Fellow Field: Visual arts

Nicolas Vamvouklis (NV): Foteini, it’s great meeting you at the Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, where your solo show is currently on view. This is actually the first time I get to see your work up close. Could you briefly introduce me to your art practice?

Foteini Palpana (FP): It is great meeting you too, Nicolas, and thank you for this interview. As is the case in this show, my work develops in installations combining different mediums, which tend to become more sculptural over the years. My practice is linked to an interest in categories of the natural environment, such as the ground and the landscape. In the past, my works have adopted the characteristics of the map, the model, the index, or the archive, gradually giving way to artificial environments of geological or even bodily formations.

NV: A couple of years ago, you created “View of Me,” a performance for the camera, and now this exhibition is entitled “View of Us.” There seems to be a shift to collectivity. How do these two cases relate to each other?

FP: Performance for the camera is recurrent in my practice. So far, I am the performer of minimal actions that either put me in some kind of contact with the natural element (e.g., “Stand” 2015) or others that focus on the interaction with my works, which is the case in “View of Me.” I regard this video as a key piece not only to the present exhibition but to my overall focus. When I explore and portray my own response to the natural surroundings, I am hoping to recreate a relatable human experience. So, this shift between Me and Us, far from revealing a change in thinking, it rather indicates that they may be used interchangeably, especially when it comes to (what I consider to be) our universal, fundamental right to experience nature in an unlimited, uninhibited way and access it with our senses.

NV: I’m naturally contrasting at the moment your physical characteristics being petite and fragile to the sculptures here, which are pretty heavy and rough. In a previous conversation with Constantinos Hadzinikolaou, you mentioned that the “scale and weight [of the works] indicate the limits of my abilities.” Could you elaborate on this?

FP: This means that I try to create things I can carry or at least move them around and work on them myself. Inevitably, I often need help with their transportation. However, whether a sculpture is big enough for me to walk on or such that I can lay it on me, their size is always in some rapport with my own. There is this sense of a one-to-one relationship, some kind of respectful confrontation, where I am often surprised to discover my limitations.

NV: I find it quite touching how you move around the exhibits. Your gestures reveal a caregiving relationship. What is your idea of care?

FP: This relationship begins in the making, where instead of bringing a sculpture to match a preconceived image, I set the guidelines for it to develop while I work and observe. Then, there is the handling of the works: no matter how big and rough they are, fragility is also one of their characteristics. At times it resembles a choreography, a slow one, where I have to hug and place them, also being careful not to overwork myself. I am not the most patient person, but I understand that caring means giving time in this instance.

NV: My favourite piece in this show is “View of Us — Soft Sculpture I.” The way you have sewn up the fabric reflects the perpetual shaping of the landscape. But, at the same time, it gives me sartorial vibes, so we return to the body. Could clothing bring a new direction to your research?

FP: I have been making these soft sculptures for some time now, and I enjoy exploring the properties of the fabric and its several possibilities as sculpture material. It is a compensation for the limits set by the hard materials I usually use. Softness is always relatable to the body and the pleasure of touch. Although I like to encounter a corporeal element in the volumes and the surfaces I create, I am not (yet) drawn to building directly on the human body.

NV: I’m trying to imagine your working space. Could you give me a glimpse of your studio?

FP: I share a studio with my partner and fellow artist, Giannis Cheimonakis. Although I enjoy my studio space very much, it may remain unused for large periods of time, while there are times when it resembles a construction site. There was this period while working for the show when the space had to be strictly divided into two zones: the messy, muddy, and dusty one and one impeccably clean, where I could work on the fabric pieces.

NV: Last summer, you spent some time on a residency program in Ios. It is exciting that there are more and more cultural initiatives in the Greek periphery. How was your experience of the local community accessing contemporary art?

FP: The residency in Ios was an initiative by Dimitris Foutris (also the curator of this show) and the association Save Ios. The objective was to foreground the natural environment of the island and raise awareness of the human intervention. In this first edition, I participated together with Dimitra Kondylatou and Orestis Mavroudis. Right before an intense tourist period, people were keen on meeting and assisting us, discovering our approaches to their own familiar place. Dimitra worked on a video based on her interaction with people that live and work in Ios, while Orestis’ work in the public space meant that the community, including the authorities, were involved in order to enable him.

What we gathered from this endeavour was the demand for continuity. People in peripheral communities are interested in strengthening the presence of contemporary art on a continuous basis rather than one-off events — and this is also the intention of Ios Art Residency. We met people preoccupied with the cultural profile of their community and fully aware of the importance of such initiatives for the cultivation of environmental and social sensitivity.

NV: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are also originally from a Cycladic island. What’s your connection with your homeland? Would you consider launching an art project there?

FP: That would be Syros. I am not from there originally, but I spent there my whole adolescence and go back to my family and friends as often as possible. On the other hand, many of my works do originate there. Interestingly enough, Syros is an important geological site, and of course, apart from that, it carries a rich history from the first prehistoric settlements to today. With Campus Novel artist group (I was a member until 2020), we worked on a site-specific workshop and group show that took place there, focusing on the lighthouse of 1834 on the islet facing the port of Hermoupolis.

Recently, environmental issues have arisen that have people, friends actively involved. As we can see, there are wider concerns across the Cyclades about the welfare of the unique ecosystem and the conservation of the landscape, along with worries about the rapid turn to a tourist-dependent economy and the societal change this inevitably brings about. To return to your question, I am personally preoccupied with all this, and naturally, it has been finding its way into my work. I am not settled yet on launching another project in Syros, but I would very much like among my next steps to be a show there, as a response to the place and the people I love and with whom I share such a common background.

Foteini Palpana (1984) is a visual artist and art educator living in Athens. She holds a BFA and MFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts with a scholarship by the Onassis Foundation, as well as a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Athens. She is a recipient of the 1st ARTWORKS SNF Artist Fellowship Program 2018–2019. Between 2011 and 2020, she was a member of the group Campus Novel, with artistic and curatorial activity. She has participated in artist-in-residence programs, and her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and project spaces in Greece and abroad. “View of Us” curated by Dimitris Foutris at Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Center, is her first solo show in an art gallery.

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.

What I am proposing to read Alkistis Mavrokefalou’s work is a curious short story of darkness and light. It is a story that begins with some of contemporary philosophy’s darkest and nihilistic lines about civilisation, western thought and even humanity as a whole brought to us by Emil Cioran. There is one specific passage from his “A short history of decay” which I want to go back to:

“What complicity, what bonds extend us into an intimacy with time? Life would be intolerable without the forces that deny it.”

(Emil Cioran, “Certain Mornings” in A short history of decay, 1949)

To approach the writing and thought of Cioran today, an age in which even during a global epidemic we cannot rid ourselves of a fundamental ideology of optimism, is not easy but possibly so ever more necessary. And neither is it always comfortable to talk about death, decay, and the inevitable withering of our bodies. The latter akin to a deadly sin in a society still very much focused on glorifying an ideal and perfection. Now that the theme of the story is set, let’s look further into Mavrokefalou’s works to understand how approaching such themes today may be a generative and reassuring space for a delicate and yet sober reflection on time and its passing.

What first struck me in the encounter with Mavrokefalou’s work was the lightness and filigree appearance of her works, almost imperceptible in a room otherwise filled with the many strong statements by other artists that asked, almost demanded attention by the viewers. It was however clear that that delicacy was not a sign of someone afraid to raise their voice but rather of someone, convinced by their own subject that poetry was the only possible language to talk about such a dense and critical subject. I left the room thinking, hoping I dare say, that the person behind them was not only aware of the importance of such gesture but also driven to a methodical and thorough research on the subject. Our conversation not only confirmed this but gave me a beautiful insight into the genesis of her interests. The work I had seen, and I later found out being part of a much larger research, was composed of miniscule elements of organic material, exoskeletons of various insects, composed through “invisible” threads suspending them both space and in time. Born over many years of gathering of cicadas, bees and other insects’ bodies, her work is not only a celebration of life and death as a cyclical process, but also an ode to specific memories crystalised in the decaying material. Specifically, one linked to the place in which most of these were gathered, an old family home in the countryside, and by extension of the people who inhabited it.

By now both subjects, darkness and light, appear clear to all readers. What happens next in the story though is what makes this special and extremely relevant in these times. At first the two might appear antithetical, on the one hand the dark nihilistic thought of a philosopher that lived through the bleakest moments of the XX century and the lightness of a romantic memory brought to us by an artist. What is indeed true is that these two fuse together in what emerges as a reassuring reflection about our own time, our own limits both physical and of thought. Mavrokefalou’s research, founded on a profound interest in biology and anatomy developed while studying in Oxford, brings about works which embrace memories in their fragility and at the same time, by using bodies which through their decay would join the natural cycle of creation and destruction, are a reassuring reminder of the fact that all things, life included, are merely a glimpse. Now you may argue, that Cioran would have argued that all life is unimportant anyways, and thus also the memories Mavrokefalou so crucially links to her works. But this exactly is the touching point between these two reflections on decay and death. Both deal with the subject and seem to be utterly aware of the limits this thought brings, but in both, we also find a reassuring reason to live, be it only the expectation of the passing of this state.

There is a final element in Mavrokefalou’s work which helps to bring this tale to its balanced conclusion between darkness and light, and it comes from a possibly somehow unexpected yet comfortingly rational field: geometry. Most of her structures are indeed composed through carefully thought geometrical patterns, sometimes borrowing from other elements such as organs, others creating repeating and reflecting rhythms. This element is possibly the key for our appreciation of the works, as it allows our minds to follow the thought and actions of Mavrokefalou beyond the individual elements of her installations; possibly also making sense of the overall reflection on life she approaches. Far from resembling the kind of ideal of beauty and inherently young bodies we are fed by media and advertisement, these ideal abstract forms turn her works into meditative spaces in which the darkness of decay can meet the light of relief of its consideration.

The product of these encounters are works in which the melancholy for a past memory and its impossibility of return give us a reassuring sense of the ephemerality of life. A beautiful coming together of Mavrokefalou’s lightness and the darkness with which we opened this text.

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.

Picture yourself standing alone on the highest point of an island. In every direction you look, the land runs underneath your gaze. It may be bare in places, there may be trees, roads, buildings, terracing, walls, farms, hotels, beaches — but, at some point, everything falls away and ends at the sea. If the island is small enough, you will be able to see its limits in every direction you turn. Your separation is unavoidable: the word “insular” derives from insula, the Latin word for island. Still, if you are lucky, other forms are visible in the distance. No need to despair then: close by, you have neighbours, new people to meet, other lands to explore. As solitary as you might feel standing on these heights, there is the comfort that your island is part of something bigger: an archipelago.

There is no way to understand Kyriaki Goni’s work without the concept of the archipelago. More than a cluster of islands, it is a community — a carefully balanced collection of individualities that each retain their sense of separation and independence. A confederation of singularities. The clear inspiration for Kyriaki, in this regard, are Greece’s approximately 6,000 islands. Indeed, for the seafaring ancient Greeks, the water separating their islands was neither empty space nor a barrier, but an interconnected web of swift roads and fertile feeding grounds.

Kyriaki tells me she spent every summer (“beginning at age 0”) traveling across the Aegean archipelago. As a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on the relationship between humanity and technology, for Kyriaki, the idea of the archipelago has a contemporary analog: the network. While popular techno-discourse pushes us to feel ever-more connected (to make more and more “friends”), Kyriaki’s vision of a network aims to retain the individual within the larger group. Even her most up-to-date work flows back and forth through time: an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) overlaid with the ancient geological structures of the Aegean islands; a 19th-century astronomer converses with a machine learning algorithm.

But before ranging too far afield, let’s begin with the single point at the center of this particular assemblage: Kyriaki herself. Born in Athens, Kyriaki was educated at the city’s German school (to the extent that she calls German a “second mother tongue”). Trained first in anthropology, in Greece and then the Netherlands, she eventually returned to settle in Greece. Kyriaki, though influenced by her research-based training, is definitively an artist. She tells me, “The starting point of my works are very emotional. It’s not a research curiosity that drives me but an ‘emotional trigger.’ My topics are ones that I’m moved by as a person, as a human being, living right now; not as a ‘researcher.’ For example, my recent works have focused on observing technology and how it’s connected to society. I want to understand how these processes affect me, and then how they are shaping the way we all live, perceive, and express our emotions.”

But, I ask her, with the growing popularity of research-based artistic practice, she must draw on her anthropological studies to some degree? She resists: “My creative process is never strictly linear. Throughout my preparation, I feel myself falling into a black hole: I become overinformed, I’m in chaos. Eventually, this becomes a period of digestion; eventually, something starts to take shape. It’s not a predictable process, but neither is it driven by luck. Inevitably, my feelings, my observations, and yes, my research, start to form structures which organize my thinking. Still, I am uneasy when people present their artistic process as overly ‘research-oriented.’ Methodologies and rigor are fine but we shouldn’t, as artists, lose our freedom. Creativity and openness are the most important traits we have.”

To drive home her point, she draws one more contrast: “I feel certain that the artistic process cannot be quantified. Yes, there are specific times of day when I’m ‘working’ — that is, consciously thinking and gathering material. But I don’t have an 8-hour schedule; it never stops. Ideas and solutions pop up throughout the day (and the night!), especially when I’m not in the studio. I believe you must put your brain, your body, and your soul into the artistic process — you must expose yourself fully to the questions you’re having. There is never truly a pause; a part of my mind is always dedicated to these questions.”

Going beyond Kyriaki’s internal processes, we discuss how these complex tangles of emotions and research find concrete expression. Take a recent project, Networks of Trust, motivated by an opposition to how world’s largest corporations (Facebook, Google, et. al) are profiting from our memories and feelings. To explore this vast subject, Kyriaki produced a multi-faceted work, consisting of a media installation, drawings, an audio manifesto, and a trove of digital material that can only be accessed when viewers are in proximity with one of three nodes that make up her alternative “network of trust.” Thus, like a pilgrim from days gone by, Kyriaki asks us to travel to one of the trio of nodes (on Tilos; in her studio in Athens; and a nomadic one which pops up wherever the project is exhibited) to experience the work. Through her demand, the universal ease and convenience promised by today’s start-up culture is confronted with an old-fashioned idea of locality, the topos.

Such a sense of place is essential for Kyriaki, since from this groundedness, she can emphasize the idea of collectivity. She says, “It’s important for me to cultivate a collective narration at the bridge between ancient oral traditions and contemporary internet culture. For example, in another project, Aegean Datahavens, I imagine places where our data could be stored and protected, not exploited. These havens would be powered by the sun and cooled by the Mediterranean water. They would be owned through a cooperation of the islands that housed them. They would mirror the way in which memory has always been preserved amongst islanders, as a shared effort.”

Across her works, elegant syntheses of disparate artistic materials help her imagine futuristic possibilities built on past relationships — a return to old ways, but with a difference. Indeed, Networks of Trust, Aegean Datahavens, or any of her projects really, are telling of the way that Kyriaki asks us to question our relationship to technology. She is no Luddite, she does not want to smash the machines. She expertly utilizes P2P and IPFS technologies. But she also wants us to be reminded of other ways of thinking, remembering, relating, and looking. She reveals how the newest, must-have technologies insist on making us forget that we ever lived otherwise.

But she is never didactic, nor patronizing. Rather, Kyriaki’s works reveal themselves gradually; they demand time and listening. She admits, “They are highly complicated. I can’t escape this. They ask for your sustained attention and engagement.” Two things that in our contemporary media environment are often in short supply — which is exactly why such slow work is invaluable today.

The subtlety of Kyriaki’s message may be difficult to grasp for overtaxed adults, but she is gratified with her work with children. In a series of workshops, with titles like, “Do Robots Dream, Mom? Are Robots Afraid, Dad?”, Kyriaki commits time and energy to working through these same topics with the next generation. She is consistently amazed by their flexibility and creativity. For example, a group of children asked to invent their own “Aegean Datahavens” came up with refreshingly original solutions. Meanwhile, in another workshop focused on our relationship to technology, an unaccompanied Syrian refugee child living in Athens spoke about the importance of Messenger for keeping in touch with his distant family. Moments like these help broaden Kyriaki’s perspective. Our contemporary society has countless tech evangelists and a small but vocal chorus of critics. Rarer, though, are those who ask us to be more thoughtful with our machines while connecting their functions to ancient practices of connection and communication.

