-sea dwellers and the wave jumpers⁴. We dance. A secret subterranean city emerges in the oldest extant sovereign state of the known cosmos⁵. Along with deep-sea companions, a strange “we” operates collectively against the commodification of everything, reclaiming the microbial mythologies of the past and the future. We catch a wave with the octopus and other squishy invertebrates. Create suits of armour made of seashells and kelp and found objects. With Chus Martínez and an octopus in love, we sense what parts being totals mean, and how to think through the skin. As Martínez mentions, the octopus’ nervous system is spread throughout its body, distributed instead of being centralized. Nodes in the nervous system are connected to each other. Fingers and tentacles think. We are at school with the tentacular ones. Is this possibly the way to relationally unmake some of the present’s violent conditions (call it Captitalocene or Anthropocene)?

The octopus’ body is a vessel for narration; an oracle and a storyteller. To think with the tentacular ones is a way to imagine a form of decentralized perception, a relational network, and cultivate conditions of ongoingness. It is a way to see a possible future. What if the political body felt and sensed not necessarily with a central system, but with its parts being totals? What if we thought of our institutions in that sense? Could art imagine a way it all connects? The alliance of vulnerable and precarious bodies, thinking with water, thinking/feeling with tentacular creatures, playing, making or unmaking together in naturecultural worlds.

Panos Giannikopoulos, ARTWORKS’ Program Coordinator, was part of the curatorial board of Mediterranea 19 — School of Waters in the occasion of which, the current text was published among other curatorial essays with Archive Books (2021).

The 19th edition of the Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean takes place in the State of San Marino between the 15th of May until the 31st of October 2021, under the title School of Waters, as proposed by the participants of the third edition of A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programme (2018–2020) and will comprise

1. Rhinolophus ferrumequinum with the common name Greater horseshoe bat, lives in very small numbers in San Marino. This critter is listed as “Near Threatened” due to its very low numbers. Its horseshoe noseleaf helps to focus the ultrasound it uses to ‘see’.

2. See Haraway, 2016, p. 41

3. See Lichens for Marxists (Milne, 2017)

4. Drexciya was an electronic music duo from Detroit, that developed an Afrofuturist mythology. Drexciya’s undersea civilization descended by the unborn children of the drowned African women who were thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. The babies had adapted to breathe underwater in their mothers’ wombs. According to Kodwo Eshun, the myth was partly built on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Deep Sea Dwellers and Wave Jumpers refer to this mythology and the respective song titles.

5. San Marino claims to be the oldest extant sovereign state and the oldest constitutional republic.

In a way, honeybees are like artists. They venture into their surroundings, seeking out nourishment. In moving from plant to plant, they fertilize flowers and thus bring new life and more beauty to the world. Besides that, deep within their labyrinthine hives, they pool their nectar and painstakingly transform their labor into sustenance. Much like artists, the honeybees’ creative process is opaque from the outside. Few of us ever make the effort to peer into the honeycomb to understand how everyday materials are transfigured into something so sweet and nourishing. The artist’s studio remains similarly remote.

But if any two people are in a position to understand these twinned mysteries, it is the artist-couple Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi. After both growing up on the mainland, and later spending time abroad, the couple have settled together in Komi, a small village on the ruggedly picturesque Cycladic island of Tinos. Ioannis, alongside his artistic practice, has avidly embraced a different art form: beekeeping. And Paola, whose family hails from the island, participates fully in their rural Aegean community while maintaining her own creative output. Together, the pair have formed Hypercomf, a “multidisciplinary artist identity materialized as a company profile.” To understand their playful, boundlessly inventive efforts more clearly, I journeyed to the couple’s charming, white-washed home. While Ioannis was away on a neighboring island, Paola welcomed me into their shared creative universe.

In doing so, Paola put into practice one of her strongest beliefs: that artists need to open up, making both their profession and their work more inviting to the public. She tells me, “I’m against the fantasy of the artist alone in their studio; me alone with my brilliant thoughts. We should involve people in the making. Most times, they only see what happens at the end, and that makes our work needlessly mysterious and misunderstood. If people are let into the creative process from the start, they will have a better appreciation of what the final artwork means.” And so, with our task clearly laid out before us, Paola and I begin, slowly unraveling what Hypercomf — and more generally, what a transparent and truly open artistic mindset — might have to teach us about how we look at the world.