Kyriaki has another motivation for running her workshops: countering the feeling that people on the periphery have of always being behind. Especially when her work began to focus on technology, she became worried herself about not having access to the latest advances and developments. Even as someone with the fortune of access to a good education, experiences abroad, and the ability to travel, she regretted her remoteness. She didn’t want young people in Greece to have the same fear.

Lately, though, she has begun to see her surroundings in a more positive light. After all, it is the particularities of Greece that have informed her belief in other, older kinds of networks. And anyways, she adds, “People on the periphery are closer to each other.” She then goes on, “Being on the periphery has its problems but it can also be fruitful. You have the space to take a different approach. I feel like I have an off space quality, one that allows me to draw on local and personal experiences to have a more balanced perspective. These days, I don’t feel like I’m chasing after the latest thing. Instead, by being in the periphery, I feel a desire to support other people who are with me on the edge.”

As we conclude our conversation, we turn once more towards the future. While the periphery has often been defined from the outside as that which is behind, away from the center and its cutting-edge developments, Kyriaki points out that the edge also lies at the frontier and the avant-garde. She says, “While preparing my presentation for Transmediale on Networks of Trust, I came across something from a writer about the concept of the periphery. He said that we, on the international periphery, have the destiny to be the first to meet the future. For example, the peripheries have already been the first areas to face the effects of climate change. This is frightening but also inspiring. Who knows what will come out of the periphery next?”

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.

The trolley bus is taking me to Stefania Orfanidou’s studio in Pagrati, the region of Athens where I grew up and moved from years ago. I know that sense that the day is over when the trolley bus turns right after Kallimarmaron stadium — the sound of the machine as it switches lines, resembling that of a deep, long breath. I think of Rena Papaspyrou, Stefania’s neighbor, an iconic Greek artist, who said to me once that “nostalgia is nonsense”. The recollection of these words comforts me, because it really is nonsense. I’m standing in front of the building where Orfanidou lives and works, among the square and the cafes, and I know, that sense of familiarity is not derived from a nostalgic emotion and -let’s admit it- the illusion of ownership that comes along with it. Right there, on that piece of public space I’m sensing instants of a past life escaping to the present and that transgression is by itself, one charming and uncanny connection with my surroundings, here, now.

Stefania is expecting me in a bright spacious dining room, with its furniture and objects carefully put in place. Beside a gracefully organized workstation, a sleek surface of a dining table accommodates a few of her self-published books: Pendulum, Cold Turkey, Jaguar Sun. Later, she would admit to me that this neat surface was rather busy a few minutes before I arrived. There, on the table and up until the clean empty wall surface of its background, dozens of her printed photographs had been spread over. It is a ritual she performs regularly: she selects a group of printed images and disperses them, she arranges and re-arranges them to discover well-hidden narratives, unconscious linearities that inhabited her lens when these stills had been captured. During this ephemeral display, it is not unusual for her to discover affinities of her more recent images with earlier projects, and in that case, she won’t hesitate to archive them back in the series where they belong. The process is indulging, it enhances her concentration, it allows her to observe strange kinships and contradictions among her images, and ultimately, it endorses her to imagine spaces, as immensely broad this term can be. In fact, when one attempts to delve into Orfanidou’s artistic and professional journey up until today, they come across with the infinite methods one can employ to serve the studies of space.

Stefania Orfanidou studied Architecture at the Polytechnic School of Thessaloniki. Until then, her childhood was shared between Chania, Crete and Kavala — all coastal cities, with a rich cosmopolitan history and evident urban traces of a multitude of cultures, ethnic and religious communities they have inhabited them over the centuries. In Thessaloniki, Stefania joined the student’s Photography Club and along with her studies, she started taking analogue pictures of her everyday life in the city. A few years later, she returned from the faculty’s trip in Tokyo with her first dummy of a photobook. A little after that, she spent a semester in the Photography School in Complutense University of Madrid and that time, she came back with the commitment to register at Stereosis School of Photography. Her visit in L’ Aquila resulted Pendulum, a book she has been working on for four years and one of her most personal works. From Berlin, she came back with the photos that composed Unseen, her 6-copy self-publication that was part of her thesis for the PARA-Poesis Post Graduate Program of the University of Thessaly. Today, Stefania Orfanidou is working as an architect and a photographer, residing in Athens permanently for the first time, and she already has at least three open project files, she feeds with new photos every day.

What occurs to her in those cities? During her studies, each change of location, each travel was an incident that unfolded another chapter of her career as an artist. Today, she avidly extracts material from the cities she inhabits, as well as from her regular excursions away from them. Orfanidou works in such a systematic and conscious way, it is impossible for me to think that she is simply amazed by the impressions from the urban and natural landscape, nor by the life and the character of the various urban and natural environments she finds herself into. Her academic and professional occupation with architecture has evidently provided her the means to get over such clichés. Stefania is blown away by her actual subjects, in the most cinematic way. In Cold Turkey, her body of work with photos taken between 2015 and 2018, a pair of bare feet is floating over our sight, cutting in half a building and a sky of cement. Next take: windows in order, each one covered -or blindfolded- by white sheets. Take three: afternoon at the beach, the figure of a girl in the center of the composition, her back covered in a towel resembling a golden cloak. The photographer drives our gaze towards the subjects, that may be human or non-human forms, objects or architectural elements that, quoting Barthes, “rise from the scene” and stand as “sensitive points and wounds”. Cold Turkey is slang for the sudden abstinence from a substance by an addict.

In Orfanidou’s works living and nonliving elements become storytellers, protagonists in a greater narrative where the lines between space and experience are undistinguishable. As active agents of the emotional or even the mythical, her subjects candidly traverse the layers she meticulously recognizes in the notion of space and visually brings to our notice. In her ongoing project Profanation Exercises, faces, details, material and human bodies, banal objects, intensely present in their own conjunction of time and space, form keyholes from where one can spy on a broader, surreal narrative. Her frames, motionless, yet intense and unquestionably pulsing, come from the domestic, the natural and the public realm, nonetheless, familiarity is equally prevailing in all of them. In Orfanidou’s work “inhabited space transcends geometrical space” as with her lens she follows -discreetly, yet daringly- lived experience, that is after all, what actually transforms our surroundings. In the same series, she might capture a snake-like path in a valley, a plaster statuette forgotten in a backyard, a loved one’s face under the sun. At the same time, the light she chooses to photograph in (afternoon hours, mostly), her gesture, her gaze, all address a unified environment, one that life has marked forever.

The city of L’Aquila in central Italy is one of these environments. There, the artist came to heal with a narrative of two ruptures, a personal and a collective, two major events: L’Aquila is the city where her parents met, and an area severely hit by a catastrophic earthquake more recently. Orfanidou went there to contribute as an architect to the restoration of the city and brought back with her a body of work that constituted her self-published book Pendulum. Within her images, the artist narrates the city’s wounds with gentle affection, reflecting in awe the collective trauma, as this is traced in space, in parallel with the rupturing point of time that signifies the beginning of one’s own existence. The remnants of human motion, the emptiness, the absence, her vague fragmental memories tell a profoundly human and timeless tale.

These nuances of memory that hide below a pile of stones, on a feather stuck on a wooden electricity column, under the tanned skin of someone we love, are also in the core of her ongoing project Cache. Stefania is using as a title this technological term, referring to the “hidden” data storage, to continue her research on the narratives that quietly inhabit the surface of physical reality. As she is out in the city and its outskirts, collecting material to complete the project, she envisions Cache in its final version occupying space itself. I am thinking that this would be inevitable, as her editions already consist 3D environments and I can already imagine how smoothly a viewer could immerse into her work in three dimensions, as naturally as visiting another unknown, yet familiar place.

Stefania Orfanidou was born in 1989. She is a photographer and an architect currently living and working in Athens and Chania, Greece. In 2019 she founded the architecture studio Chora Atelier, that integrates research, architecture and supervision, construction, interior and furniture design, books’ editing and scenography. In February 2019 she published the book Pendulum, a visual recounting of a return journey to the city of L’Aquila in Italy. In 2020 she received the SNF Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. In 2021 she published the book Cold Turkey that deals with the multiple levels of addiction, the relationship of dependence and mourning, the path to redemption. The same year she co-curated and participated in the art installation Daedala at Yiali Tzami, Chania, Crete. In 2022 she was nominated by VOID to join FUTURES European platform of contemporary photography. In her work, a personal experience or event, real or imaginary, is the starting point for fragments’ stitching and the composition of tales, where the irrational, the reasonable, the uncanny and the secret may coexist harmoniously. Her photographic work has been featured in magazines, galleries and festivals in Greece and abroad. Her work belongs to public and private collections.

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.

¹ Talking Heads, Heaven, 1979, from album Fear of Music

² Barthes, R. (1993) Camera Lucida (R. Howard, Trans.), Vintage Classics

³ Bachelard, G. (2014) The Poetics of Space, London, England, Penguin Classics.

In a text until recently largely forgotten by critics and historians one of the fathers of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with a light-hearted tone be it undeniably imbued with sexist and misogynist remarks, describes in under two hundred pages the art of seduction, for the ideal futurist. The short pamphlet “Come si seducono le donne” [How to seduce women, translation by the author][1] serves as a mirror to glimpse at the evolution of one of the main characters behind the futurist movement who, just a few years prior in the Futurist Manifesto (point 9) had clearly stated a “scorn for woman”. While certainly women are still considered “secondary” the text also leaves room for a “new feminine” to emerge like in the following passage:

Consider a woman like a sister of the sea, of the wind, of the clouds, of electrical batteries, of tigers, of sheep, of geese, of carpets, of sails […] They think, desire, work; they too prepare the new intellectual progress of humanity.

“Come si seducono le donne” F. T. Marinetti, p. 144 (Translation by the author)

Although there are no documents to historically prove this, it is likely that the shift is also a consequence of the emergence within the French and later international Futurism of a figure which will have a great influence on the movement with her unconventional life and positions: Valentine de Saint Point. Born in Lyon in 1875, de Saint Point was a descendant of a notable bourgeois family who since early years moved in literary circles eventually rising to international fame with her “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” and “Futurist Manifesto of Lust”.

Valentine, as Maria Sideri affectionately and intimately referred to De Saint Point throughout our recent conversation, who over the years has been described as an artist, activist, journalist, art critic and perhaps spy, is more than just an inspiration and reference to Sideri’s work and approach to artistic practice. And no doubt, the complexity of the character makes it easy to believe that, once one engages and dives into her life, it can easily become a life’s work to narrate her oeuvre. In Sideri’s case though, what becomes clear throughout our conversation is that Valentine is not the mere object of a research, she has become over years of research a life companion, confidant and inspiration. What began as a breadcrumb trail of documents spread in archives in France, Italy and Egypt guided not only the research but life itself of Sideri who, in this journey developed a practice based an idea of the archive that moves away from a patriarchal vision of a space of power, becoming instead a lived substance, a medium itself which she weaves into a rich and multifaceted texture.

While in Sideri’s early works such as the Vibrant Matter — The Métachorie, presented as a performance and installation among others during the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale in 2013 the influence of de Saint Point is still very direct and obvious. Their relationship starts to complexify through her series “It comes in waves”, formally part of the same body of work. The three-part publication (2014–2015) unfolds a dialogue between Sideri and Valentine over “their” understanding of feminism, desire, lust, performance/dance among others which, observing the overall practice of Sideri can almost be considered her own manifesto be it written in dialogic form. Through these short pamphlets containing fictional dialogues between Sideri and the French intellectual, historical documents and texts commissioned for the occasion to other researchers and poets we come in touch with a radical view of feminism that moves away from a mere political opposition to patriarchy in an attempt to break free of a sterile dichotomy; we are guided, at hand of historical accounts, through the Arab liberation fight against the colonial rule in Syria and Egypt and the parallel women emancipation movements in the region.

Moving forward to a more recent work of Sideri to understand how these influences and approaches form the basis of her current practice unfolding at the touching point between anthropological research and performative practice. Invited by In Situ (http://in-situ.info/), a European platform for artistic creations in public space active since 2003, to participate in the series “Artistic Acupuncture Missions” a project coordinated by Lieux Publics Sideri was given the opportunity to develop a project in Marseilles between 2018 and late 2019. Titled “Assemblages” her contribution to Acupuncture develops in the tradition of flaneurism to reflect on the space of women in public space in Marseille. She does so not only using her own perspective but gathering a dense network of individuals and associations dealing on a daily basis with these issues to multiply the lenses through which she’s observing the city. These external helpers and contributors include women’s collectives, sociologists, students, social workers and public officials.

The project brings her to confront structural elements such as urban design, often determined exclusively by a male gaze, social networks that come to facilitate or hinder the feeling of a shared and inclusive space and city policies that, in the name of safety and/or public decor exacerbate the creation of zones of exclusion. Her intervention, which she defines as an Assemblages, is composed by three phases and aims ultimately at the staging of a performative representation of all the difficulties as well as the proposed strategies to render the space of the Southern French city more inclusive.

The first phase aims at the gathering of data about strategies through which women navigate the city in their daily lives. In the second these information are re-assembled into a utopic representation of the city with the help of a graphic designer and turned into light-boxes used to illuminate dark and unsafe street spaces. The third and final phase brought together all the participating women in an attempt to draft a manifesto of women in public space. This would however not only take the form of a written document but also of a public performance taking place in the very spaces identified by the participants as an act of reclaiming the streets by the same women who feel excluded or intimidated. Due to the limitation imposed by the Covid19 pandemic the project could not be realised in full with parts of it being shifted online and others changed from their original format to find a way to maintain their presence in the physical space of the city.

At first seemingly distant from the world of Valentine, this project I believe makes clear that the intimate relationship developed between Sideri and de Saint Point makes follow her strategies and interests much more than her historical figure as such. The ghost of Valentine is present as a reassuring figure to turn to in order to gain the courage to tackle through her practice the issues Sideri feels are still holding women and feminist struggle back in regard to self-realisation, decolonisation and emancipation, much in the same way that de Saint Point did in France, Syria or Egypt almost a century ago.

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.

[1] Originally published in 1917 and recently republished by Rizzoli, Italy.

On the Cycladic island of Paros, Giorgos Palamaris tells me, there is a historic Byzantine church. At first glance, the structure appears unremarkable — but he believes that in this humble building, we can have a telling glimpse of Greek history.

He begins by describing how the church was constructed: an assemblage from a wide variety of material and architectural styles, a living cross-section that spans thousands of years. At its base, the foundations of earlier structures can be dimly made out, hinting at other, now-lost functions. On the surface, humble stone and wood mix with marble recycled from ancient temples, the past lending its weight to contemporary forms. As a professionally trained marble sculptor, as well as a frequent aide on archaeological sites (and even, an occasional house builder), Giorgos has a perceptive eye for such details of the built environment.

But for Giorgos, the real interest lies not in the church itself but for how this single place speaks to a much larger issue. Namely, how Greece needs to embrace its underlying reality as a chaotic mix of influences, peoples, languages, and periods. He goes on, “The Greeks have built so much of their identity on a glorious, and highly limited, view of the past: white marble here, Byzantine icons there, the modern state over there. We mustn’t clean up our history and purify it. It’s both racist and inaccurate. We have too often scrubbed away our ambiguities and preferred to force things into neat grids, like carefully laid-out archaeological sites.”

Slowly, Giorgos believes, archaeology has begun to adopt a different vision than the one it held in the past. After years of frustration with the discipline’s insistence on clear-cut divisions, he sees it demonstrating an interest in more ambiguous conclusions. But regardless of this shift, Giorgos is not confined to the field. Archaeological sites have offered Giorgos much more than a job: they have been formative to his art and his life, and allowed him to spend the past several years traveling between the islands of Delos and Despotiko. But ultimately, his identity lies elsewhere. He tells me, “This is why I feel so lucky to be an artist — to be able to look in a more open manner. I can take inspiration and poetic feeling from what I experience, and not feel the need to adhere to strict boundaries or scientific delineations.”

In his work as an artist, Giorgos wants to further blur these lines. While he strongly believes that we must be close to our past and live within it, he rejects a frozen glorification. Rather, through his work, he aims to create a dynamic relationship between past and present, to cultivate a thoughtful, ethical respect for history that also gives space to people living today. He summarizes, “We each have to learn how to make the past our own and find our own way to co-exist with it. Greece, with its rich heritage, has an opportunity to show the world how this can be done. Here, we have a flexibility and an openness to improvisation that many find maddening. But maybe these qualities can be used to help us reimagine old truths in new ways.”

Giorgos grew up in Pallini, a suburb of Athens. His father and grandfather had always worked with their hands, as builders, and thus Giorgos grew up as a child of construction, amidst the smell of churning cement and building materials. The family trade was no accident — the extended Palamaris clan hail from Tinos, one of a number of clustered Cycladic islands famous for their marble quarries and craftsmen. At the age of 19, Giorgos felt the desire to get closer to his roots and so he abandoned the city of Patras, where he had begun his studies, and moved to Tinos. There, he began his artistic training in the island’s School of Fine Art, which specializes in marble. He learned all the technical skills he would need to work with the material, to become a professional sculptor. But at the end of these studies, he felt the need to keep going.

The following year, he won a scholarship to study at the Fine Art School in Athens. The school pushed Giorgos to engage with sculpture as more than a craft, but as a multi-dimensional means of expression. He also began experimenting with installations, stage design, and a wide range of materials. Even more importantly, in Athens, Giorgos found a creative community. For five years, he shared a small studio space with three other friends. Their collaborations and their discussions further opened his eyes. The group offered Giorgos visual, intellectual, professional stimulation. He told me, “My friends have been my biggest inspiration; exchange with them my greatest teacher.”

Within this encouraging environment, Giorgos found himself at a crossroads. Growing up, he had never been interested in the way history was taught in schools. At the same time, he found himself continuously attracted to working with ruins and old objects. But the relationship between the two remained ambivalent. He recalls, with a smile, how he often used to think to himself when he was younger, “The center of Athens is so boring: why don’t they destroy the Acropolis and build something new there?”

Over the course of his time in art school, he steadily began to appreciate more the importance of culture. History, and then art history specifically, became his magnetic pole. He realized that his connection to the past came not from textbooks and ideas but from space and the material themselves. And so, in need of a way to support himself, Giorgos began working on archaeological sites. With this, a new world opened up: he felt like he was having a magical experience with the ancients. But he particularly marveled at how the past co-mingled with the present. He told me, “I can clearly remember a moment when I was working in Despotiko, reconstructing an archaic temple. I was having a break, making an Italian blend coffee on the box of a Chinese generator, between plastic bags full of fragments from the Geometric period. This overlaying of chronologies and cultures electrified me. Whereas an archaeological purist might resent this intermingling, as an artist, I was filled with wonder.”

From this story, we can clearly make out Giorgos’ philosophy when it comes to the past: open, vital, and alive. To further his point, he tells me about a site he worked on in Antiparos. There, a local shepherd had built a manger for his herd on top of what remained of an ancient temple to Apollo. Once the archaeologists came in, they fenced off the area entirely, making it inaccessible to the public. Of course, Giorgos recognized that heritage has to be protected and can’t just be used willy-nilly for livestock. On the other hand, overprotection results in making history even more remote, untouchable, and disconnected from our lives. As Giorgos says, “The essence of the problem is that of complete enclosure. Instead, we need to create a bond between ourselves and the past. By creating such airtight separations, this relationship never forms. In Greece, there are some ancient sites that are totally fenced-off from the public — but then are not well upkept. This is the worst. Because these sites are invisible to us, they are left to further ruin.”

What, I asked him, was an example of a more successful balance between preserving the past and meeting the needs of the present? When not staffed on archaeological projects, Palamaris also works periodically with a company that repairs and restores historic houses. The firm is committed to working on a slow, human scale. They avoid discarding material and do everything they can to find ways to give the existing structures new life. They aim to preserve the past not just for its own sake, but to provide a livable home for the current owners. A philosophy perfectly in line with how Giorgos wants to work with the past, in the present.

As another example, take the sculpture Giorgos made for the ARTWORKS exhibition, Mr. Ruin (Waiting for Hestia). When I first saw the work, it looked to me like nothing more than an unloved pile of rubble on a faded armchair. After talking to Giorgos, the sculpture became the perfect expression of his view on how we can relate to the past more ethically. The discarded material came from derelict interwar houses scattered around Athens — a cityscape long blighted by disused, abandoned structures, but which tragically are some of its most beautiful buildings. Though Giorgos can’t restore each of these houses himself, his artwork places this overlooked rubble in a venue for greater appreciation, giving it another life. It pushes us to reconsider how we move through the city and what could be done to bring its past and present into greater harmony. The fact that Giorgos carries out such work both on archaeological sites and people’s homes in parallel with his art practice is a testament to how deeply this belief guides him.

Mr. Ruin reveals one other important tenet of Giorgos’ perspective: his desire to make the art world more down to earth. With his broad smile, shoulder-length hair, and brimming beard, Giorgos brings something refreshingly humble to the too-often rarefied and disconnected world of contemporary art. Much as history must avoid becoming too separate from our current reality, art faces the same danger. Giorgos, in his work and his way of life, embodies ways to bridge such gaps.

To close, he tells me a story about the day the art-moving company came to transport his sculpture to the Niarchos Foundation in time for the ARTWORKS exhibition. When they came into his studio and saw the pile of rubble sitting on a chair, they told him there was no point in moving this pile of junk — couldn’t he just find some rubble closer to the exhibition space and haul it over himself? At first he joined in their laughter, but he also saw an opportunity. Convincing someone to engage with your ideas in a cultural institution is easy; reaching the wider public is where the real work begins. He explained to them what his sculpture meant and how he had gathered it. The movers grew interested; as their attention sharpened, the old tiles and cracked bricks were no longer being passed over and ignored. Bit by bit, thanks to Giorgos’ loving hand and infectious passion, they began to see things from his perspective, with newly appreciative eyes.

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.

An online correspondence between Ioanna Gerakidi and Iria Vrettou, tracing Vrettou’s artistic practice as a vessel for thinking across the limits of the real, the potentials of the imaginary and the pleasure of the habitual, for becoming with monsters, animals, nymphs and other deities.

Ioanna Gerakidi (IG)
A poem

ceremonies rituals broken
legs wide open
allowing for others to come in
or out
to become

fragments monster animals
having more than one
head licking each others
wounds kissing
their darkness their light
where eternity is
real the ephemeral
is always

speculative

when movement is the only
entrance to silence
skin shows when covered
in blood colors clothes
history

when angels are born the water

flows naked when demons

die the earth grieves her cries

turn fire into love her scars

melt the human
psyches into laughter and affect
blues and bruises
of lives lived in parallel
in synch.

Iria Vrettou (IV)

IG

I’ve been reading a text of Raquel Gutierez, on the work of Wu Chang, it starts by them quoting the words of José Esteban Muñoz: “Communal mourning, by its very nature, is an immensely complicated text to read, for we do not mourn just one lost object or other, but we also mourn as a ‘whole’-or put another way, as a contingent and temporary collection of fragments that is experiencing a loss of its parts”. Muñoz’s words echo, in my ears, a cathartic scheme embodied in your practice; a paradoxical mourning arising from what you call “ephemeral border”, when referring to finding new forms of kinship, togetherness, love in between “water and land”, “individual and collective”, “solid centers and liquid peripheries”. And the reason why I think of this perpetual process as a mourning one, is because it comes with a perpetual separation from the self, in order to find and “touch” the other, a perpetual separation from “land” in order to find safety, or that which has never been explored, a perpetual separation from staticness, solidity, linearity in order to “grow bigger”, to quote the words of Kathy Acker. Within these endlessly transforming ways of being and producing and growing, are you ever scared? Have you ever been attracted by the pleasure and comfort of the habitual?

IV

I am scared. I think this ‘thrill’ of transforming, shifting, changing must include feeling scared. Forms of life are always shared — both collective & singular and in that, there is a responsibility.

I see producing as translating sometimes, and through that, new forms of language arise. There was this lecture of the philosopher Steven Shaviro, where he said something like “to imagine a language means to imagine a new form of life”, and then he continued with what Latour calls ‘a proliferation of hybrids’. To me, forms of life stretch everywhere, they do not respect the borders between entities, they have fuzzy outlines and resist definition. So, in this translation sometimes I am scared; in this exact responsibility I feel towards the real, the imaginary and the in between. What is being gained, and what is being lost in the process. And in this process I find comfort, also, and pleasure of the habitual. Creating worlds of hybrids and hybrids of worlds is an escape and something very familiar to me. It is hopeful.

IG

I’m thinking of your “Volcanic Identity”, for which again you engage with transformations, when you write about their power to “regenerate”. I googled the etymology of the word volcano, and realized that it was named after the Roman God of fire, “Vulcan”. And it’s interesting, because fire to me, is not only the most transformative element, but also -at least symbolically or mythologically- a tool and a mechanism to reach empowerment, demand agency, fight for existence, resist. It’s a vessel through which you can break hierarchies, protect your rights, desires and needs. In that sense, with your project “Volcanic Identity”, it’s not only demons, and nymphs, and all kind of deities that speak, shout, or shriek their voices, but also us, women, outcasts, marginalized, dismissed human, non-human, or as you say “more-than-human” beings.

IV

Absolutely. Volcanic Identity is queer identity. Queer, in the sense of resistance, metamorphosis, active participation, remapping, revisiting, recharging, cultivating, birthing, of a radical empathy and I can keep going. It’s an identity that helps me understand different states & concepts but also the realities around me. Volcanic is femme. And femme is a way of thinking for me. One which reclaims power, reclaims nurture, reclaims love, reclaims anger. Volcanic witchcraft.

Recently I’ve been having more and more dreams about volcanoes. And there is always a very familiar face involved. It is usually my mother, somewhere close by, closer to the crater than me.

And even though the Volcano erupts, and there is lava, and smoke, the dream is never angry, nor scary, nor sad. It is reassuring, it is a feeling of tiptoeing around a shift/a change/a leap. The more I dream of volcanoes, the more I speak to them and they speak to me.

IG

I read elsewhere that you speak of your works as portals. And I remembered you mom telling me once something about portals as inductions to things unknown and therefore as something that has to be tender in its abruption, comforting in its scary quality. I’m sure I paraphrased her words, but it’s interesting, because even though your practice uses various media, your (or your creatures’) presence allows for this exact inclusivity, stroke, affect required when entering an altering state.

IV

Dancing for me is a way to portal. Another one is dreaming. To either be a portal or go through one. And portals in themselves are a neverending in-between.

An ever-shifting feeling, which blends, absorbs and births new entities and moments;

Recentering with no center
Rebalancing without balance
Caressing the vicious
Wilding the tender
Becoming extremophilic.

Teeth and limbs and multiple tails.

Eyes and eyelids and tongues speaking

speaking in tongues

haunting in tongues
mumbling lava
mumbling compost
Portals of love
Profoundly in love.
Profoundly teratomorpho

IG

There is this exercise I ask from my students to do in advance of our first meeting, where I encourage them to send me their alternative short bio. And by alternative, I mean, writing about loves and rejections, past fears and future hopes, unrequited or fulfilled desires, astrology, candles, psalms or prayers, dances, walks or any other schemes meaning something to you.

IV

Dream sharing is something I’m hoping to practice more. It structures my thinking and renders my everyday experience. And I dream a lot. A scheme of dreaming? That could be a part of my short bio. This and making my favorite pasta dish. Cherry tomatoes, feta, caramelized with garlic. It’s a process of healing and comfort. The definition of the habitual for me.

Iria Vrettou is an artist, born in 1995 and based in Athens. She holds a Diploma in Animation from University of the Arts London and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice-Moving Image from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work is primarily focused on concepts and modes of hybridity as methods of research and practice, whilst addressing aspects of hand-drawn animation, performance and installation in relation to their conceptual, eco-queer functions. Her practice critically examines the function of the ‘screen’ in the context of cultural production and political processes, and explores the creation of art works that can work as disquieting, complete spatiotemporal experiences. Within this framework, in the last couple of years she has developed a keen interest in the real and symbolic life of volcanoes. She has participated in various art projects in Athens, London, Seoul and others. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021). She was a resident of International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City (2022).

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, poetic and archival studies and schemes. She has collaborated with and curated exhibitions and events for various institutions and galleries and residencies and her texts and poems have appeared in international platforms, magazines and publications. She has lectured or led workshops, seminars and talks for academies and research programs across Europe. Her practice and exhibitions have been awarded by institutions, such as Rupert Residency, Mondriaan Fonds, Outset and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS, amongst others.

As most interactions these days, the conversation between Maria Mavropoulou and myself about her practice happened virtually. Nothing out of the ordinary in these times you may rightfully argue. And yet never has the virtual space been more appropriate to discuss someone’s work as with Mavropoulou it seems. Throughout the past four years in fact, she has reflected through a variety of lenses on our relationship with the digital, it’s pervasiveness in our daily lives, the complex ways through which we have developed a symbiotic connection to devices that seem to start taking up a life of their own. This is the case also with her latest two series Tear Spit and Cum and Image eaters.

Approaching the two newest series developed by the Athens based artist, who has primarily been working with photography throughout her career and has been a member of Depression Era since 2014, one cannot but stop and reflect on how complex our relationship with screens are, especially in these times of overexposure to digital materials. The two series, developed in parallel throughout the past couple of years construct an intricate critique of the screen, shaped around a double perspective: the first, unfolding in Tear, Spit and Cum is based on the flatness and sterility of the surface of the screen, the second in Image-eaters imagines screens as an anthropomorphic and anthropophagous organic being whose metabolism is kept alive by all the elements (in form of information) we constantly feed it. The resulting relationship is more based on a symbiosis, a win-win food chain, in which the needs of the algorithm for information and interactions are matched by our own human/biological needs to ease and improve our conditions. Mavropoulou elaborating on this in our conversation underlines a positive outlook on our relationship with the digital world, however her words seem slightly at odds with the somewhat disturbing atmospheres presented in the works.

Tear, Spit and Cum features a series of images in which a background colour gradient is overlayed by traces resembling various bodily fluids marking lived emotions. The gradients have been developed by Mavropoulou using samples from sites and apps we’re all grown familiar to, from social media to dating apps to porn sites identified by her as the basic digital architecture we inhabit and give life through our emotions. Her project and the traces of these liquids e/affectively highlight the constraints of a life lived from behind a slick surface of a screen. While we are able to interact, share emotions and even live love stories through the screens, our bodily selves are restrained and obstructed by their surface, leaving behind a mark which at first appears to reveal a kaleidoscopic world of colours but soon exposes all the limit of a digital world made essentially by zeros and ones.

The perspective is completely reversed in Image Eaters in which suddenly we are not observing the digital world from outside but are immersed in a universe of references, visual metaphors, sometimes witty but mostly somewhat disturbing commentaries on the images that constantly surround us when navigating the virtual space. In a project that in many ways departs from her more familiar themes and visual language (and does so convincingly), Mavropoulou seems to find the right vocabulary to complete her thesis on the digital. She does so on the one hand through the titles, in itself a rarity in her practice which leaves this aspect usually open for the viewers to determine, and on the other through the images themselves. The images seem to flirt with the aesthetic of the stock images but recalling what could be defined as a concrete-digital-dystopia while the titles, functioning as a biting commentary on each image, only heighten this sensation of being presented elements of our familiar digital surrounding that make visible its contradictions and sharp edges.

The two series are not Mavroupoulou’s first stint at delving into the dichotomy digital-physical world and feel very much like a consequent step from her project Family Portraits (2017). In it Mavropoulou brings us face to face with familiar images of our homes yet presented with an eerie atmosphere lit exclusively by the many screens of our devices, making up for the absence of human figures.

While observing this earlier work of Mavropoulou one would be more than excused to have their mind travel to hauntology and the concept of the eerie developed by Mark Fisher for example. Even more specifically in his “The weird and the eerie” (2016) he points to the circumstances in which to find the rather elusive concept of the eerie, ascribing it to “the failure of presence”. Think of ancient ruins, or a post-apocalyptic landscape to have an image in mind and of the question hidden behind them about the agency, not whether there was one but whether we’ll ever be able to grasp its true force and rationale. Well, in Family Portraits Mavropoulou manages to large extent to make us face this same feeling not about a distant era and long past lives but about our own existence, about the complex forces of capital, technology and human psychology that made those screen take our place in our homes. By extrapolating the light of the screens in absence of their observers, giving them agency and thus turning them into the silent subjects of the images, Family Portraits delivers a bitter-sweet comment on our world in which the relatable environments of our everyday home is no longer only ours and the terrain of a dispute between us and the forces hidden behind the lit screens.

Through our conversation what emerged is the keen interest to observe rather than bring judgment to the specific way we interact with the digital, the fact that while it certainly opens fundamental and dramatic questions on our way of living the digital environment is not by any means a full substitute to nature and the physical world. The images and thoughts through which Mavropoulou is developing her last few years of practice are a mirror of our society rather than a manifesto for or against the increase of our digital selves.

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.

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone.”

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Tucked away in the furthest northeastern reaches of Greece, pressed up against waters that are at the extreme edge of what we know as the Aegean, lies the Thracian port city of Alexandroupoli. Its very name hints at bygone Hellenistic expansion; low-lying and green, the landscape surrounding the city feels a world away from the dry, rocky hills we associate with Classical Athens. For the artist Niki Gulema, growing up at such a distance from the country’s artistic center was a mixed blessing. Her ambivalence makes itself clear as she considers my first question about the influence that her birthplace had on her and her work. At last, she shakes her head and frowns, pushing away any traces of nostalgia. She tells me plainly, “Where I grew up, it’s all flat. Wherever you stand, you can see far, far away — and still, nothing is happening. There was no inspiration for my work in that environment.”

We are sitting across from each other in the living room of her well-loved, charmingly bohemian apartment not far from the centre of Athens. Every piece of furniture, every object on her crowded desk seems to have had many previous lives, but has found, with Niki, a happy home. We laugh about her remarkably old laptop, coming up on a decade. Niki strokes it affectionately and says, ”It gets a little hot, but it’s still running fine,” as if describing an ageing animal companion. In this moment, Niki seems perfectly enmeshed in her immediate surroundings, her seaside childhood feels far away. I push again on the question of environmental influence but she sidesteps and focuses instead on her own creative beginnings.

Niki took up drawing from a very young age. She drew constantly and with ceaseless passion. If she had lived closer to a big city, art school might have seemed a likely path. But, she tells me, those days were different: there was hardly any internet and Niki felt completely isolated from the rest of the world. The possibility of being an artist didn’t just seem remote — it wasn’t even on her horizon of possibilities. Obliquely, she reveals a bit more about the challenges of growing up in Alexandroupoli, “Athens felt so far away. Things happening there didn’t seem like they were in the capital — it was like they were in another country altogether. But fortunately, I had an art teacher who told me about the School of Fine Arts and encouraged me to apply.”

Niki came to Athens at the age of 19 and began her studies. “Once I settled in, I found exactly what I needed. I know that this city is a bubble, but it’s one where I have everything I could want to make my work.” As she advanced in her degree, she broadened her approach; photography, especially, became a major influence. Experimentation with different kinds of lenses, cameras, and analog film revealed new ways of seeing for Niki, a means to fragment the world that could then become whole again on her canvas: “There was a long period when I used telephoto lenses, using them to zoom in on very specific moments so that they would be transformed into something beyond recognition. I also experimented with plastic cameras, which are so imperfect and hard to control. Each one does whatever it wants and makes its own atmosphere. I find something beautiful about that. I remember once I found a bag of expired film. All the images came out pink. Without my intending, that became the start of the project, an accident that told me how I would work.”

As Niki describes her process of bouncing between a disjointed, photographic mosaic and a unified, painterly whole, my mind wanders to her immense canvas, Dawn, which I saw exhibited at the ARTWORKS exhibition at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The work’s largely bare surface is dominated by its empty expanses, broken up by scattered, often solitary forms: a delicate zag of energy here, a soft glow there, an unnameable silhouette resisting definition. The relationship between photographic realism and the painting’s diffuse abstraction seems hard to trace, especially given the underlying subject of her camera’s images. Athens — one of the most chaotic cities where I have ever spent time, a riot of overlapping layers, clashing histories, and churning life — appears unrecognizable as rendered by her brush. Even in the studio-like calm of her apartment, restless street activity periodically interjects; surely her painting has nothing to do with the city we both inhabit?

I tell her about my struggle to connect these two worlds and Niki laughs. She pulls up a jpeg of the two-meter painting on her computer and offers to guide me through her process of imaginary transformation. We walk together through the abstracted cityscape and Niki describes how each individual shape derives from a singular moment of origin: a shadow of Athens’ skyline, a distillation from a photograph she made during one of her urban walks, or even a relic from the flat, watery place she left behind. “In an earlier painting, I drew on the symbol of Alexandroupoli, its lighthouse. The regular rhythm of its beacon turning off and on, illuminating the night, made its way into my work.”

Indeed, many references in Niki’s paintings are prompted by her environment but quickly turn towards the inwardly sensory. She says, “My teacher at art school always told me, ‘You, you hear your paintings.’ Other painters have worked closely with noise; I don’t do this consciously, but somehow it expresses itself in my work. There are sounds that are frozen in my paintings. I listen to funny music when I paint (for example, Milton Babbitt). When I look at each part of my composition, I can remember specific feelings, certain moments, a single voice that informed it.”

Despite this abstraction, Niki’s paintings remain deeply rooted in the world through their materiality. She tells me, “What I like about painting is mixing the colors, stretching the canvas, all these handcrafted aspects, how everything smells. I am a little romantic, I guess. Since I often leave so much empty space in my frames, it’s important for each material to be just so — the unpainted canvas puts more emphasis on the underlying support.” Niki’s attraction to these fine details also pushes her back into the city, like a photographer looking for frames, but with a different goal in mind: “I even get excited tracking down each of my materials, finding just what I need. But it’s more than that; it’s the whole process. For example, I love talking to different shop owners, each of them boasting they have the best stuff. Sometimes they cheat me or sell me fake silk. It’s a game, a search, a hunt.”

As she talks, the once infinite chaos of Athens becomes condensed into a stroke, the bend of a line. In her simple way, Niki reminds us that we rarely ever see the entire city at once. Instead, we experience it in exactly these tiny, crystallized fragments; we inevitably make our own personal map through the surrounding disorder. She pauses and then concludes, “My paintings are a container for all of my experiences.”

I ask her if it takes courage to leave empty spaces on her canvases, to feel confidence in something that appears unfinished. She bats the idea away. “No, I never thought about it. From a young age, I drew this way, with many empty spaces. Even in the emptiness, I know what’s right and what’s wrong. When it’s finished, I can tell.” Such strong conviction also come with challenges, “In the same way, if I make a mistake, I also know. Even if it seems like it’s just one small mark, I can’t work around it, I can’t go back. I have to get rid of the whole canvas and start over.”

But lately, her work has been shifting. Niki’s recent pieces have begun to fill up, paint now running from edge to edge. Her canvases are now drenched in color. Yet the source seems to go deeper. Niki tells me how these “complete” canvases, paradoxically, are the result of her spending more time up north, seeing her once-empty home with new eyes. She says, “I had been away for ten years and after a decade in the city, I had forgotten what it was like to have nothing happening. Suddenly, nature became very enriching for me. In the provinces, we have so much time. I can read, I can draw, I can make my work.” She goes on, “How do people pass the time in a place where nothing is happening? There, everything is very cyclical. Life runs on a program. In the early morning, people work in their gardens, with their bees. At 3 pm, when the sun is high, no one is moving. It’s time to eat and rest. In the city, we lose track of these rhythms; in the country, we are closer to them. Time there is less fragmented. I want my work to return to that wholeness.”

Still, she recognizes the limits of solitude and her need for other kinds of energy. She says, “On the other hand, Athens is where everything happens. Ideas come from being here, seeing people, moving through the city. Right now, I feel on the border. Perhaps going back and forth will be the best way forward.” Although we spoke in the middle of the summer, a time that many look forward to as the best part of the year, Niki was ready for September to arrive; she wanted to get back to a routine. “I need to have a proper studio again, my own space where I can have all my colors.” Niki is committed to staying in the city, but with a new approach, informed by tempos that long predate those imposed by contemporary Athens. “I need a stable place that I can return to every day. I like to keep my surroundings fixed so my ideas can move. It’s only in routines that I can find one thought, which brings the next one, and the next. And then, suddenly, I have the sense of going somewhere.”

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.

A golden foil fringe curtain blows in the wind, from an office building, right over Omonoia square, in the center of Athens. With the window open, Marina Velisioti is working in her studio, one of the numerous offices forming the labyrinthian structure of the building. In the corridors, lawyers, a few more artists, clients and visitors wander around. On the busy ground floor, inside the arcade, a multifunctional fish tavern serves as the building’s cafeteria.

In her luminous studio, Velisioti stacks her materials up in order. Color coordinated skeins of threads of various origins and textures, wool, metal strings, folded rugs and rolled fabrics, a few old magazines and books. A medium size wooden loom, set in front of the window creates an odd composition with the view of the prim hotel façade. Apart from the corner which is catered for the reception of visitors (a coffee, table and a small sofa next to the coffee maker), every inch of the room is organized in favor of the creating process: materials, tools and working decks. The artist doesn’t study nor does research here; this space is dedicated to production. The studio in the office building is a an actual “working” place itself, one could even see it as a crafts(wo)man’s workshop. Hence, the room is screen-free and one can spot only some of the books with her visual references: a series of magazines on UFO’s and conspiracy theories, a pocket size encyclopedia on extraterrestrial life, hardcover books about traditional embroidery and the architecture of ancient and prehistoric civilizations.

Marina Velisioti started her career drawing and painting, following her educational background. Her early works are mostly large canvases, resembling otherworldly deserted landscapes with floating mysterious creatures and machine-like humanoid silhouettes. Her iconographic interest in the aesthetic language of science fiction along with her attraction to popular visual culture were already evident in these works. Interestingly, even in her early painting surfaces, her practice demonstrated signs of her urge to escape two dimensions; the surface is covered with glue, a material that, without disrupting the illustrative lines, added volume to her forms and reached out for the sight of the viewer. Her forms and landscapes were starting to gain weight and movement.

Equally, her ever-favorite technique of collage satisfied the same impulse for visual depth. Collecting tremendous amounts of pictures, photographs and graphic elements from magazines, comics and encyclopedias for ongoing works, or stocking them for future use, Velisioti is carefully picking the structural components of her futuristic and flamboyant world. Landscapes with mysterious colors and unexpected geological relief, landforms that imply traces of inexplicable forces, her collages create a set up and an instigation point for the paths her practice takes in different periods of time and media. After all, her sewn collage series engaged the establishment of the systematic use of thread, a material and its accompanying techniques that defined her practice and liberated new dimensions in it. Her collages are autonomous pieces, studies on composition, plans for printed editions and for the past few years, drafts for her loom-embroidered objects and ceramics.

The yarn entered the artist’s work and slipped into her hands smoothly, as a natural development of her escape tactics from flat surface. Velisioti grew up among fabrics, rags and collars her mother brought from work in a clothes industry, materials that impressed the artist and she would play with. Today, her studio remains close to the source of these materials, a few blocks away from the streets where one can find all types of fabrics yarns and relevant tools. She learned weaving at SEN-Heritage Looms, an association founded in the end of the 19th century in Athens with the purpose to educate young women. She was comfortable enough in this non-academic environment to indulge in the artisanal knowledge, and begun to experiment with motifs of traditional weaving. At this turning point, her research on the non-human and the readings of the inexplicable phenomena, mirrored on the magical and mythological themes of folk and tradition. Her bewitching landscapes are now repositioned on the weaving surface, rough, soft, glowing and stimulating for the touch, as well as for the eye.

Equipped with the expertise and inspired by craftsmanship, Velisioti utilizes this visual and material language to expand her iconographic experimentation. She brings to life images, colors, textures and finally, sculptural objects that she extracts with her bare hands from a universe equally extraterrestrial and human; objects and textiles seem disassembled by Barbarella’s¹ spaceship, relics of a futuristic universe that is, nonetheless, humorous, seductive and conspicuously human-made. A recent example of this twofold effect, is her sculptural installation The Queen is in the chamber of her dreams (2022), showcased at the J. & A. N. Diomedes Botanic Garden as part of the group show “Sheltered Gardens”, organized by PCAI Polygreen and curated by Kika Kyriakakou. Velisioti has set a bamboo tent, covered with a woolen fabric she embroidered knot to knot. On the top of the pyramidoid structure, enigmatic ceramic symbols indicate the importance of the lodge’s inhabitant and possibly their unique powers. On the background, and in dialogue with Velisioti’s work the feathery plumes of the White Feather Pampas Grass plants were calling attention to the organic nature of the elements of the installation, which seemed, however, like it landed on the ground after an intergalactic journey.

Marina Velisioti through laborious processes extracts vestiges and biosignatures of an extraterrestrial civilization to which she attributes earthly and natural characteristics, without demystifying it from its charming and arcane glory. She understands her fabrics, her embroideries, her sculptural and her ceramic work as a pile of findings from an archaeological pit; they are all paraphernalia of an extraterrestrial civilization, whose history and achievements are being recorded in present time by the artist who takes the role of a counterfeiter of history. I see the knitted belts and the long scarf she created for SERAPIS this winter and I think of ceremonial clothes that survived to reveal stories for mystical cults. Velisioti imagines landscapes as magnetic fields, she embroiders sacred architectural monuments and molds in clay cosmic symbols that serve as canals for curious correspondences. Her insistence on handcraft, her choice of materials and her references point out the affective realization that human fantasies of the Other and the transcendental, project mostly our immeasurable admiration of life and nature, as we know it, yet, not always comprehend it.

Currently, along with her new series of ceramics, Marina Velisioti creates, collects and organizes material and also designs a new self-published edition for her work that, -in her own words- involves “party, the erotic, food and UFO’s, all things that have always fascinated me”. I can’t help but share her enthusiasm as I’m thinking that not only these things actually “fascinate” myself, but also bring us closer to the uncanny, the otherworldly and the magical.

Marina Velisioti was born in Thessaloniki, Greece 1982. She studied at the Department of Applied Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Thessaloniki. She is based in Athens. During her university studies she attended courses and seminars of scenography. Amongst her interests are video art applications and music themes of psychology, psychoacoustics and documentary. She has also attended courses in technical analogue and digital photo printing, engraving and sculpture. She is a scholar of U.F.Os, monsters, sci-fi culture. In her recent work, Marina Velisioti produces a series of collages, tapestries, sculptures developing narratives inspired by ancient buildings, deserted or forgotten landscapes, motifs symbols, over which she collides with the most prominent technique, turning them into astonishing, unrealistic universes, often with a playful mood. She is the founder and editor of the art zine Bebabebo. Marina Velisioti rthe Stavros Niarchos received the Foundation (SNF) 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.

¹ Roger Vadim, Barbarella, 1968

In psychoanalysis, it is common for patients to repeatedly relate the same events. A slight change in the structure of a sentence or a word used mistakenly in the course of one of the many iterations can shift the patient’s way of thinking and force them to see themselves in the reality of the situation, now presented under a different light. Something completely obvious to one’s milieu may remain unperceived by the person in analysis. Once aware of this otherwise conspicuous trait, the patient becomes frightened. It is a little like seeing one’s bare back captured in a picture. How scaringly blatant is this image! The experience produces a displacement of what was previously a familiar part of one’s body and personal narrative and in that sense cannot but inspire fear.

When I look at Anastasia Douka’s sculptures, the same thought always springs to mind. “But it is obvious,” I hear myself musing, though of course I have never before imagined or recalled in this particular way the object Anastasia chose to use. Once Anastasia’s sculptures have rendered their revelatory service to the object, the result is the emergence of a new type of ‘existence’. The object, be it a chain, an inverted ladder or the ‘skin’ of a crocodile or a female figure depicted in a public sculpture, is displaced first mildly, then at an intimidating degree.

This ‘object’ is so close to my nose I almost feel I am unable to see it! Or, to put it more accurately, it is embossed on my nose. Suspended half inside, half outside my nostril, it radiates as it is left to create prismatic reflections on the symbol it has chosen as its content.

Anastasia’s sculpture is embossed on body and conscience alike. Therein, in my opinion, lies the explanation for the coexistence of the positive and the negative in her practice.

The works are like toys that have been cut open, revealing an interior you had always formed a picture of though not quite in this way. When faced with Anastasia’s sculptures, I have the feeling that I am wearing an elastic mask. I suck on it with my mouth so that the plastic skin of the mask becomes attached to mine. Then this skin bursts, and, for a while, I see it reappearing before me.

Anastasia Douka (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is a visual artist working with sculptural media. Her work “Crocodile” is presented in the group exhibition “Unhappy Monuments” at Parko Eleftherias (10–20 October, 2020).

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2020) is a visual artist working in painting, text, sound and photography.

In Malvina Panagiotidi’s basement studio, pots sitting on top of small electric burners are filled with nameless liquids, slowly boiling. If you squint your eyes, you might instead see cauldrons, the artist transformed into an alchemist from days gone by. Magical shapeshifting seems entirely possible in the world that Malvina’s work conjures up. Her latest sculptures, composed principally of frozen liquids (wax and glass), take the form of contorted hands, draped fabrics, braided hair, unblinking eyes, and unbeating hearts. These configurations are only temporary, though — when her work is exhibited, the wax is illuminated and begins to melt and deform, disappearing before our eyes. Such ephemerality is befitting of Malvina’s paranormal sources of inspiration, which range from spirit sightings, to ectoplasmic landscapes, haunted houses, and occult manuscripts. But as we talk, this heady mix of ideas starts to take on a clearer outline and I discover Malvina’s firm grounding in the specificities of the Greek environment.

The first cornerstone: years ago, when Malvina was a little girl, she used to help her father formulate the prescription medications in the backroom of the drug store that he owned in the Athens neighbourhood of Pangrati. Seen in this light, her artist’s studio filled with implements of heating, cooking, mixing, and casting is merely an extension of the family business in another guise. Further, when looking at Malvina’s work, I am reminded that in Greek, the word for medicine (pharmakon) also means “poison.” What can save us can also kill us, if administered in the wrong dose. Malvina’s sculptures rest on this ambiguous border, carefully balancing the forces of structure and chaos, life and death, science and magic.

As we trace the origins of Malvina’s varied interests — ghosts, spirits, the uncanny, architecture, local Greek histories — another seminal memory emerges from Malvina’s past. “Since I was a little girl, I remember being amazed by the magic of glass,” she reflects. “When I was nine years old, I was told in my science lessons that glass is like a plasma, it’s always moving. This was presented as one of the paradoxes of physics: you see a solid, but it’s actually a fluid.” For years, these ideas ebbed and flowed through Malvina’s consciousness, shifting and morphing until finally taking material shape in her sculptural works.

But before dedicating herself to art, Malvina had several other formative educational experiences, especially during her architectural studies in the city of Volos. Even though she never worked as an architect, she asserts, “Architecture is always present in my work in different ways. Not only in the construction of objects, but also in my thinking. For me, architecture is a structure of thought.” Her time in Volos also brought her into contact with many of the themes she would later explore in her artistic research.

For example, her final undergraduate research project was an examination of the forensic collection as a museum. She focused specifically on a collection located in Athens, now part of the city’s university, that was established at the beginning of the 20th century. Its founder, Professor Ioannis Georgiadis, was inspired by traditions of forensic criminology in western Europe, and began to gather together a diverse and eclectic assortment of objects: wax models, vases filled with formaldehyde, mummified bodies, patches of skin with tattoos, black magic paraphernalia, anthropometric materials, and even a guillotine that was used for executions here in Greece. For Malvina, “everything started from the writings of this professor. Besides all the objects, the key text for my research was his description of the ‘accessories of decomposition’: an exacting description of the 8–10 different insects that come in a specific order to carry out the process of decomposing dead bodies. My entire project began from this point.”

Next for Malvina was a postgraduate arts degree in Berlin, which gave her the space to develop her artwork while also imposing some much-needed distance from Greece. The program, titled “Art in Context,” pushed her to produce work in her new home while also digging deeper into her Greek origins. Her graduation project focused on the Greek concept of haunting. “It turns out that we have a different concept of haunting from, for example, the Victorians,” she explains. “My research explored the subject in numerous directions, drawing from folklore, superstitions, cultural history, literature, political events — the building blocks of the Greek psyche. I wanted to see how our uncanny belief in ghosts could be connected to our imagined relationship to socio-political frameworks. Ultimately, I produced a series of wax reliefs that depicted specific haunted houses across Athens. What I love about these structures is how they are still part of the city’s urban fabric today. These buildings became vessels to express the city’s history, ghostly personifications of its layered past, but also anchors that connect the past with the present. Over time, as they accrete stories and superstitions, they become unofficial monuments for the locals. By focusing on these select points, I found a way to convey a personalized reading of the history of my city.”

As for wax, which along with glass has become one of the hallmarks of Malvina’s work, she was initially drawn to the material because of its connection to her forensic research. Wax is often used in anatomy models because its softness and malleability connect it with the human body on a tangible level. Wax, like the body, has certain characteristics that can change drastically depending on the surrounding environment. Beyond their material similarities, Malvina found a deeper thread to tie her interest in organic decomposition and decay with her wax sculptures: a wick inserted in the heart of each of her creations. These wicks are not merely for decoration: upon exhibition, Malvina’s wax objects are illuminated, burning until they melt down to a puddle, completing their inexorable return to the formlessness from which they came. As she says, “I don’t see this process as a disappearance, but rather a means to convey the underlying truth of constant transformation. Wax is a living, vivid thing. Like our bodies, like our memories, like our societies, my wax sculptures change, warp, and shift over time, constantly reinterpreted within our system of collective experience.”

Meanwhile, as we wrap up our conversation, I begin to push and shape Malvina’s use of wax in a different direction. To me, there seems to be a plasma-like relationship between the pressure exerted by Malvina’s casts on her wax forms and the immense pressure exerted by the crisis on a malleable generation of young Greek artists. As we go back and forth, our exchange reflects the contested meanings of Athens’ recent cultural renaissance. Specifically, Malvina questions aloud how her generation will be considered in relation to the crisis, the defining feature of Greek life for the duration of her artistic career. Incidentally, this reality applies to almost every Artworks Fellow who joined Malvina in the first cohort. She says, “I cannot speak for older or younger artists, but only as someone who started making art in precisely this period. Will we be a generation that produced great work — or only a “generation of the crisis?” Will our art stand on its own or only be a recording of its economic context and socio-political surroundings? This remains to be seen.”

In the case of Malvina’s art, her shapes take on much more complex associations than their external forms express on their own. Her distinctive mix of diverse intellectual interests with aesthetic references transforms otherwise simple sculptures into something much more resonant, even haunting. There is no doubt that the pressure exerted by the crisis has been hugely destructive, but in specific moments, it has lead to creation. For Malvina herself, and her artistic contemporaries in Greece, we have to hope this same alchemy will prove true: an intense array of external forces, mixed with an undefinable sprinkling of personal qualities, that will coalesce into something we will all remember.

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. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

(a series of poetic responses on Iris Touliatou’s show “Mothers”)

In her text occasioned by her solo show “Mothers” at Rodeo Gallery in Athens, Iris Touliatou quotes Lauren Berlant saying: “There are only two kinds of questions; am I right or are you my mother?”. By using her words, Touliatou induces us to her work and along with it, to everything motherhood comes with, symbolically and otherwise; from secure attachments and unconditional loves, to fears of failing, impositions of authority and depictions of non-motherhood, among many other primal senses, behavioural, psycho-social and always political subjects. This poetic text operates as a series of responses and diaristic cartographies of some of these encounters with motherhood. And it does so, by using as schematic axes for its chapters, the titles of Touliatou’s works: mother frame, mother work, mother settle, mother material, mother arrangement, mother light, mother notice and mother orifice.

mother light

Every system around us has a voice

tender ghostly rough
or burned insane behave

acceleration is a thing
engagement is another
but the same

mothers and mothers and fluids

light is never a filter you said
quite the opposite

for when time escapes its institutional life

mother frame

I called my mom before, she told me she had a dream about giving birth to two girls, they were twins. In her dream she was thinking how she’ll cut their hair. She told me one girl would have short hair and the other one long and that she’d preserve that scheme in turn. That way, none of the girls would ever complain about how they look. Then she told me that it all means she’ll be cursed twice. I convinced myself that it won’t happen. I had to avoid my triggers.

On Saturday I was really hungry, I was eating all night long, until chewing exhausted me, and I fell asleep. I dreamt of my mom dying. I woke up knowing how it’d feel like.

In one of her blog posts named “the governing grass of dream language”, Anne Boyer writes: “Beginnerism might be like any other preference for annihilation: things that are always reducing us to the beginner’s nought? Love, intoxication, divinity, beauty, and revolt.”

I killed my mom and two days after, she gave birth to two daughters.

You killed time and

mother orifice

we found freedom in the margins.

mother settle

I was scrolling on Facebook resisting rest and success, when it hit me: happiness, Laurie Santos says, “comes through empathy, solidarity, altruism”. And then she quotes a guy, a boyband member, saying something like: “committing to one decision is the best way to live your life”.

I felt very empowered reading that line; all of a sudden, commitment justified my whole existence and I started writing about this eye opening quote, only to realize that if I embody it, I might die and I don’t want to.

mother material

There is this poem by Adrienne Rich, called a “Mark of Resistance”.

It goes:

Stone by stone I pile
this cairn of my intention
with the noon’s weight on my back,
exposed and vulnerable
across the slanting fields
which I live but cannot save
from floods that are to come;
can only fasten down
with this work of my hands,
these painfully assembled
stones, in the shape on nothing
that has never existed before.
A pile of stones: an assertion
that this piece of country matters
for large and simple reasons.
A mark of resistance, a sign”.

That’s for all of your sentence compositions, papers, back and forths,
for when you said that it was easier than you thought it’d be.

Collecting, composing, in touch,

mutations, subversions,
ownership (singular always),

it’s all yours anyway.

Papers are never just papers.
Papers are permissions;

they are portals allowing access to histories and futures and currents.

You used them to prove exclusion.
You won.

mother work

She wants her to be a mother.
She silences her voice, as if hearing it would prove her guilty.

cast concrete gallery furniture as exhibition
structure
it’s all about cheat codes.

I silenced yours.
Hearing it proves me guilty.

mother arrangement

There are things that cannot be weighted unless you force them,
like water or affect or labour,
and there are discourses about them,
sounds and sighs and words and works and protests, but numbers?

I once tried to count them but I failed,
and then I felt deeply sorry because longing for approval slash self-destruction slash the ultimate control slash I’m cool but I’m faking it slash the fear of abandonment is a thing.

Anyway,
the story about counting that which can never be counted started with weight,
it moved to age,
then to money,
until it reached the point of a sustainable living,

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

mother arrangement

There are things that cannot be weighted unless you force them,
like water or affect or labour,
and there are discourses about them,
sounds and sighs and words and works and protests, but numbers?

I once tried to count them but I failed,
and then I felt deeply sorry because longing for approval slash self-destruction slash the ultimate control slash I’m cool but I’m faking it slash the fear of abandonment is a thing.

Anyway,
the story about counting that which can never be counted started with weight,
it moved to age,
then to money,
until it reached the point of a sustainable living,

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

By Ioanna Gerakidi

Ιris Touliatou (b.1981, in Athens, GR) engages in a conceptual practice, which transposes the political, environmental and affective, and employs various mediums necessary for each intervention. Using sculpture, photography, sound, scent and text, her work often draws on found objects and creates open forms and shared experiences to comment on time, love, transience, mortality, economies and states of being. She has exhibited at: DESTE Foundation (GR); Radio Athènes (GR); Exile (AUT); Beton Salon/Villa Vassilieff (FR); Manifesta 12, ΥΛΗ[matter]HYLE (GR); Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art (DE); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR); Alcobendas Arts Centre CAA (ES)· Onassis Stegi (GR)· Ricard Foundation (FR); contemporary art center La Galerie CAA Noisy le Sec (FR); and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at Nanyang Technological Univesity Center for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) in Singapore, while in 2012 she received the art prize Europas Zukunft from the Leipzig contemporary art museum GFZK. She is currently based in Athens, Greece. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2020).

Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, poetic and archival studies and schemes. She has collaborated with and curated exhibitions and events for various institutions and galleries and residencies and her texts and poems have appeared in international platforms, magazines and publications. She has lectured or led workshops, seminars and talks for academies and research programs across Europe. Her practice and exhibitions have been awarded by institutions, such as Rupert Residency, Mondriaan Fonds, Outset and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS, amongst others.

“So someone would have to wait for the perfect society before daring to speak? Or perhaps speak while disguising their meaning. Or altogether assume the risk and speak in order to lie,” remarks the protagonist of Theo Prodromidis’ film Towards the Bank of the Future, 2013(2013). As bodily presence in the public sphere tragically reemerges as a right needing to be constantly reaffirmed, we are called on to invent new ways through which we will be able to speak about participatory, political or public art. What do we really mean, or what are we trying to disclose, when we talk about art taking on the notions of the political subject, everyday life or the very art of politics and its historicity? Within the framework of this inquiry, the need emerges to reflect these issues anew in a manner that would bypass a series of archetypal ethical questions, such as who has the right to speak and in which way, and would, instead, focus on the reality of things: what is the vocabulary that could include the excluded subjects. If we want to stop speaking ABOUT these subjects and comprehend the actual condition of being excluded, it is perhaps necessary to dedicate oneself to the study of art’s capacity to let the precarious subjects speak for themselves.

In Prodromidis’ video Towards the Bank of the Future (2013), we follow a writer-intellectual as he visits monumental spaces and monument-spaces across the city and witness his revelatory meeting with a Cavafian character. A film documentation that starts off as an endless questioning of the citizen’s place through time and space soon turns into a record of the subject’s agonising need to become included in a historicity weighing heavily down on his/her shoulders. What ethical measure can a person apply when assuming the responsibility to be actively present within his/her own time? What are the costs involved and which parts of them are levied on the individual? The video contains footage from Cairo during the Arab Spring uprisings, shot in 2011 by Mosireen, the independent media collective that came together to document and transmit images of the Egyptian Revolution. Mosireen’s bottom-up approach delivered archive footage that figures as cracks or traumas inflicted on the narrative of Prodromidis’ video. The real space of action comes to provide an answer -and perhaps at the same time pose a challenge- to the main character’s existentialist self-referentiality and to the moral mire into which he is plunged. Historicity itself provides the answer on our behalf: “Somebody is searching for the right words and cannot find them, that’s why you don’t know what to say”.

Still, a few years later, Prodromidis teams up with actress Angeliki Papoulia and does indeed try to find the right words in the course of two 8 hour-long performances presented at Kunsthalle Athena, which will form the basis for his new installation, Goodbye Etc. Element for the support of new structures (2015). Following an open call, the artist amassed a collection of journals and books containing emblems that marked the development of left-wing political discourse. The gathered texts were then torn and taken apart randomly — or not — before being reassembled in front of the audience. The objective: to create a new book out of the existing ones. The publication resulting out of Goodbye…Etc. Element for the support of new structures (2015) traveled widely: it was shown at the Thessaloniki Biennale of contemporary art and at the Fodazione Sandretto re Rabodengo, where it was presented as an installation without, however, disowning its performative origins. These archives, bound together into 16 bright red copies-objects, claim to forge their own relationship with the audience, which is invited to leaf through them, change their position or even try and remove them from the exhibition space. Both the archives and the visitors participate in a well-orchestrated and surprising choreography in order to shape, using chance and their own mobility as a vehicle, a new, sculptural common space. Fragments of texts that played a key role in the evolution of revolutionary and emancipatory politics and whose echo still reverberates strongly not just in contemporary discourses articulating political demands but also on people’s collective memory, for a moment cease to function as theoretical monuments and organically transform into the joints of a live mechanism calling for involvement and active participation. Rid of the burden of having to deliver a narrative at the end his archival research, Prodromidis explores the possibilities of a dialogue unfolding between the text and the architectural landscape, as well as the public space and the people inhabiting it. The fact that Goodbye etc. performs all of the above in the context of institutionally established cultural settings, such as the ones provided by modern art biennials, already intimated a clear orientation towards a bold artistic practice which, in the following years, would tap even more firmly into the problematics germinating within the axis politics-art-community.

In 2019, the work A poem as an image (Amartolo) lends a voice to groups deprived of one. Woman activists, members of collectivities, and female immigrants read Galateia Kazantaki’s poem “Amartolo” and their voice becomes the focal point of an installation presented at State of Concept gallery in Athens, in the context of an exhibition curated by the collectivity What, How and for Whom / WHW. “From the depths of my hell I scream to you: I am your image, society, and I resemble you”, are the words blurted out from the headphones, thus delivering a public performance, an attempt to claim visibility. The poetry of a woman persecuted for her political activities placed in the mouths of women fighting for their experience of femininity to be acknowledged within the realms of society turns into an almost corporeal assembly releasing an emotional charge akin to that of a public protest. Yet the sound of this installation did not find an outlet into the urban space, which is the natural setting of every collective action, but instead resounded only within the confines of a modern art project space. To what extent, then, did the project manage to circumnavigate the authority of the dominant discourse, so as to challenge it or at least break its continuity? Prodromidis has no illusions: he does not believe that art is capable of bridging the distance separating the exhibition space from the socio-political sphere. Instead, then, of proposing solutions he brings into relief the potential inherent in each moment: he probes into, shapes and delivers a temporary performative field that is conducive to solidarity and participation, a sphere through which inroads can be made into the public.

Pushing on with this peculiar attempt to own up to the artist’s privilege vis-a-vis the community, in March 2020, in the context of the exhibition Translocal Cooperation held in Furtherfield gallery in London, Prodromidis decides to contribute an edited volume featuring texts written by multiple authors. In the work An open newspaper (You can’t evict a movement) (2020), the result of his collaboration with Theodoros Karyotis, Tonia Katerini, Stathis Mitropoulos, Nemanca Pantovic and Ana Vilenica, Prodromidis sets himself the goal of publishing a newspaper gathering new texts discussing the protection of first residence and the movements against evictions. In this manner, he tries to welcome people whose housing rights have been thrown into precarity and the solidarity movements favourably inclined towards them into an area of the public sphere that usually remains barred to them. Most importantly, though, he does this without purporting that his own writings can represent the members of this community, his track record of advocating for social causes notwithstanding. As the editor of the publication, he instead invited grassroots activists as well as scholars studying the solidarity movements organised in recent years for the protection of the first residence in Greece and Serbia. In Theo Prodromidis’ work, political activism, solidarity and the notion of collective action are not embodied in the work but rather heard, seen and strengthened through the work of art, whose visibility and institutional support the artist uses as his instruments. I finish this article, the result of many meetings and conversations with the artist, less with a sense of ownership over it and more with the feeling that it is a piece of writing I have contributed to. And this feeling possibly best encapsulates the importance of producing something in a shared condition.

Theo Prodromidis (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is a visual artist and film director based in Athens, Greece.

Christina Petkopoulou (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2019) is an independent curator currently based in Athens.

How does one support oneself as an artist? Does one’s art suffer from being utilized as a means of financial support? Athens, once crisis-stricken, has been feted as a city on the rise, one of Europe’s next art capitals. But what does that international buzz materially translate to for Greek artists trying to support themselves on a month-to-month basis?

These are questions not only for those living in Greece but artists everywhere. Today, between the precarity of creative work, the increasing cost of education — especially of fine arts degrees around Europe (even while Greece’s public universities bravely hold out) — and the rapidly-rising expense of living in major cities, where so much of the art world’s attention seems to focus, it is hard to ignore financial realities when seriously contemplating pursuing the life of the artist.

Such questions preface the work of photographer Angelos Tzortzinis because he offers a concrete example of how to navigate these irresolvable tensions. If we take the name “ARTWORKS” seriously — that is, believe in the idea that ”art” “works” — then Angelos’ artistic and professional practice is an important one to understand.

Angelos is a freelance photographer who puts his craft to work every single day both to express his vision and to support himself and his family. The balance that he has sustained, since the age of 21, between financial sustainability and creative satisfaction contains an essential lesson. From the beginning of our conversation, he acknowledges the temptation to allow his daily work to influence or even diminish his underlying passion for photography, but with careful discipline, he has been able to maintain his twinned existence. Photography, for Angelos, stands for many things: a place to explore his core values and beliefs, a channel to find the right distance from his surroundings, a space for moral education — but alongside all of these abstract concepts, the camera also functions as his fundamental means of livelihood.

In 2015, Angelos was named Time magazine’s “Wire Photographer of the Year” in recognition of his heartfelt photographs that documented two historic events that befell Greece over the past decade. In the case of the first, Greece’s economic crisis, Angelos was able to document the event as it unfolded over the course of several years. Unlike so many headline-seeking journalists, he was not a passive bystander, but embedded in the situation, capturing the struggle of his own daily life and those around him. The second, the height of the refugee and migrant wave that passed through Greece in 2015, was also a topic that was close to Angelos’ personal experience.

As he summarizes, “I wasn’t just a Greek but someone who had lived through both of these experiences on an intimate level.” Rather than pretending to offer the clarifying perspective of the all-knowing photographer, Angelos accepted his own limited perspective. Each day he worked, he would ask himself, What is happening? and would then go out with his camera to answer his own question. By admitting his confusion, his photographs transcended the usual impersonality of news photographs to convey an individual’s point of view on dizzying global events. His honesty translated to his work: ”Maybe this is what attracted Time: a sensitivity to what we were all living through here in Greece. Unlike many of the foreign press, my images were less hardcore and more emotionally empathetic. I sometimes worry that we have tired out our audiences…”

But for all of Angelos’ closeness to these stories, he emphasized one thing repeatedly while we spoke: the importance of distance. To produce images with any external legibility, Angelos learned how to hold himself apart. As he told me, “If you lose distance, you lose your orientation and finally, your destination. There is close, close, and close — in other words, many different levels. For example, at the start of the crisis, I was swallowed by the story. I was following every demonstration and documenting the struggles of individual people who couldn’t pay their electricity bills. All of these emotions began to affect me too much to carry on working. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more sensitive to what ‘close’ means. Every photographer finds their own distance; I looked towards individuals who I really admire to understand where I needed to be. Vanessa Winship in Turkey…Daido Moriyama in Japan…Trente Parke in Australia…Garry Winogrand in the US…what I saw in each was how they could be inside their subjects — while maintaining themselves apart.”

For Angelos, an emotional proximity to the country’s financial crisis and later, the surge in migration, came from his own background. Growing up in Egaleo, a poor suburb of Athens, many of Angelos’ neighbors and friends were refugees from Albania and the Middle East, especially Iraq. Thus, while many spoke of the 2015 “refugee crisis” as a new phenomenon, Angelos had lived with refugees and migrants his entire life. The other formative event of these childhood years was the untimely death of Angelos’ father. At a young age, he felt the burden of having to support others. He knew that whatever path he decided to pursue, it would have to sustain not only him, but those around him.

Given his difficult circumstances, Angelos began searching, trying to understand himself and the world he lived in. Early on, Angelos showed a technical aptitude for making pictures; at the age of 21, he dedicated himself to photography. But from the beginning, he decided “photography is not just nice light and a pretty frame, but about depth and feeling.” Through this profession, he says, “I tried to improve myself as a human.” Angelos continuously pushed himself, “to go one step extra, to seek out the next level. And soon I discovered the only way to get there was not through more photography, but everything else: reading books, watching documentaries, moving through the world. When I began, I did not understand the breadth that was needed. The broader my education became, the more this came out in my pictures.” Yet more than any visual or intellectual training, Angelos believes in something even more foundational: “There are many great photographers but fewer good people. The latter is the most important, but also the most rare.”

Nevertheless, Angelos has always had to balance his nobler sentiments with practical realities. Today, he supports his wife and they are expecting a child, while relying on his photographic earnings. This balancing act informs his photographs; Angelos knows that making money with his art is not a simple thing. “How do I protect my personal work from being influenced by my commercial work? It’s very difficult. When I began, I was innocent. I wasn’t interested if other people liked my photos, I did it only for myself. But now, it’s impossible not to think what will enter the market. At the same time, I know this is dangerous. I now feel I am on a good path, but it’s a constant struggle to not be influenced by what the editors and audiences out there will think. It’s a fight that demands vigilance.”

Social media, for example, is a huge problem in this regard. As any photographer knows, Instagram is an essential channel for getting one’s work out into the world. But Angelos says, “Social media can help you only if you impose on it very careful control and limits.” For Angelos, social media feeds another troublesome trend: artists’ obsession with exposure. “Everyone wants exposure and festival exhibitions and awards without being paid. This is very bad. All artists need to get paid for their work, time, and skill. I don’t care about fame, I care about being recognized for my work.”

He goes on, “I won’t give my work without being paid. It’s a simple life rule. If I give my work for free, I won’t be respected. We have to respect ourselves; no one will do it for us. We live in difficult times — in photography, in art, in all aspects of life. If you give your work away for free, then you will do it constantly. You need to set a hard rule and follow it.”

For his entire career, Angelos has followed a difficult road, balancing these many demands. But as we close, he dismisses one more illusion that is so frequently held in the art world: “You can’t do everything by yourself. We artists need each other, we need communities. For example, I have a friend at Reuters who helps me with my texts. Every photo project is 50 percent pictures and 50 percent text. You can have amazing pictures but if you don’t have a good text, you have a problem.” And then Angelos, who has depended on his camera for so, so many things over the years, reveals how one person, and one machine, are never enough: “Every time I do a final selection, I show my edit to my wife. We sit at the kitchen table and discuss the work. She tells me to cut pictures, even at the very last minute. Remember: we all need help from each other. Politically, socially, ethically, it’s the only way we can live.”

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. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis can be found working in an apartment, a former architect’s office in a residential area, in the environs of central Athens. “We live in the city. We live in the block of flats. We see the block of flats as a cave”¹ he wrote in the accompanying text of his solo show in Kalfayan Galleries in 2021. His studio is a cave itself, encapsulated in a block of flats, distanced from the vivid core of the Athenian artworld, yet close to it in terms of practicality. One can work there undistracted. Afar but approachable. Among family houses, other professionals, shop owners, families, students, Kassapis is painting, drawing, writing, composing and playing music in working-hour shifts.

This multitasking, however, in the case of Kassapis seems to be employed in favor of painting. His texts are notes of his painstaking observation of the most delicate and indiscernible functions of human memory and perception. Poetic landscapes of self-reflection that stand as pieces of literature per se, his texts are compositions of scattered diary excerpts that the artist puts together in order to organize his research on image making. “Look at these plants below. How does it sound like?”² Kassapis writes, and even though he — proudly — admits this question was initially posed by his 3-year-old son at the time, one can’t help but, read it in relation with his own preoccupation with sound making. His soundscapes, distant analogue tones, are made to be listened to in his own studio during the actual process of painting. An analogue audio mixer, an old phone (a few devices he displayed in his last solo show “Pliance” in Radio Athènes, Athens in December 2022 as a sound installation from his soundscape series “Rooms in Negative”) are always in the room, placed beside him, actively involved in the creative process. Even though it is certain that artists rarely produce the soundtrack that accompanies their studio work, Kassapis speaks of this particular practice in a casual and humble way, as if his sound pieces are necessary painting tools, practical devices that are just “part of the job”.

I notice that, in contrast with his paintings, his soundscapes emerge from the outside, open-air, sometimes natural, physical spaces. In the calm and introverted capsule of the studio, they infuse instances of what is — or could be — taking place within the infinite dimensions of the exterior environment. This carefully premeditated condition that prevails over the apartment that is the artist’s studio, what purpose does it serve? What’s the use of this perfectly curated set-up: the soundwaves vibing through the speakers, the clear-cut lighting, the relics of the former architectural office, instruments of the design discipline, wooden rulers, the old tv and the slide projector, vintage design magazines, notebooks and markers, the brushes and papers, personal objects.

Trying to comprehend how the manipulation of the surroundings of the creation affects the work, I asked him about its relationship with space, yet our conversation would always lead us to the concept of time. Kassapis’ painting is a long study on memory, specifically in the very process of recollection. His works lie precisely on this conjunction of time and space, where subjectiveness, intuition, perception and human body coproduce an attenuated reflection of the lived experience. Series of paintings that formalistically consist of compositions of objects and landscapes unfold aspects of what the artist refers to as the “nuance of memory”: the distortions, the superpositions and the deductions that formulate an image within the mechanism of recollection, a process affiliated, according to him, to the concepts of repetition, duration and mood³. His paintings, parts of indivisible series, are often seen as studies of color and shape on a subject, a perception he welcomes from the position of a painting and drawing teacher, a parallel profession he devotes himself to this day. After all, how can one study perception, if not by assimilating it from the subjective gaze of the other?

And then again, we return to the concept of duration. As the viewer spends more time gazing on Kassapis’ series of paintings, they realize that the matter of composition and technique is not his main concern, even though it remains his credible vehicle. Within their absolute silence, his canvases disclose a sequence, a rhythm which — as obscure as it may be — certainly remains present. Slight changes on the dubious position of the potential light source and on the overall framing of the subject suggest the existence of a microscopic movement that entangles among the pieces that form the series. This type of motion is so vague, one might question their own vision, or even, the artist’s intention. Is it there? Is it actually taking place or it is us, the viewers who fail to recall the details, as our sight moves across the painting surfaces?

That sense of mistaking that to the artist resembles a Freudian slip, engages the viewer with his eternal subject: the autonomous life of human memory. That familiar sense of intuition that renders us at the disposal of the empirical object, the esoteric state of being present in several timelines, our unique way to recall an image . With this theoretical diagonal in mind, that I think strikes through his work, I personally tend to see Kassapis’ painting series, as a juxtaposition of analogue monitors, continually projecting impressions of objects, bodies and spaces that I have actually encountered at some point. “These photos I collect, I do not distinguish them from my personal ones. They are not photos of facts, but they help to recollect”⁴ he writes.

Merging into his work, I feel I can relate more to the instrumented atmosphere of his studio and the practice that is taking place there. I like to think that Kassapis is creating a simulation, a space where himself -if exhaustively focused- can capture the material traces of memory. With the soundscapes insulating every corner of its shell, the charged and stimulating objects, its dense quietness, the artist’s studio is a space where he observes the experience of recollection, he runs trials and experiments and records fragments of this intimate and abstruse mental process. The journal of this investigation is transcribed in his canvases, captured in his sound pieces, spoken in his writing.

Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (b. 1981) studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens from 1999–2004 where he lives and works. His work includes painting, drawing, photography, text, sound and music. He has also worked on set designs and as a teacher. Solo shows: Pliancy (Radio Athenes,2022.Athens. The Shallow Room (A Sud, Pescara 2022). To see a block of flats as a cave (Kalfayan galleries,Athens, 2021).’Melting snow as if in a room’, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis / Konstantinos Hadjinikolaou (Tavros, Athens, 2021), ‘Songs’. Athanasios Argianas / Andreas Ragnar Kassapis (Hero Gallery, Amsterdam, 2018), ‘Breakwater’ (Independent Space, Athens 2015), ‘How Can one Remember Thirst?’ (Loraini Alimantiri
Gallery, Athens 2011), ‘Bones are Tight’ (Loraini Alimantiri Gallery, Athens 2008), ‘Numb’ (Loraini Alimantiri Gallery, Athens2006).Selected group shows: Documenta 14 (Art Director: Adam Szymczyck, Cur. Katerina Tselou, Athens / Kassel 2017), ‘Reverb: new art from Greece’ (cur. Evita Tsokanta — Eirine Efstathiou, Boston, 2014), ‘Hell as Pavillion’ (cur. Nadia Argyropoulou, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013), ‘Heaven’, Athens Biennale (cur. Christoforos Marinos, Athens, 2009), ‘Anathena’ (cur. Marina Fokidi-Marina Gioti, Athens, 2006). Selected set designs: ‘Era Povera’, Patricia Apergi (Athens 2012), ‘As my Heart in a Storm’, (Bijoux de Kant, Athens, 2012). ‘Blossom’, Agni Papadeli Rossetou. Selected music works:Rooms in negative-Lucky Boys published on tape.(untitled. 1) 2019. Rooms in Negative, published on vinyl (2009), Look and the Beast, Music for the dance performance by Agni Papadeli Rossetou. Andreas Ragnar Kassapis was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2020.

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.

¹ Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2021, To see a block of flats as a cave, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

² Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2022, Pliancy, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

³ In Bergson found as “la durée” and “stimmung”

⁴Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, 2022, Pliancy, translated from Greek by Michalis Varouxakis

In his latest solo gallery show, multidisciplinary artist Yorgos Maraziotis lures the viewer into an environment where not everything is what it seems. The exhibition Monroe Springs at Antwerp’s Base-Alpha Gallery consists of paintings and sculptures of different sizes, installed unorthodoxly to create a carefully-planned spatial choreography that puts the viewer’s body into different situations. The deeper visitors delve into the exhibition, the more they realise that behind the show’s apparent softness and playfulness hides a much darker layer, one that is full of violence, social injustice and late-capitalism ennui.

The exhibition’s title refers to an imaginary place, a Californian town perhaps named after Marilyn Monroe. Maraziotis chose this title because he draws inspiration from California, and specifically Los Angeles, for all the works he created for the exhibition. The artist has never visited Los Angeles though; the place exists in his mind as a collage of the representations he has been exposed to over mass media and through popular culture. The show is referencing the city and its history, but at the same time is also addressing the struggles and plight of any western or westernised modern city. Monroe Springs is therefore not a show about Los Angeles, but turns Los Angeles into a metaphor for 21st-century urban societies and the trappings of urbanisation and capitalism.

Upon entering the gallery space, visitors walk past a set of wall-mounted sculptures in the form of Japanese shuriken made of thick pink marble. The weapons’ sharpness is cancelled by the choice of material, and their colour imbues them with an attractive, almost edible quality. Functioning as the exhibition’s ceremonial gateway, a pedestal stands in the middle of the hallway carrying a pair of pristine white roller skates with iridescent details. The shoes are filled with soil into which two pink candles are standing lit. On either side of the pedestal and near the ceiling hang two neon lights in yellow and pink; they are based on a drawing by Maraziotis of cartoonish blood oozing from an invisible wound.

Passing the pedestal visitors find themselves in the exhibition’s first room. A large copper articulated sculpture is hanging from the ceiling like a metal spine made of laser-cut, identical abstract shapes. The impression of the sculpture changes as one moves around it, becoming almost invisible and razor-like from the side but curvaceous and figurative from the front. The shapes are again based on a doodle by Maraziotis, but being cut out of thin metal adds an element of danger and aggressiveness to them. On the wall across, a small painting is sitting on a metal shelf; a plant removed from its pot is placed right in front of it, concealing its content and at the same time duplicating the tropical plants depicted in the painting.

A pair of large paintings standing back-to-back on the floor conceal the entrance to the next room. They have been placed like a wall that separates this first part of the exhibition from the next, creating an indirect path for visitors to follow. Behind the two paintings and mounted on the wall with magnets is a pair of metal nunchaku, the Japanese karate weapon made famous by Bruce Lee and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Maraziotis’ nunchaku are connected with a very long chain to look more like a skipping rope, confusing in one gesture the limits between violence and play.

In the final and largest room of the exhibition, there are two sculptures. On the left there’s a curving white volume covered in ceramic bathroom tiles and a single metal tube coming out of its top like the railing of a swimming pool ladder. The end of this metal tube that touches the floor is pointed like a weapon. On the other side of the room there’s an austere metal structure that is modelled after a children’s swing with two seats — only in this case the swings are replaced by two angular slates of metal that dangle mournfully from their chains. Above the sculptures, two paintings of identical size are hanging from the ceiling like billboards. A red neon light in the same shape as those in the entrance tints the white wall with an ominous red glare.

The paintings at Monroe Springs are made using a limited palette of bright yellow, pink and red. At first sight, they seem cheerful and harmless, featuring lush palm trees and cartoonish forms painted sparsely on raw canvas. At closer inspection, and especially when one reads their titles, the paintings are in fact a blood bath, referencing violence both real and fictional. In the first room, the 2,4-meter-high painting Rodney King’s Liquor Circus (2019) is back-to-back with LA Guns (2019), referencing Rodney King’s beating by the LA Police in 1991 and the subsequent riots where over 60 people died. Hanging over the dystopian swings in the back room, the two paintings are referencing Kathy Acker’s violent postmodern writing (Cathy’s Eyelids, 2019) and Disney films (Bunny Love, 2019). The exhibition is constantly referencing the 1980s and 90s through various elements — whether that is the vintage roller skates, karate B-movies, the Los Angeles riots or Acker’s punk literature. This conscious decision relates to the constant tug of war that is taking place between violence and play throughout the exhibition, but also to the artist’s own nostalgia for a childhood that is becoming more and more distant (Maraziotis is after all a Millennial, born in 1984). This very clear reference to the late 1980s and early 1990s also highlights that although we change and move on, history repeats itself: this year we saw another filmed incident of excessive police violence in the US that sparked widespread riots, and we’re again sliding into a recession like in the 1990s.

Maraziotis incorporates these issues not only in each work separately but also in the conception of the exhibition as a whole. The nuanced, almost theatrical dramaturgy of moving from one space to the other, the underlying sadness that permeates every attempt to cheerfulness and optimism, the impact that the different materials have on the viewer, the show’s disorienting layout — all are elements that cannot be conveyed via photography and must be experienced in person. That said, Monroe Springs is not just a well-played game of perception and aesthetics, but also a melancholy recollection of the state of the world today. We were promised prosperity and peace, but we ended up with endless war and class oppression. We were promised a playground and we ended up in a torture chamber.

Review by Kiriakos Spirou, originally published on und-athens.com.

Marble columns; soaring arches; celebrated monuments that have stood for millennia. So often, it is these structures that stand in for “culture,” the proud embodiments that we mentally refer to as emblems of our civilizations. But in reality, they are the exception, the ostentatious outliers. So much more has been built over the span of human history using softer, mutable, ephemeral materials, such as wood, clay, and straw. And even more invisibly, there are those structures that underlie all of society, never taking a physical form at all: feeding, cleaning, caretaking, loving.

When we talk about shaping society, it is the imposing institutions that we are likely to think about first: parliaments, courts, and banks. But these towering peaks of stone and steel rarely take the time to acknowledge the interstitial materials they are built upon. It takes the prodding of an artist to remind us that we can lower our gaze from those that strive to reach the heavens, and find great beauty in our overlooked earthly underpinnings. Not only that, but if we truly want to shape society, it is in these unspoken spaces where we must focus our efforts.

This is the field which Paky Vlassopoulou explores in her work. Trained as a sculptor, Paky has confidence in her talents for formal and artistic production. But lately, her interests have expanded to examine how physical objects and shared spaces are interwoven within vast, underappreciated webs of invisible work. She continues to sculpt, but the materials she utilizes have evolved to include social ties, emotional bonds, and intimate relationships.

From early on, the social element of art was on Paky’s mind. Indeed, when she first began her education, she didn’t even think she would become an artist. Rather, she imagined she would organize concerts, exhibitions, and other gatherings to bring people together. But she quickly realized that she couldn’t live on the phone and behind a keyboard, only arranging events and programming for others. She re-committed to the idea of making art itself and started exploring the broad range of themes that art can address. She focused on tactile relationships, always through three-dimensional objects, putting special emphasis on the process of making, rather than the outcome. Reflecting on this perspective, she explains, “Sculpture is my first vocabulary. What I learned most about my work in school is that I always start with my hands, not my eyes. I am always thinking sensually, and about how we experience our environments spatially. My focus is on touch, not sight.”

Even during the time when Paky was making objects, the notion of mutability was key. She says, “My artworks were always ephemeral, including my built sculptures. Look at the fact that I’ve been working with clay and straw for ten years. I consider my clay to be a product of the earth, rather than as ceramic, a human technology. I sculpt in a way that is fragile, but also re-arrangeable. No matter what I build, it can always change. I don’t believe in the concrete.”

As Paky’s work developed, she realized that she was not just interested in the objects themselves, but what these objects reflected about the social structures they existed in. Her larger question became, “How can I make art in a way that can be decomposed and reconfigured in another assembly?” For example, counterintuitively, the first time Paky baked one of her clay pieces was just two years ago. But even then, this fixity was not for the sake of the object, but for the purpose of creating a social environment: the hardened piece was a carafe, which she used to serve wine at a performance. She says, “It was only when I thought to make a tool that my sculptures took on any permanence.” More recently, objects have receded further in Paky’s practice, used only as a means of bringing people together to share a space. Ultimately, she is still producing ephemeral sculptures, but these are now ones that each person can take home with them — that is, their shared memories of a group experience.

Paky’s increased flexibility has also opened her work in other directions, especially in terms of reaching broader audiences. She admits, “An important aspect for me is my social life outside art. This has led me to question how more people can engage with art, starting with my partner but extending to my friends, neighbors, and more. I believe that art can address issues such as freedom, identity, and social relations, and I cannot imagine myself questioning such universal issues solely within a narrow professional sphere.” As she pushes herself more in this direction, she signals at least one clear influence from within the art world, albeit a figure who reveals a path for breaking out of it: the Polish artist Paweł Althamer.

Like Paky, Althamer makes sculptural works with the goal of using his art as a means of “community building.” Drawing inspiration from such an example, Paky goes on to assert, “If you stay in a structure that is too narrow and hierarchical — such as the academy or the fine art world — it can only hurt your ability to communicate. Some years ago, I did an exhibition that was very pessimistic and that was addressed only to the art world. When it was over, I asked myself: Why? Whom am I talking to? Who is going to value my work? Only we, as individuals, can value our own work. Even if the best museums acquire it, nobody can tell you that what you have made, or done, or written is meaningful. The belief that you are somehow adding to the world has to come from yourself.”

Still, Paky is no solitary individualist. Although she might chafe against the weight of larger structures, she passionately believes in more agile forms of collective action. Take the artist-run space called 3 137 (three artists, located at 137 Mavromichali St in Athens), of which Paky constitutes an essential third. As she describes it, “3 137 began in 2012. It came out of an encounter, a debate about the agency that was possible in art. There was never a grand plan; it wasn’t a conscious response to the financial crisis. Rather, we realized from the beginning that there was a collective need for a place to gather, collaborate, and make exhibitions outside of the gallery system. Our initial interest was to map the city and its art scene, and question how things worked. We quickly became a small family, and then slowly began to expand outward. We invited various groups to our space, especially those from outside of the Fine Arts School. We mixed social networks, different social classes, all kinds of people. We used the radio to invite people from the neighborhood; we addressed the possibility of auto-didactism; we invited individuals who were in rehab. A friend of mine even did a show about how football could be used as a tool to fight fascism.”

Yet this effort of reaching out to others is never finished. Reflecting on the development of 3 137, as well as her own work, Paky confidently says, “Looking back, I can see how each one of my projects answers a question that I posed in the past.” But then she pushes herself to discover how her questions can become “more inviting for others (and accessible for more kinds of others).” She goes on, “I want to continue to invite as many different kinds of people to experience these questions with me — not just intellectually, but physically, by bringing them into the spaces I inhabit.”

While Paky tirelessly questions the structures in which she operates, she also recognizes that beyond her own work, or even the walls of 3 137, the city of Athens has changed dramatically since 2012. “Today,” she continues, “Athens is very different. Young people who are just starting out already know how to self-organize. There are artist-run initiatives all over the city. This means we now face a new set of questions: What are the gaps we still see in Athens? What role do we play to address them? For one thing, Athens is still missing state-run institutions supporting contemporary art. For another, it lacks sustainable means of discourse-production. In the former category, EMST, the city’s contemporary art museum, has been struggling for years, opening briefly and then closing its doors for long stretches. Paky explains, “When the institution put out a call for a new director, 3 137 sent in an application for the position, where we seriously suggested alternative governance models and tried to imagine how this institution could be sustainable. Our goal was to make this discussion public — so we then published our application. The lack of a functioning contemporary art museum in Athens is a major structural gap and we want to address it.”

But Paky, fresh from spending several months at WHW Akademija, a new arts study program in Croatia, wants to broaden her view beyond Greece. For her, two words are central not only to Greece, but the whole world right now: flexibility and precarity. On the side of flexibility, Paky is optimistic. Not only has this idea been present in her sculptures from the start, but she sees it extending to many other areas as well. “What is exciting about the moment we live in is the opportunity to see different civilizations and understand what they are doing,” she says. “We can begin to look past the hegemony of the West — recognizing the extent to which the US and Europeans have done really, really terrible things. I don’t mean to exoticize other civilizations but rather to acknowledge that we have been taught a constrained narrative that has nothing to do with the full possibilities of being human. The framework, from my point of view, has been super exclusive, extremely arrogant, and overly ‘productive,’ but in a very limited definition of production. Since the mid-20th century, the United States took over the paradigm of work, productivity, and usefulness. Fortunately, I think this is all starting to change. It’s an amazing moment to understand these structures, and thus ourselves, more clearly.”

On the other hand, flexibility also comes with a great deal of precarity. This has been sharply evident in Greece but can be seen in all parts of our late-capitalist world. “Beginning most visibly in 2008, many people in the middle class started to find themselves in situations of precarity,” Paky explains. “While this is sad in many ways, the positive aspect for me is that people who once had a safe position have been shaken, which creates space for connection between different layers of society. If precarity affects us all, that can force us to explore new structures and different ways of organizing ourselves. Amidst this crisis, my hope is that we will start to look around and see others who are more similar to us than we thought.”

Paky also appreciates the difficulty and uncertainty of embracing such precarity: “It’s more challenging to sustain flexible things. It’s very tiring. It’s easier to create clear laws, strict norms. If you follow a more open-ended approach, you have to work a lot.” At the same time, as with the marble temples cited at the beginning of this essay, our society cannot only be built on the hard and fast. For example, Paky pushes us to look at the domestic sphere: “While the public sphere is governed by explicit rules and codes of law, the space inside the home has many unspoken norms. Indeed, our entire society is held together by fragile, socially-determined, unstable relations — in the home, amongst families, between friends. Ultimately, I don’t believe we need to clarify every single rule, but rather, we need care and we need to perceive with care. We must recognize that providing care takes energy and time, and we need to value such efforts.”

To conclude our conversation, Paky moves from broad, speculative strokes to something more specific: the role of the artist. On this subject, Paky’s final words are exceedingly clear: “Provoke,” she urges. “What is close to you, in every moment, is the most important thing. As an artist, you must expose yourself to what’s really meaningful to you. You will have a reaction, and eventually these feelings will come back to you in a different form. This process always comes with difficulties — but in my mind, it is the only interesting way to live and create.”

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. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

3 137 is an artist-run space in the center of Athens that was established on a turning for the future of the city as a contemporary art destination and a manifold political battleground. In the past two years, artists and members of 3 137, Paky Vlassopoulou, Chrysanthi Koumianaki and Kosmas Nikolaou curated a contemporary art project that revolved around the state of the city, as this appears to be ten years after the founding of the organism; a financial breakdown of the Greek state, a documenta hosting and a pandemic later. 3 137 inaugurated F.A.R (Floor Area Ratio), a series of events, radio shows and workshops referring to the particularity of the housing problem in Athens and beyond, while addressing in a characteristically confrontational way the (art)world, and the urban condition under which their hybrid art organism has been born.

In June 2022, as part of F.A.R., the team curated “Ideas and Solutions for your Home”, a group show which took place in the space of 3 137 and the next-door building, former music club Enallax. In this final chapter of the F.A.R project, 3 137, particularly interested in the perception of the notions of home and housing, instigating from the paradigm of Athens, strived for a more esoteric, universal experience: the fragments of familiar memory, common images, the abstract outline of everyday objects that draws our impression of a household.

The group show hosted the work of Greek and international artists and collectives, archival material, design objects, artifacts and texts in order to put together a two-stage setting that enabled the viewer to engage with the artist’s interventions, intrigued by a feeling of coziness, subtly -yet constantly- invaded by a sense of estrangement. How can a house serve as a monument of use? How distinctive to the emotional gaze of its resident is the aesthetic stratigraphy of an apartment? The group’s curatorial approach of the project, instead of reflecting these questions from a certain distance to attempt an epistemologically “correct” aspect of the transitions occurred in inhabiting and cohabiting in the past few years, it aimed to inspect those transformations within the confidence of their subjectivity, like a neighbor behind their window (or perhaps the neighbor’s cat) observing the outside world from the -debatable- safety of their home. The 3 137 team, along with the artists invited, delved into the concept of “home”, as this can be experienced in a house, a neighborhood, a city, in a shared cultural or physical environment.

The show’s title “Ideas and Solutions for your Home” is a reference to an acclaimed design and decoration magazine, printed and published in Greece during the 1990s. In an era defined by a narrative of wealth and ambitious expectations (yet lacking Instagram filters and Pinterest), middle- and upper-class Greeks flipping through its pages, accessed an imagery of prosperity and perfection, culturally neutral and satisfying, with harmonic color tones, smooth fabrics and spacious rooms lacking human presence. Those ready-to-wear design settings and house trends invaded massively the properties of privileged at-the-time Greeks, who could finally buy their own houses with the blessings of the thriving economy and generous housing loans. Surprisingly, in the ongoing economical and real-estate context, the title sounds differently than it did twenty years ago: I unintentionally think of a problem that asks to be solved with good, redemptive ideas.

In the exhibition space, design objects and hand-made rugs from Thrace co-exist with Maria Toumazou’s disarticulated bed headboard, Shreyas Karle’s uninviting cushion, Hera Büyüktaşçiyan’s industrial, carpets with her personal, mysterious carved language, Andreas Sell’s photograph depicting all of his material belongings and Claire Fontaine’s Epikourou 26, key on the wall. With the mental image of the safety locks hanging all around Athens including keys of apartments for short-term rent, I stood above the archive material of the -now closed-Thessaloniki Design Museum staring at fragments of its un-housed collection.

Intimate and mysterious, Marc Camille Chaimowitz’s Vasque tapestry was placed strikethrough the glass window of the 3 137’s studio. Its surface served as a gate to a family room, invoking the feeling of entering a private space, where we have been welcomed at some point of our lives. With the uncanny pattern of decorative urns, the tapestry encloses a memory of the artist’s Jewish-French heritage and at the same time a reminiscence of the banal tapestries covering the walls of the apartments of our grandparents since the 1970’s. There, where one could find framed family photos and paintings, like the fragile canvases by Niki Gulema, lying on the floor and on the tapestried wall. Sensitive glimpses of color deriving from an obscure place of one’s personal history, Gulema’s works responded to the viewer’s uncertainty on how to pose themselves inside the gallery space: as a house guest with a slight reluctance, like the painting on the floor expecting to find its place on the wall.

Wandering in the exhibition space, in and out of the familiar premises of 3 137, out on the street of Mavromichali -my own neighborhood-, to the next-door building of Enallax club -a point of reference of another generation that makes me nostalgic of something I’ve never lived-, I kept thinking of the intensely sensitive nature of comfort. One can feel comfort in familiar spaces that they have once been inhabited or even in ones reminiscents of the latter. Equally, friendly faces can be often as heart-warming as familiar objects, like the ones in the photo prints of Eleni Bagaki hanging on the walls of the club’s first floor, her installation The Importance of Reading, Writing and Exfoliating. A mixer you cooked with ten years ago, a coffee machine that reminds you of your mother and strangely, objects that imply the former use of a stranger, as if their contact with human body broke their glossy, cold, industrial husk forever. All these everyday objects, devices and banal containers, most probably hidden in cupboards in professional design-architectural catalogues, don’t they signify the difference between a space that is being lived rather than just visited? Meanwhile, in the next room, Thodoros Tzannetakis presented for the first time his collection of Braun items, juxtaposing them with care on a case he discovered in the 3 137’s space. The electric devices with their own history, colorful, shiny objects, futuristic in their own time and eye-candies in the present, stand now out of use in a rare assemblage.

Comfort however, doesn’t go along with risk, and crossing boundaries is a risk worth taking. Curator Eva Vaslamatzi wrote a piece that, through her creative collaboration with graphic designer Stavros Bilionis, stood as an artwork on the front door of the music club. Visible and readable from the passers-by, Vaslamatzi’s text was an ode to the fluidity of the term of “space”: physical, domestic, inhabited, or historical. Discussing the rigidly definitive relation of space with time, she exposes herself as a creator moving gracefully into a position of which she has profound knowledge, yet it was never acquired by herself before. Fairly, 3 137’s choice to work solely as curators of this particular project, even though it is not primarily unexpected, since they have been actually curating the space’s program with the strict and the broader sense of the term for the past ten years, one can’t help thinking that it wasn’t the easiest way to go. From the large scale production the activation of a nearly abandoned building, to the creative insightfulness of involving young and established artists, archival material, exhibits from an ethnological art museum and the contributions of artist collectives, 3 137 ran thoroughly an ambitious and courageous curatorial project, owned it and most importantly shared it.

After the exhibition tour, I found myself on the terrace of the former music club, exposed to the actual residents of the neighborhood. An open space, viewed directly from dozens of windows and balconies of the surrounding blocks of flats, hosted the red silk banners of Byron Kalomamas Silk-Banners in Limbo or How to Undo the Meander and Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s installation She Vomits the Forty-Seven Oranges she Swallowed Whole for a Bet. They Fall from Her Mouth one By One Strings of Saliva Accompany Them. Neighbors would gaze at the top of the building from their own homes. They were watching us walk among the oranges, spread on the floor, an image well-known for the Athenians, since the streets of the city are occasionally covered with the products of a certain variety of citrus fruit trees. Kalomamas’ blood-red banners with their drawings seeming to have been extracted from a manual of a strange, complex machine, waved in the summer breeze. The former night club is now on sale.

*F.A.R. (FLOOR AREA RATIO)-PART III Ideas and Solutions for your Home took place between June 9 — September 24, 2022 at 3 137 artist-run space in Athens with the participation of: Eirini Apergi, Eleni Bagaki, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Katerina Charou, Elli Christaki & Thessaloniki Design Museum (Dorothee Becker, Bruno Munari, Aldo Rossi), Eteron — Institute for Research and Social Change, Claire Fontaine, Iannis Ganas, Niki Gulema, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Byron Kalomamas, Shreyas Karle, Pennie Key, Audrey-Flore Ngomsik, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Amalia Pica, Viktorija Rybakova, Andreas Sell, Evi Sougkara, Eric Stephany, Tastes of Damascus, Ethnological Museum of Thrace & Aggeliki Giannakidou, Maria Toumazou, Thodoros Tzannetakis, Eva Vaslamatzi, Come to Greece gia na tin vreis (Greg Haji Joannides, Em Kei)

3 137 (Paky Vlassopoulou, Chrysanthi Koumianaki and Kosmas Nikolaou), Eleni Bagaki, Niki Gulema, Byron Kalomamas, Pennie Key and Eva Vaslamatzi are SNF ARTWORKS Fellows.

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 Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS. She also works as a teacher and a copy editor.

The imminent threat of the collapse of cultural subjectivities that has steadily been looming, partially due to the torrent of digitization, has brought about a resurfacing of the study of the universality of the senses by multiple disciplines. The sensorial revolution, as defined by anthropologist David Howes, endorses a “more relational, less holistic perspective on “the body” and its various modes of “being-in-the-world”[2]. At the same time several concerns surrounding issues of disembodiment and dematerialization have been explored in theoretical research internationally. Art theorist Fay Zika has suggested that the claim for the unification of the senses and the arts can no longer be limited to the modernist era, rather should be extended to include today’s digital media through which new means of production and forms have emerged[3]. The use of super-media, data bases, mining, search engines, image processors and simulations in the production of art has revealed a dynamic multi-sensual approach to aesthetics, one that includes interactive participation and puts access and management of information in the core of the aesthetic experience. “Digital media is characterized by the multisensorial immersion and interaction”[4], permitting multiple experiences and perceptions of an artwork, one that departs from the singular consumption of a work through the prism of the artist’s intentionality. The artistic practice of Theodoros Giannakis uses these theories as a starting point to explore digital art and further the discourse between aesthetics and technological ethics.

Theodoros Giannakis is in his third year of his PhD at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He is preoccupied with the topic of cosmotechnics, “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making”[5]. The theory, formed by Yuk Hui, presupposes that there is no singular understanding of the notion of technology but several that vary from culture to culture, allowing numerous perceptions of morality to be acknowledged and accepted. Hui warns that “The Anthropocene is a global axis of time and synchronization that is sustained by this view of technological progress towards the singularity”[6], building a case for a rethinking of the definition of technology as formed by the rather dated, Eurocentric Heidegger argument. “To reopen the question of technology is to refuse this homogeneous technological future that is presented to us as the only option.” Giannakis is precisely interested in exploring the variety of subjective experiences of art, not only from culture to culture but even between different states of mind of an individual encouraging thus a reconsideration of technology’s effects.

The artistic practice of Theodoros Giannakis is not articulated in well-defined bodies of work. Instead it takes form as a constant flow with no firm beginning or end, not unalike the constant flow of information we are constantly exposed to. In both his solo shows, in Eleni Koroneou Gallery in Athens in 2018 and Union Pacific in London in 2019, there is a sense that that two did not occur in sequence but in synchronicity. The works fuse into others and co-exist with what has been and what can be imagined to be. The artworks seem to be in perpetual progress, only briefly pausing to be displayed till they rematerialize in other contexts, through different iterations that allow for additions and reductions, but mostly a rethinking of their purpose, use and effect. Much like his existential ponderings that have stigmatized an entire generation that can barely remember a life before digitization, time has been rendered redundant: “the Anthropocene heralds a collapse of the distinction between geological time and human time”[7]. In his solo show Primitivism mirage, Giannakis presented a collection of paintings, sculptures and installations. The works manufactured largely with 3D reconstruction, fabrication and default machine learning algorithms retell narratives of the past, present and future in co-existence. A blending of time through recontextualized symbols and mythologies achieves an atmosphere of otherworldliness, simulating past perceptions of futurism, largely drawn from early science fiction novels with an emphasis on William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The repetition of perspective grids in Giannakis’ practice reveals the desire to achieve a continuity, a view towards what is yet to materialize and a belief in the cyclical passage of time. The video installation of a real-time rendering of the continuous alternation of night and day through endless sunsets and sunrises in front of an infinite ocean accentuate this point even if only realistically but never real.

His following solo show at Union Pacific in London seemed to be a renegotiation of the previous show, fittingly entitled Always Already aka a primitivism mirage again. He repeats the phrase “always already” to himself, as if thinking out loud. It seems imperative to remind himself that this is the single solid, de facto truth to which he must constantly remember to return in order to ground his inside monologue. Always-already in phenomenological terms refers to the irreducible essence of a thing, being is always-already a given. Althusser claimed that an individual is always-already a subject, that their roles are ideologically predetermined. You get a feeling that this doctrine acts as a lifejacket for Giannakis, reassuring the plausibility of his subjectivity and releasing him from the heavy burden of what he feels to be his major responsibility: moralistic, all-encompassing objectivity as a visual artist. Always-already is a constant return to physicality and all its inherent constraints, something to wrap one’s mind around, even if only fleetingly. It allows one to refocus on the essence of things rather than ideas and meta-ideas surrounding them.

Philosophy of mind, the specialized approach to the study of the relationship between the mind and the body and the physical world is always present in the artist’s work. Various iterations of the Gorgoneion symbol, an ancient talisman said to be commonly worn by Zeus and Athena as a symbol of their descent from deities reappear. The Gorgoneion is always a representation of a, rather rare for Greek antiquity, confrontational, terrifying head, seemingly unattached to a body. In various primitive cultures, similar mask-like symbols are thought to have acted as reminders in order to scare the owner from doing something wrong. The gravitas of responsibility, the acceptance of the limitations of the genealogy of subjectivity and the need to remain in the substantial rather than the mental are in constant negotiation in the forms of Giannakis.

More Common Wild Flowers was published in 1948 by botanist John Hutchinson, known for his research in phylogeny of plants and the evolutionary relationships among species. Theodoros Giannakis tweaks the title of this study into More Common Mirrored Wild Flowers, 2016. The verbal addition to the title reveals part of his preoccupation concerning subjectivity and heterodefinition but the artist maintains the essence of the original’s purpose: the attempt to search for the evolved relationships between new-found species of existence. More Common Mirrored Wild Flowers references the term quantum satis, the minimum physical property necessary for any interaction. As if Giannakis is searching for what human relations can be reduced to before being redefined into a different ontology altogether. The classification reference that he carefully selected reveals the need to create a system of categorization of information, data, input, whether digital, emotional or physical. His artists books seem to be part of a much larger exploration for the artistic methodology that would allow the artist to classify and ultimately comprehend the powers at work in the creative process. More Common Mirrored Wild Flowers includes a series of short form essays that read as a stream of consciousness, interspersed by illustrations indicative of his aesthetic that seem indecipherable in a non-scientific context. Giannakis mentions that these artist books are vital to his artistic process as they act as notes in which he is drafting out his thinking. They read as a type of auto-fictional phenomenology, a study of structures of consciousness as experienced by the narrator. Phenomenology proclaims that the central structure of an experience is its intentionality, how it is addressed or directed towards something, an object. Giannakis suggests that the interesting thing about his writing is that it was not initially intended to be read by anyone, it was not therefore addressed to an object, which is what grants him the freedom for unfiltered exposure of sensual experiences.

How does matter compose itself around me? the artist wonders in the essay Wild Night. In possibly the most existential of all the texts included in the book, Giannakis travels through the fragmented materiality of the urban surrounding, alluding to a new-found natural environment. Mentions of nature are interspersed in the texts, in an attempt to return to the always-already safe space. The artist concludes in his own disembodiment, a type of voluntary human extinction in a posthuman future that finally succumbs to AI takeover. The sort of annihilation that can only be caused by vast amounts of matter that clutter the mind. A type of evaporation that can only be sensed and not explained, a unification of the artist’s senses and his artwork. The distinction of senses seems to have collapsed, the capacity to transcend their limits has been achieved, aesthetics and ethics have finally merged and posthumanism has prevailed.

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] Theodor G. Tzimas, More Common Mirrored Wild Flowers, epub, artist book, 2016.

[2] David Howes, Charting the Sensorial Revolution, Senses & Society, Vol. 1 Issue 1, Berg, 2006.

[3] Φαίη Ζήκα, Απορία Τέχνες και Σκέψεις Κατεργάζεται, Άγρα, 2018.

[4] David Howes, Charting the Sensorial Revolution, Senses & Society, Vol. 1 Issue 1, Berg, 2006.

[5] Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics, e-flux journal, Issue 86, 2017.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Interview of Yuk Hui by Giovanni Menegalle, A thousand Cosmotechnics, Research Network for Philosophy and Technology, 2018.