Paola and Ioannis met in London when they were 21 years old. Paola had grown up in Athens, Ioannis in the flat, central city of Karditsa. Both had left Greece for London in order to study art and see more of the world. Each was looking for something bigger out there and amidst this immense metropolis, they found each other. Paola has no trouble recounting the exact moment when their relationship deepened: “From the beginning, we were painting together. That is to say, side by side, in the same space, but still focused on our own canvases. Slowly, we began to play exquisite corpse. That is, we put a canvas in the middle of the room and one person would start painting. Then, they would leave it and allow the other person to pick up in their own direction. We continued this exchange, truly painting together now. It was like a game.”

Paola and Ioannis now had each other; next, they needed to fashion an environment in which they could both flourish. They returned to Athens where, individually, their practices were busy. They found the city’s artistic community welcoming and especially appreciated being once more amidst the Greek sense of humor. But over time, Paola began to recognize a “psychological need to be close to landscapes and nature.” Within the choked streets of the city, Paola did what she could, creating a personal oasis of “a balcony with 500 plants.” Still, she felt she had to get away. When she saw an opportunity to go to Tinos for work — helping run an educational program at a museum on the island — she jumped at it and Ioannis followed.

Upon arrival, Paola and Ioannis connected deeply with their surroundings. Ioannis, who had never before lived in such a rural setting, took up beekeeping. Paola, meanwhile, connected with the community from where her grandmother had originally come. “In Komi, half the people are my family. I call everyone aunt or uncle, since we are all somehow related.” More deeply, the island’s culture resonated with her and began to shape her perspective on the world. “Everything is more real here. I think it’s because death is so close at hand. There are over 200 people in Komi and only a few dozen are under the age of 50. That means people are dying a lot. Just outside my house, there is a bell ringing each time someone has passed away; that’s when you know the soul is departing. But none of this is morbid — it’s simply part of life. Death sharpens your focus and keeps away some of the pointless distractions of modern living.”

Immersed in the rhythms of their island village, the ideas behind Hypercomf began to percolate. Far from the galleries of Athens and the city-dwellers’ need to impress each other with their wit, originality, or cynicism, the project adopted a distinctly approachable character. Paola says, “We wanted to make functional art pieces that incorporated elements of design. The pieces would be easy to buy and appeal to a wide range of people. Our humble goal was to make everyday life a little more interesting.” At the same time, since the project emerged from the playful minds of Paola and Ioannis, it came with a twist. Hypercomf, from its beginning, adopted a “fictitious company profile,” a sort of faux corporate sheen that allowed them to poke fun at the commercialization of art while also opening themselves to the possibilities of reaching a wider audience. As Paola tells me, “For our first public event, we held an exhibition that doubled as a pop-up shop. It felt much warmer than an ‘art exhibition’ — we felt we were with the people. Out of this success, the idea of a fake company became established.”

Since its founding, Hypercomf has been a success: brisk sales, numerous openings, and an international footprint. On paper, the envy of many aspiring brands. But all of this, Paola reports to me with a mischievous glint in her eye, is part of the fun. To anyone who has seen their output, it is abundantly clear that Hypercomf is not your average company. For example, on the company’s e-shop, Hypercomf asks people to use its products for “multiple lifetimes” — an unlikely basis for a profitable business model. And anyways, as Paola reveals to me with a laugh, “The e-shop isn’t open yet. Two years after we started, it still says, ‘Coming soon.’ Yes, real soon, real soon — we’ll keep them waiting.”

But for Paola and Ioannis, the real interest of Hypercomf has been creating a new space for their playful explorations — an updated, online channel for their old games of painting-studio exquisite corpse. Given that the two artists have matured since their art school days, their creative spark has leapt beyond the bounds of their own partnership. As Paola tells me, they discovered that adopting a group identity opened up the possibilities of working with other artists. Paola says, “Something about the utopian idea of Hypercomf seems to activate people’s openness.” Such projects have included curating other artists’ work, set-designing exhibition spaces, all while utilizing a diverse range of mediums ranging from film to purely digital experiences.

Indeed, as she hinted at the beginning of our conversation, this expanding spirit of collaboration extends beyond fellow artists to the wider world. She tells me, “Right now, most people have no idea what artists do all day. Yes, making art is complicated — investigating materials, working through concepts, experimenting in the studio, finding money (that’s part of it too!) — but all of this work is real and many kinds of people can have a worthwhile input. I believe we need to involve our potential audiences: inform them, get their opinion, make them part of the process. Not only will they better understand the work, but I think it will make the work itself more interesting.”

She starts with an example close to home. Komi, her village, and the entire island of Tinos have contributed greatly to the material form of Hypercomf’s work. Like the honeybees which Ioannis tends, Paola describes a symbiotic relationship with the two artists’ immediate environment. “We try to find different ways to repurpose what’s already been made. Our work is not fully organic — we use computers and all kinds of manmade materials. But this reflects the reality that humans are everywhere now and so there is no ‘pure’ nature. For example, we use plastics we find on the beach. We use bones. And most of all, we use fabrics that we find stowed away, hidden in the community. A particularly good source are handmade tapestries and rugs. Our neighbors have been happy to open up their ancestral chests and give us their old fabrics; they just want to see them put to good use.”

She goes on to give another example from a project done in Italy. “We were invited to a textile factory and asked to respond to the building as well as the surrounding landscape. Of course, we could have done all our research online, taking ideas from elsewhere and looking at satellite images of the nearby mountains. Instead, we hiked up onto the slopes, found some shepherds, and explained our project to them. We asked if they would put GPS trackers on their sheep and suddenly, we had live data coming in from the locals. As the sheep’s wool had been used to create textiles, we used the sheep’s data to create new weavings that represented their journeys. We were so happy when the shepherd then came to the exhibition opening. He saw his own lands in a new way and he easily understood everything since he was involved in its creation.”

Hypercomf’s projects, both in Tinos and abroad, exemplify Paola’s belief of getting to know a place through its inhabitants and of making art almost literally from the ground up. In this light, then, it can seem odd that Hypercomf bases itself in such a remote location, seemingly secluded from wider connections to the world. But this is perhaps one of the key contradictions that the couple has learned to relax: between place and movement. With the lessons Paola and Ioannis have learned in Tinos about becoming embedded in their community, their fake company has put itself into global circulation, carrying its embodied wisdom everywhere it goes. She says, “Maybe 50% of our creativity happens in Tinos. We think internationally; we are nomadic. If the internet has done something good, it’s that you can live anywhere and still work just fine.”

This winter, for example, the couple will be in residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Among the endless activities pursued in New York City, Paola and Ioannis found out about a small but tight-knit community of pigeon keepers who understand the city in a way different than anyone else. “Our goal was to research the various networks of the city: urban, digital, natural, transportation, jogging routes, etc. And then we discovered a great entry-point — these crazy pigeons! We plan to explore how this peculiar subculture works as a social structure — both for the humans and their animals.” And then she adds, characteristically, “It also suits us since people claim to love nature but they certainly don’t love pigeons or rats or cockroaches. We’re proud to have a victim of speciesism as the grounding for our next project.”

As we wrap up our conversation, we return again to the idea of structures and scale. It’s funny to think how New York City, a sprawling, bustling center of productivity, can also provide the setting for a small group of fanatics to fly pigeons, unnoticed by the city at large. For Paola, these nested frames are essential to how she sees the world. “I suggest everyone try to experience the full spectrum, from the micro to the macro. I have lived in a village with 200 people, an island with 8,000 people, a capital with four million, and a global metropolis with over ten. What I have learned is the universality of scale. My village neighborhood here in Tinos is like one building in Athens. But the city of Athens, as a community, is not so different from my island. The basic structure of hierarchies and what we individually pursue is always the same. In nature, the atom is round and the earth is round. Maybe the universe is round too? What works on the small scale seems to apply everywhere.”

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide.