Fellow Field: Visual arts

This is a great time for contemporary art. A great generation. No one thinks they can change the world anymore: the world has already changed. For some people, the world as we know it does not even exist. Either nothing is real, or everything is flatlining. For us, disasters are happening elsewhere, yet within a varied measure of proximity. It is a truly incredible moment when artists don’t criticize the superficiality of society in the aggressive way they did in the previous decades. Neither are they wagging a finger at others. In this era, our era, and in this generation, our generation, artists are more fragile than ever, more knowledgeable and more curious, processing faster more complex information and not solely personal at that. Identity is redundant, the next frontier is so much more relevant. Going further onto the search for meaning, recognizing reality in the awareness of facts that count, our errors, missteps and the incredible volume of our failures, the state of unbalanced spaces we ―my generation and I― occupy seem to be able to generate loftier, freely flowing and intuitive results.

My generation of artists in the post-post-post universe of metadata, care a lot, as they navigate through venerable yet treacherous companies of dealers, curators, institutions and collectors. For my generation ―I am certain about that― once you care you are future.

We care because our world is too obvious. We experienced the most significant political changes of recent years in absolute apathy, deprived of our right to our daily dose of sea and sun during the collapse of the Soviet Union in August 1991, for example. No major powers paraded their armored vehicles down our streets, saluted our generals or stole our properties. We had no role in the emergence of the global movement or the fundamental changes that obliterated invisible borders and brought faraway geographies closer in seconds. Our values were chiselled during our formative years by Super Mario and the fantastical powers we savoured in the attempts to save Princess Peach. They were later redefined by film ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and the bulldozing of desire via geosocial networking mobile apps geared towards the possibilities of some sort of adulthood. By the time we could totally understand the work of Lena Platonos for example, we were probably too old to indulge in anything other than excessive consumption in a nondescript mall. However, we rigorously hung onto our affinities with a landscape that had possibly gone through everything we ever wanted, with but also without us. And for this, we deeply cared.

Our history, materially and conceptually, is significantly more fascinating for our post-goth boyfriends and girlfriends and our fluidity in digital metamorphosis rather than the ideal modalities mused by the poets, such as Helens of Troy or Madonnas. Recognizing their eternal unobtainability, we are sorrowfully sorry for the expenditure of desires that brought about a past condition of strange metaphors, both shameful and celebratory. Over the course of generating this generation, artists with completely new approaches started working in Athens, a city often associated with myths. Artists and the city itself ―a mythical relation of its own― have been ludicrously uninterested in each other.

Culture in Athens is still disconnected from everything else, from any systemic infrastructure.

The impossibility and irrelevance of mainstream education in the arts, the type of practices, techniques and rhetoric that maintain a certain sense of prominence, a kind of process that parrots without speaking for the highly sensible, create a skin under which we are all, without knowing who left it behind. In this terrestrial network everyone is involved, without having the slightest idea who gave them the code. Non-existent museums evidently do not reflect new thinking or tendencies. The studio, the street and Instagram are far more flexible and present, far more open to ideas that can make a difference. Until now there hasn’t been any considerable effort to place trust in this generation that no longer felt at home in the phenomenology of this reality or any other similar to it, but was instead more privileged by the immensity and the mobility of data.

Considering a different form of realism, these artists, who stood on the shoulders of miniature giants, were never destined to play a central role. Decentralized but connected, artists were extraneously galvanized in an unprecedented checkmate and boom! The King is gone ― long live the King. Under this simple but not after all simplistic context, I was called upon to reflect on the unknowable and then relate it to the imaginable. That meant to help inject a chance of vitality and caring in the work of hyper-informed artists in order to transcend a state of nihilism by embracing the truth of their realities. This is called Fellowship. This setup — from day one a radical inception since it is built on the many diabolic mechanisms of administrative agreements — was not the matter of buying and selling something. The offer to artists is founded on pure trust and caring, both things that are radical in themselves and, in the current conjuncture, an endangered species. The broad approach of each Fellowship inevitably boils down to a choice based on support and continuity rather than constraint. Strikingly exciting and otherworldy, this approach feels as exotic as French Vanilla and South African Pecan ice-cream in its flavour. Sick avant-garde harder than concrete.

From where I am standing, it defines a form of resistance and a return. A return to trust and commitment and a resistance to suspicion, mistrust and lack of faith which permeated every and each cell of social culture in the past. I would call this approach ‘resurgence of mushrooms’. I like mushrooms not only as a simile but also as a way of rethinking progress and evolution. Mushrooms are great species of plants, that come in elusive natural formations. Existing in conditions of unpredictability, mushrooms carefully entangle with other plants in order to survive, waiting to appear after the rain; they are so ingenious that they can disrupt the normative comfort forest floor: they can spring up in damaged landscapes in industrial ruins, showing that Instead of an expected progress where the idea of progress has already come and gone, real progress can be a far more precarious condition, a vulnerable indeterminacy or a trivial unpredictability. This precariousness is intriguing and rewarding: like a good black truffle or a Japanese matsutake, which are unique varieties of mushrooms, highly valued, quite elusive but also important in an ecosystem. Symbiotic, easily influenced by their surroundings but also growing fast in the right conditions, they can remain dormant for long but they become highly productive once germinated. It is difficult to find good mushrooms. First of all, one rarely looks for whole mushrooms. Most of them are either discarded by other animals or eaten by worms. Good mushrooms lie under the ground. Where they grow the soil shifts and cracks but you cannot see them easily. You can feel their presence from those who know how to hunt for them. Remember what we said about Super Mario? It is through such metaphorical thinking that I want to bring my argument forward and support my case for this sort of quiet resurgence and resilience I had not imagined before. For through an active involvement with the disarmingly charming integrity of a support structure, my sense of embarrassment and awkwardness of an uncaring, relentless past was not only challenged but justly retreated.

As a fellow of fellows myself, I experienced this sense of caring beyond the obstacles, curiosity outside the grand narratives; and an energy, which only the wildness of this generation can mediate. This is growth, and this is growth once again. Therefore, I did not only explore but I was instructed. By the artists themselves. In my many exchanges in recent months, I encountered projects that generated their own histories, deploying often a broad and, at other times a more intimate diversity of codes and symbols, only to evaluate and perchance subvert them. I was attracted by what it was felt consisted by an actual, real endeavour in the present time. Efforts that did not arise from the negation of everything and did not aspire to replace any power through denial. Rather, the concerns that struck me and the ones that grew in me were those that managed to emerge as a developed part of multiple realities in a way that could not be reduced to anything but themselves. The stories that make a difference are neither stories of power nor of enclosing the world in art-historical narratives. Their strength lies in the combination of rigour and constraints, the barriers of experimentation imposed by systemic obstacles and an indefinable spirit of adventure that circumstances of unpredictability can bring about. The host mechanism here has broken new ground. It has remoulded the role of facilitating the significance for cultural production as the bloodline of every potential landscape and as a simple metaphor for life; the osmosis of current ideas, whose significant mark entails an affirmation of the minor scale and senses. Why is it necessary to pollinate, why is it essential to create natures and rethink our ecosystems? The key and fascinating aspect in this process, a process that regards hosting as vital, implies an alteration of the normative, which can be seen as world-making: the ability to make workable arrangements, invent new categories and revitalize processes such as description and imagination but also production, generation and discussion.

A fruitful landscape, has been set up here: it allows one to remain curious, ask questions and try to identify what they are looking for through what has been ignored because it possibly never fit in the narrative of a timeline of a different progress. It is only through trust that new assemblages can develop. A funding scheme like the fellowship programme, and the fellows of fellows ―so unique in the local context― are groundbreaking, after a dead decade that has shifted the possibilities of breeding, of growing culture. Amongst many things I saw, the most deeply moving features the polyphonic assemblage of the project’s entire inception. Gathering rhythms, breathing in the varied temporalities of maturation, believing in the a-simultaneity of ripening and nourishing these with the sensitivity and the fragility of a virtuous desire to just make visible and only allow a growth process, and believe in it, whatever this might be and regardless the outcome. From monsters to swans, the non-dilemma of whole-heartedly providing the conditions for positive encounters and a sense of continuation is contaminating this landscape. Contamination is our new King. Purity is not an option. This form of ecology in the local cultural landscape catapulted me not only beyond academic knowledge but also to places where varied languages, histories and traditions showed me innumerable possibilities in the making, patterns of coordination, assemblages of a cultural economy and the different fullness of caring. Returning therefore to the beginning.

It is indeed the most exciting period for contemporary art as Athens is experiencing an intense moment of cross-contamination.

Might we then dare think of the continuously new generations of artists as a form of symbiosis of different species? Both Marios and mushrooms? I think we can. Recently, following the most forceful shift in direction, the heavy rain has produced an abundance of new species that slowly spread across the ground and loom large over a world that had become a terrifying place. Here, in that edge, of many insides and outsides there is room for imagining worlds. The kind of blurred boundaries that mark the current moment demands a getting by without the horizon of progress but through persistence, caring and commitment yearning for unpredictability, surprise and continuous growth. In the post-post-post universe of metadata, rebuilding curiosity and a renewed love for learning, protecting and understanding has to be and to always remain an inconclusive project. A fantasy platform where artists as artists can constantly show us what it is to imagine new adventures.

ARTWORKS Mentor 2018 Vassilis Oikonomopoulos is a Curator at LUMA Foundation Arles. Prior to LUMA Vassilis, was the Assistant Curator, Collections of International Art at Tate Modern. He worked with Tate’s Middle East and North Africa Acquisitions Committee on formulating Tate’s strategy in the region. At Tate Modern, he has co-curated the retrospective exhibition Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture and also organised the 2016 Hyundai Commission Anywhen, with French artist Philippe Parreno in the Turbine Hall.

Content warning: text & images contain elements of violence that might disturb sensitive audiences.

Publication Histories

The present text is a short version of the article originally published in Performance Philosophy Vol.7, №2 (2022):111–140 [DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2022.72360, ISSN 2057–7176], based on the author’s practice-led Ph.D. Thesis in Philosophy & Fine Art (Performance) at the Royal College of Art in London, supervised by Prof. Johnny Golding (Primary) & Prof. Nigel Rolfe (Second, 2015–2019), and supported by the Onassis Foundation Scholarship for Research studies (Scholarship ID: F ZL 027–1/2015–2016).

Introduction

The paper problematizes the ways in which performance art might be philosophy, and vice versa, that is; how philosophy might operate as embodied praxis and method. The performance practice under discussion stands as the research’s starting point, method and output, with all the works brought forward being conceived and performed by myself. However, the deliberate use of a third- person phrasing (e.g. ‘the performer’, ‘the artist’) while describing these performances serves as a strategic methodological choice of narration, so as to avoid oversentimentality, egocentrism, and a sense of diary/confession writing, even more so due to the already quite visceral character of the live works presented.

Performance as Philosophy / Philosophy as Embodied Practice

The main hypothesis adopted is based on the argument that philosophy, though predominantly thought of as a rational ideological construction, is essentially an invitation towards change and a method on how to lead one’s life (Hadot 2001, 148). This position has been particularly stressed by philosophers Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault, who revisited ancient Greek philosophy to indicate how embodied practices might operate as methodologies for leading one’s life. Foucault, in the late years of his life, focused on the notion of parrhēsia (Greek term indicating a particular kind of courageous truth-telling) as practiced by the Cynics and early Christian ascetics (Foucault, 2011), in the context of his research on a new hermeneutics of the subject (Foucault 2005) that would comprise technologies of the body in the form of care of the self and others. It is in that respect that one should look at Foucault’s engagement with sadomasochistic practices; as a laboratory (Rabinow 2000, 151) for “the creation of new forms of life” (Rabinow 2000, 164).

Violence as an Apparatus towards Performance-as-Surface / Life-as-Surface

In light of the above, this text discusses how performance strategies related to violence might suggest a radical re-thinking and revisiting of philosophy as embodied practice and method towards a life-as-surface, that is; a life experienced in its full intensity and in pure joy. Violence in the context of this research is defined as any force exercised among bodies at the moment of their encounter, with its effect having a severe impact on the bodies upon which it is applied. The way that violence operates in the live works put forward, differentiates itself from what seems to be at stake in existing examples in the field of performance art discourse, and brings to light alternative points of view than those already argued in the relevant bibliography (e.g. O’Dell 1998). On the contrary, violence is here rethought of as a technological apparatus for the generation and distribution of intensities within each live work, via the transmutation of the performer’s body into flesh, stripped of any given subjectivities. In so doing, the performance practice at stake, manages to operate as surface: as a field occupied only by intensities, thus also overlapping with Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body without Organs (Artaud 1988, 571; Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 177– 8). Therefore, the images created by the performer’s postures, movements and/or marks on the skin, would be but a manifestation of forces traversing the artist’s body at any given moment. In this way, the performer essentially takes the risk to reveal — while also protecting — a life which is radically other, a life affirmed as it is and as it is lived, without any ideological or moral presuppositions. Consequently, what is at stake in the works presented, would be contemporary performance art’s ability to operate as a locus of parrhēsia, and as an invitation to a new ethical life.

Works of violence

Following from violence’s definition as any force exercised among bodies at the moment of their encounter, with its effect having a severe impact on the bodies upon which it is applied, the works of violence brought forward could be distinguished into two categories: (a) performances in which violence takes place at a time prior to the performer’s appearance in front of an audience, and (b) works in which violence takes place during the ‘actual’ performance, either live or in a video format reproducing an action that has already happened in the past (during a performance piece or within a private consensual environment). In the first category (a), violence is presented either through marks left on the performer’s body as a trace/remainder, e.g.: bruises, imprints, and/or abrasions, or is implied through rituals of care that would constitute the ‘actual’ performance work, called upon to manage violence’s traumatic remainder.

Given the phrase ‘severe impact’ in the adopted definition of violence above, it would be necessary to investigate how this severe impact gets manifested in the performances discussed. In the following examples of works, this impact would be usually read via its residual expressions that constitute proof, testimony, and memory of the event of violence. Such residual expressions would include:

1. The intensities produced and distributed in the work, accompanied by the production of images of a body in spasm assuming positions and generating images that would be impossible to be engendered without the application of forces on the performer’s body and without the mediation of pain.

2. The creation of marks on the performer’s skin, such as: imprints, bruises, abrasions, or even breakings of the skin tissue (e.g. using body stapling), manifesting trauma-as-corporeal trace.

3. Rituals of care following the effects and affects of the violent forces exerted at a time prior to the performance work, including their residue-as-trauma.

Vulnerability/Affectability

In the performances discussed, the testimony of a body submitted to violence during its encounter with other bodies, would indicate the ability of this body to affect and be affected by other bodies and forces. This ability would be named as affectability or vulnerability. Therefore, what is essentially at stake across this series of works of violence is the performer’s ability to exhibit a vulnerable and sensuous body affirming life as it is.

Towards a Politics of Intimacy & an Ethics of Care

To sum up, works of violence in my performance practice operate as fields occupied only by intensities where parrhēsiastic games take place to reveal life-as-surface, after shattering all essentialist categories and ideological hierarchies. Within this suggested condition of successive entanglements where bodies intra-act with other bodies, the possibility of a new ethics of care emerges. The following question, then, arises: are there any ethical limits within performance-as-surface and, consequently, life-as-surface? What would be the thickness and the porosity of those limits? After dismissing all kinds of morality, what is suggested instead would be the investigation of modes of conduct based on ideas of care; with care understood here as the maintenance of one’s ability to be useful. Given that one agrees with Agamben’s definition of intimacy as “use-of-oneself as relation with an inappropriable” (Agamben 2016, 91), then the performances brought forward would allow for intimate coherences to happen, not on the grounds of possession — and thus exchangeability — but on the uninterrupted circulation of forces via the use of the performer’s body, that would then be able to shapeshift across various fluid subjectivities, through use-of-oneself. In the suggested paradigm, therefore, care would not only be an ethical apparatus to safeguard the performer’s usefulness, but also a potential social contract for a new ethical life towards being surface.

Links for performances discussed (links working at time of publication)

Corner Time (2016) https://mai.art/projects/asone despinazacharopoulou.com/corner-time
vimeo.com/197389133
Introduction (2015) despinazacharopoulou.com/introduction-hzztl
vimeo.com/147328308
Being a threat (2016) despinazacharopoulou.com/being-a-threat
vimeo.com/195880210
Aftercare Ι (2016) despinazacharopoulou.com/blank-1
Love *me* (2017) despinazacharopoulou.com/love-me
D’après S.K. (2017) despinazacharopoulou.com/d-apres-s-k vimeo.com/221403826
Aftercare IΙ (2016) despinazacharopoulou.com/blank-1
Surface (2017) despinazacharopoulou.com/surface-live-to-camera-ii
https://vimeo.com/249317661
Pudeur (d’après F.N.) (2017) despinazacharopoulou.com/pudeur-d-apres-f-n
vimeo.com/265869390
Pudeur II (d’après F.N.) (2018) despinazacharopoulou.com/pudeur-ii-d-apres-f-n
Aphorism (2019) despinazacharopoulou.com/aphorism
Response-ability (d’après K.B.) (2017) despinazacharopoulou.com/response-ability-d-apres-k-b
vimeo.com/249951756

General Bibliography

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Agamben, Giorgio. 2016. The Use of Bodies. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Artaud, Antonin. 1988. Selected Writings. Translated by Helen Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12101zq
Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl
R. Lovitt and Donald N. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
— — — . 2012. Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin.
Braver, Lee. 2014. Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
— — — . 1989. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze / Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translated by Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books.
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2013. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350251984
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Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
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Freud, Sigmund. 2005. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin.
Golding, Johnny. 1996. “Pariah Bodies.” In Sexy Bodies the Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, 172–180. London and New York: Routledge.
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Hadot, Pierre. 2001. La Philosophie comme manière de vivre. Paris: Albin Michel.
Haughton, Miriam, ed. 2018. Staging Trauma: Bodies in Shadow. London Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53663-1
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Holzner, Steven. 2013. Quantum Physics for Dummies. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Johnson, Dominic, ed. 2013. Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey. London: Intellect and Live Art Development Agency.
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Biography

Dr Despina Zacharopoulou is a performance artist, theorist and academic, born in Arcadia, Greece, currently working between London and Athens. Despina completed her practice-led Ph.D. in Philosophy & Fine Art (Performance) at the Royal College of Art, London (Onassis Foundation scholar), supervised by Prof. J. Golding (Primary) and Prof. N. Rolfe (Second, 2015–2019).

Her practice investigates performance art as surface, and philosophy as embodied practice and method towards a life which is radically other. Her work has been presented at events of global impact, e.g.: AS ONE by the NEON Organization & the Marina Abramović Institute (Athens, 2016); London Frieze (2016, 2017); A Possible Island? By the Marina Abramović Institute & the 1st Bangkok Art Biennale (Bangkok, 2018–19), etc. Press/Publications include articles in: Performance Philosophy Journal, New York Times, The Nation Thailand, Liberal Newspaper Greece, The Art Newspaper Greece, etc. Dr Zacharopoulou has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021) and holds the position of the Course Leader of the Contemporary Art Summer School at the Royal College of Art in London.

www.despinazacharopoulou.com

© 2022 Despina Zacharopoulou

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Let me go straight into the heart of the matter — the focusing on young artists as the motive power of change, on youth’s innate ability to reshape radically the artistic landscape — through an example from the past: a little-known artistic event which can function as a prism, or, better still, as a snow globe. Let’s shake the globe and travel magically across time to 1963 Athens. Don’t be fooled by the snowflakes — the setting is bustling Patission Street in midsummer. In a room at the School of Fine Arts of Athens, AICA Hellas organises the group exhibition Young Greek Artists. We have no pictures of the works on show, but we do have the triptych brochure. It contains the artists’ names, the titles of their works and a brief text by the “curators” (in quotes: the term was not established at that time) which sets out the following rationale:

Alongside the visits to places and works of art from ancient and Byzantine Greece, we meant to give the opportunity to our colleagues from the International Art Critics’ Association to form an idea about the artistic production of an utterly contemporary Greece. Thus we have gathered here a brief yet representative panorama of the current work by young Greek painters and sculptors from all movements. Aside from the participants’ age limit — up to 45 years — our choice was based on the vibrancy of works executed as recently as possible, on the promises they show or those they have already fulfilled. Some of the exhibitors we invited are already known to our colleagues, others not yet. Some others were invited but could not, for various reasons, submit recent work. There are certainly more out there who await to be discovered; there are also some who have to convince us of the import of their current work. This exhibition represents a selection, and all selections involve some arbitrariness. Here we tried to keep it to the minimum, giving space to every work that betrayed a glimmer of creativity. Our colleagues, upon viewing these works, will tell us to what extent we have succeeded. We do not know the impressions of the foreign art critics whom the exhibition meant to inform and entertain.

However, the names of those young Greek artists — twenty painters and eight sculptors — show a remarkable prescience. Apart from four or five who are known today only to those well-versed in contemporary Greek art, most of those artists were to play a leading role in the country’s art life.3 Seen from today’s viewpoint, with the hindsight of the participants’ subsequent course and contribution, describing the show as merely successful would be an understatement: we could say that it turned — at least on a symbolic level — a new leaf for the visual arts in post-war Greece. Incidentally, one year earlier Thomas Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift” to define the transition from a scientific model in crisis to a booming new one.4 In this sense, this 1963 exhibition certainly constituted a new “prospective paradigm”.

As a reference and starting point, this exhibition paradigm as it is expressed in the organisers’ rationale can be useful in evaluating similar ventures, in this instance ARTWORKS5 that supports and promotes the work of young Greek artists. Moreover, thinking dialectically, we are called upon to identify the similarities and differences in the art, the mentality and the skills between the youths of 1963 and those of today, who are beginning — or ending prematurely — a promising creative course. It is true that young Greek artists represented and still represent, despite the losses from the scourge of brain drain, the “utterly contemporary Greece”. It is also true that all young artists who live in Greece face constant competition from the so-called “glorious past” or “tradition” or “ancient Greek and Byzantine legacy”, against which they are measured — not to mention “a sun that ain’t kidding” which one needs to take seriously into account. It is often said that Greece has some noteworthy contemporary art, but the statement has never been axiomatic: establishing the fact in the public’s conscience requires a consistent visionary drive — ideally, a strong set of concurrent activities organised or supported by private or public organisations, collectors, curators, art critics, gallerists, publishers as well as the artists themselves. Today, to be sure, the restrictive division into “painters and sculptors” is obsolete. Young Greek artists now express themselves through a broad range of media (painting, sculpture, drawing, installations, collage, performance/live art, video, photography, text, new media art) used in parallel or combined (in the “post-medium condition” so to speak), but this is not to say that there aren’t still some champions of purity — artists devoted exclusively to a single medium or genre. As in 1963, several young Greek artists are active abroad, having already exhibited at major galleries, independent art spaces, biennials and prestigious institutions. The difference is that today’s youths are multi-skilled. Take for example the 45 visual artists supported by ARTWORKS in its first Programme: almost all of them can write very well (statements on their work as well as texts on theory), sometimes equally well or even better than many young art historians and critics. Almost all hold a postgraduate degree, some continue to PhD level, and more than a few work also as curators, having studied the subject; also, many are knowledgeable in web design and self-publishing. It becomes evident that young Greek artists are now fully in tune with their foreign colleagues in terms of interests and skills. Apart from the diametrically opposed social conditions which are crystallised in the progress/decline dipole, there is also a radically different mentality among today’s young artists.

The years of wandering (Wanderjahre) as part of young artists’ training and a prerequisite for their aesthetic cultivation have long ceased to be a priority. The journey to Italy, highly popular in Dürer’s time but also a sine qua non for many artists who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s,8 has given way to browsing around the Internet. Indeed, in many cases the traits and traces of such an experience make up the subject matter of the work of young artists. In 2010, on the occasion of the first solo exhibition of Petros Moris, I had noted the importance of these virtual travels in his work: “Navigating this changeable, prolific and highly scattered atlas of the internet — not unlike the ‘atlas of the impossible’ which Michel Foucault attempted to unfold in his groundbreaking essay The Order of Things — the artist uses diverse aspects of human activity to describe a new, dematerialised materialism”. Indeed, no one disputes the fact that the traditional ways of acquiring knowledge — travelling, libraries, museums, the external reality — have been largely replaced by this vast, constantly renewed encyclopaedia with the endless reserves of stored memory: the Web. In the case of KERNEL, a group comprising Theodoros Giannakis, Peggy Zali (ARTWORKS Fellow 2018) and Petros Moris (ARTWORKS Fellow 2018), the theory and the experience of Internet culture constitute a major field of interest and engagement. As they note, “We approach the Internet as a model ‘space’ where the phenomena of cultural and political action that concern us are crystallised and presented for exploration in a cohesive way. So although our work is not predominantly about the Ιnternet as a medium or the tradition of ‘Ιnternet art’, it often employs Ιnternet tools and is considerably shaped by the new consciousness proposed by the age of networks”.

In 2010, KERNEL curated the exhibition Full/Operational/Toolbox, in which they explored the idea of “the artwork as a hybrid object, as a flow of multiple manifestations and possibilities”. The exhibition included the project Index of Potential, an Internet library the group had set up earlier that year. In order to bring this collaborative library from the digital to the real world, KERNEL erected Dexiontype shelves to store printouts and borrowed books which had been previously uploaded on the website of the project. Standing out on one shelf was the English edition (Penguin Classics) of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (together with the Dictionnaire des idées reçues). In some peculiar way the subject of the exhibition, which promoted the “idea of an alternative economy of creativity”, was reflected in the contents of this ‘crazy book’ as well as in the special processing of the author’s style, which stands out for “a maniacal obsession with transitions and with the repetition of words”, as Roland Barthes observes.

Bouvard et Pécuchet undoubtedly foreshadows many of the obsessive interests of today’s artists. It is no accident that in the personal statements in which the 45 young artists supported by ARTWORKS comment on their work we find words like “obsession”, “mania”, “excess”, nor that most of them perceive art as “constant probing”. As they state themselves, their key interests include “the appropriation of existing archive material”, “interdisciplinary approaches”, “conveying a timeless reality”, “combining seemingly unconnected themes”, “public space as a field of research and exploration”, “the concept of physicality”, “the materiality of the media”, “appropriation of space”, “forms of fakeness“, “the endless process of acquiring knowledge and information”, “the introduction of pseudo-scientific processes in an artistic context”. All this explains how the art of young artists, Greek or otherwise, has the gift of sorting and amalgamating (Marcel Schwob), strives for hermetism (Stéphane Mallarmé) and values the poetics of Pataphysics (Alfred Jarry). Among other things, the works of young artists display an enviable maturity, and in this they differ little from their older colleagues. One may well wonder whether youth in art has ceased to exist as a distinct age group.

Let us come back to the present in a somewhat cinematically violent way: the snow globe falls off the old narrator’s hands and shatters; the snowflakes fall in a shapeless white mass, another type of landscape. Most of the young Greek artists in the 1963 exhibition are no longer around. Nevertheless, their “promise” and their “vibrant works” (indubitably such by the innocent criteria of a bygone age) bore fruit, leaving a weighty legacy for subsequent generations. Are these 45 talented artists to have a similarly brilliant trajectory? Will their work and actions leave their mark on the art life of this country? Chances are the secret of success lies in the element of deviance. I recall an interesting thought by Marc Augé: “It is those [artists] who innovate and possibly surprise or baffle, who, in retrospect, will fully emerge in their time. We need the past and the future to be contemporary”. In his latest book the eminent anthropologist, now at an advanced age and contemplating the approaching end, takes it one step further with this aphorism: Old age does not exist. […] Time is a palimpsest. […] we all die young.

Christopher Marinos, art historian, curator and ARTWORKS Mentor 2018, regularly contributes articles to the greek and international press. He has edited a large number of publications on contemporary Greek art, including Possibilities: Interviews with Young Greek Artists (futura, 2006), The Work of Curating (AICA Hellas, 2011), Maria Karavela (AICA Hellas, 2015) and Vlassis Caniaris (Cultural Foundation of Tinos, 2016). In 2008, he founded the online art journal kaput, while in 2013 he was part of the curatorial team of the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA and chief editor of the two accompanying publications (Guidebook and Anthology). From 2012 to 2015, he was the president of the Hellenic Section of the International Association of Art Critics — AICA Hellas. In 2013, he formed part of the curatorial team of the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA and chief editor of the two accompanying publications (Guidebook and Anthology).

“This is what we’ve waited for
This is it, boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As ninety-nine red balloons go by

Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify and classify

If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here”[1]

Born in 1987, two years before the fall of the Iron Curtain, in Soviet Ukraine, Alexandra/Sasha Streshna moved to Athens, Greece at the age of 11. It shouldn’t therefore come as a surprise that Streshna is haunted by grand historical narratives. What role have they played in western history? How have they been formulated in the realm of art? How do they affect the people that are directed to enact and consume them? What can and should be accepted as real and what as construction? Streshna’s oil on canvas figurative representations follow the tradition of western painting while depictions of battles, violence and authority are the central recurring themes in her research and her artistic process. Her paintings often reference the typical war scenes that can be found hanging in all important museums around the world. Her original starting point, however, has an unexpected twist that render the works far more complex than their predecessors. Streshna captures the zeitgeist of today’s comprehension of notions of power and their contemporary mutations.

The instrumentalization of history and the process of identity-building through national narratives of heroism and strategic regressions between victimization and hegemony are concepts interspersed in Streshna’s works. The allegorical imagery she appropriates reveals an underlying David and Goliath moral of good and bad while suggesting that the unspoken, is what unveils a more intricate and far more comprehensive portrait of the past. This is Streshna’s way of challenging the idea of the grand narrative, the carefully edited and meticulously crafted latticework of what has been. The intention is to showcase a frustration with or disappointment in the collapse of a single universal truth which most of us have been raised to believe in. This entails a loss of faith in institutional values such as the historical narrative that is reminiscent of the theory of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). Lyotard argues that since World War II, personal micronarratives have replaced the grand narrative as a means of understanding social shifts and politics precisely because the truth seems to be increasingly debatable. He suggests that the loss of faith brought about by the collapse of grand narratives has led to the challenge of scientific knowledge, that can only become legitimate again if transformed into computer data, or potentially even pixels on a video game monitor.

After Streshna completed her MA at Central St. Martins she embarked on a series of paintings, entitled Charles, 2012–14. The original reference were pages from 1970s soviet school world history textbooks. These, as in fact all high school history lessons, are a storytelling tool that apart from educating, aim to build and reinforce national identity. Streshna selects and crops certain illustrations and reproduces them in a painterly technique that is meant to obscure the original event they depict, challenging the validity of the grand historical narrative that they were originally telling. Thus, the mechanism of collective memory-building is transformed into an activity of personal deconstruction and self-imposed amnesia. The tools so often connected to memorization and mindless repetition, are transformed into obfuscation mechanisms. The titles of the works reference the events so abstractly that it would require a compulsive need to get to the truth to understand what they depict. In fact, even the artist’s title-giving process is an act of discombobulation including works such as К оружию!, 2014, Radioactivität, 2013 and Malocher, 2014 which only obscurely reference events and notions studied in history, as taught within the Soviet Union. In her work, 1775, 2012 a blurry image of a horseback monument, most likely a military figure, surrounded by a crowd that seems to be rioting could be a nod to the Pugachev-Cossack Rebellion against Catherine the Great that took place in the Russian Empire in the entitled year. Herero, 2012 is potentially a work concerning the German-Herero conflict between 1904–1907 following Germany’s colonial attack in South West Africa and the subsequent extermination of 75% of the Herero population. However, these can only be a viewer’s guesses as the artist is uninterested in offering any further explanation on her depictions as that would defeat the purpose of her intention, camouflaging the depicted events. During this time, Streshna received for her painting the first of many awards, scholarships and accolades by the, particularly appropriate, Athens War Museum. It was followed by the Charles Oulmont Award, a short list for the Griffin Art Prize, the Spyropoulos Foundation Young Artist Award, the apexart NYC Foundation exhibition organizer grant, the Neon Curatorial exchange program and, until now, the Artworks Fellowship.

In Streshna’s painting, text of various languages is often included on the canvas itself in various forms. Either as a reproduction of the book texts or cropped captions of the original illustrations or even as her own painterly addition of words. Never consistent in language, Streshna utilizes text almost as a reminder that languages from other nations might be telling a known story differently or even an entirely unknown story that seems to have been lost in translation. Born into one language and being raised in another, such as Streshna, creates a particularly unique circumstance of dissociation between thinking and uttering. Not as easily compartmentalized as traditional bilingualism, it pertains that one is connected to a specific language, thus culture, as native in one stage of life and cognitive development and to a different one in another. Such a trajectory initially confuses but also enrichens one’s sense of belonging, consequently one’s national and cultural identity. It is therefore an in-between state in which communication becomes loaded with a philosophical quest for the authenticity of subjectivity. As Gerhard Richter says: The first impulse towards painting stems from the need to communicate:”[2].

In the following years, between 2015 and 2018, Streshna focused on two series of works entitled Dark Age and Iconic. Loyal to her preoccupation with grand historical narratives, she embarked on a depiction of the Pergamon Altar’s frieze that illustrates the gigantomachy battle between the gods of Olympus and giants. Her painterly process involved painting the canvas over and over again for a long period of time until even the artist herself had forgotten what the original image reference had been. Almost as if to test herself if even she could forget the histories and myths that had forged her and were finding their way onto her canvases. The completed paintings are extremely thick-layered but ultimately abstract, while the original depiction has been beaten to obscurity by her brushes and hidden behind a seemingly sculptural plane of oil. Streshna named these works after irrelevant phrases that sound almost comical as viewers struggles to see in the painting what the title tells them to. In Iconic, the artist tackles quintessential themes of western painting such as the nativity scene, the Ascension and the birth of Venus. Her original art historical references are once again barely detected in the painting and the titles only slyly imply, if that, their origin. Once again, the audience is left wondering on the distance between title-text and image, depending mainly on their own self-confidence to pinpoint what it is they are looking at and if they are in on the joke or not.

In 2019, painter Ilias Papailiakis curated Streshna’s solo show, HELLO!, a series of works that deal with popular first-person shooter video games and their respective simulations of military combat. Returning to her preoccupation with violence, Streshna does not distance herself from her original western painting references. She however evolves her approach to an of-the-moment reiteration and understanding of warfare. Moving from a historical approach to an anthropological one, the artist illustrates the contemporary representation of war, which is a simulation of one. Recently the debate about whether gaming can be considered an artform came to an end through the judicial ruling in a case against one of the most popular video games Call of Duty, originally designed to emulate scenes of World War II. Known for its particularly realistic depictions of warfare, the game includes the use of a well-known military vehicle, whose trademark owner sued the game’s production company over licensing. The judge declared “If realism is an artistic goal, then the presence in modern warfare games of vehicles employed by actual militaries undoubtedly furthers that goal.[3]” Such a court ruling allows gaming to be considered an artistic form and Streshna to freely access it as yet another artistic reference. Not much was mentioned in the verdict concerning the, apparently not unprecedented, normalization of violence through the realistic depiction of warfare.

HELLO!, an ironically enthusiastic expression of joyful introduction or perhaps even an absurd order, is a rather interesting evolution for Streshna because she delves further into the mechanisms of war and their capacity to drive grand narratives. Here, she studies not only the manner in which war is presented in order to build collective memory and construct national narration, but its contemporary depiction on a screen through which war is both enacted and witnessed to be as real as possible, to the point of copyright infringement. Undeniably Streshna takes a nod from Jean Baudrillard’s infamous The Gulf War Did Not Take Place[4], who clearly states: “the consequences of what did not take place may be as substantial as those of an historical event. The hypothesis would be that, in the case of the Gulf War as in the case of the events in Eastern Europe, we are no longer dealing with ‘historical events’ but with places of collapse.” Streshna’s paintings therefore have evolved into questioning the notion of reality-construction not through representation but through simulation. She goes as far as drawing a comparison between what has occurred and what we assume has occurred. In the end, this is an existential conundrum fitting to her capacity in abstracted painting and draws a direct parallel with Baudrillard’s idea of collapse in terms of representation.

The aforementioned places of collapse trigger my own personal childhood memory and particularly the life-forming experience of watching footage of the Gulf war on television in Greece and asking my parents: “Is this going on right now as we eat our dinner? Are they really bombing cities and killing civilians, as we speak?” I vividly remember the self-imposed and perhaps willing, if not necessary, suspension of disbelief that was presupposed when faced by the all-prevailing image on a TV screen emitting war scenes of world news. I can’t help but wonder if the same was in fact true when Sasha Streshna watched at a tender age the televised collapse of Eastern Europe illustrated by a huge party surrounding the remnants of a wall, somewhere far away from her living room. Today’s dominant abundance of micronarratives, or subjectivities, such as mine or Streshna’s, otherwise the postmodern condition, can be traced back to language. Definitions of words such as justice and injustice become unclear and the foundation of ethics loses credibility, as Lyotard proclaimed in Au juste: Conversations (Just Gaming), (1979). Not unlike the study of linguistics, cultural relativism inevitably leads to dilemmas of accepting two understandings of justice that are by definition incompatible with each other. In fact, the capacity to acknowledge the difference and to attempt to bridge the two different notions, and definitions, of a single translated idea from two different subjectivities, is where the solution may lie. But then again, that is only one subjectivity, mine. As James Elkins mentions in his analysis of Lingchi photography in the essay On the Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture: “Formal analysis, compositional analysis, iconographic inventory, narrative reconstruction — all the supposedly preparatory, elementary, rudimentary ways of looking — are far from neutral encounters with visual objects. They are, I think, cold and often cruel dissections of visual objects.[5]”

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.

*“The die has been cast” (Alea iacta est ) is a variation of a Latin phrase attributed to Julius Ceasar at 49 BCE, as he led his army across the Rubicon river in Northern Italy in defiance of the Senate. Thus, began his long civil war against Pompey and the Optimates.

[1] Lyrics from the song 99 red balloons, by Nena, a western German rock band whose 99 Luftballons (1982) song was translated into English in 1984 after the German original had widespread success in Europe.

[2]Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, Penguin Random House, 2016.

[3] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/virtual-museum-nintendo-animal-crossing-1824990

[4] Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1995.

[5] James Elkins, On The Complicity Between Visual Analysis and Torture in Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture, co-edited with Maria Pia Di Bella, (New York: Routledge, 2012).

An art scene is determined by characteristics relating to place and time. Smaller or larger geographic zones and references to decades or eras are used to describe the activity of visual artists within specific spatial and temporal limits. Although the focus on the artistic activity of major metropolitan centres may be constant, most other cities and regions find themselves at the centre of attention at times of major social, economic or political change. As it is known, this was the case with Athens during the recession. Earlier in this decade, domestic and international organisations, scholars and curators wished to provide a theoretical framework to the work of an emerging generation of Greek artists, to showcase it and study its subject matter its media and its preoccupations. With exhibitions, articles and books they attempted to chart what is burgeoning in the face of socioeconomic adversity and to identify any common attributes and references.

The need to identify such commonalities or affinities seemed natural in each of these initiatives, as one finds by consulting the curatorial texts for events of this type. The 2013 exhibition Afresh of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, for example, aimed at showcasing the “new differentiating elements” and the “unique artistic dynamics” of a young generation that works despite the fact that “possibilities and opportunities are shrinking” (Dragona, Pandi,Vitali, 2013). The selection of works reflected “a pluralism of artistic practices” and means” and in particular “it signals afresh” their approach and utilisation (ibid.), and stressed the interdisciplinary approach of several practitioners and this new generation’s strong focus on “research, cooperation and the exchange of information and knowledge”. Three years later, The Equilibrists exhibition of the New Museum and the DESTE Foundation at the Benaki Museum spoke of a group of artists” as part of an international ‘young precariat’” who, “amidst a climate of political and economic instability,” have “responded with a spirit of improvisation and cooperation” (Carrion-Murayari, Christoffersen, Gioni 2016). The title was chosen to convey the sense of balance and stability of a new generation that experiences a turbulent world. Examining the artists’ relation with materiality, the curators emphasised the experimentation, the metamorphoses and the absence of the homogeneity one might expect as a result of the commonly experienced precariousness as well as the uncertain and conflicting social and political views of the time (ibid.).

The common lived experience of a generation and the quest for its traits in the works of artists so as to convey the pulse of a period echoes Raymond Williams’s thinking. The “structures of feeling” or “structures of experience”, as he names them, which differ from one generation to the next, are first traced in the field of art and the creation of the active present (Williams 1977). Defying classification, boundaries and ideologies, they are ―in a way― emerging collective moods which, combined with spatialities and temporalities (Anderson 2014), have the potential to effect change. This approach seems to be reflected in the rationale of Documenta for its Athens event of 2017, which asserted that “the place and the time matter” and that the experience of a city between continents, cultures and multitudes can be invaluable at a time of major social challenges and transformations(Szymczyk 2017, 29). Indeed, as it was explicitly stated, Documenta was interested in Athens mainly as a living organism, a city that could represent other cities and places.

Yet what does it mean to describe, on the basis of the above, a generation according to the specific characteristics of an era in one country? How does it help or confine the artists to whom it refers? Having lived through a decade of economic recession, and currently experiencing increasingly stronger social, cultural and economic divisions globally, the emphasis on identifying the common traits of an artistic community or generation may leave room for misapprehensions or ambiguous approaches. Documenta, for instance, did not escape the danger of defining Athens and its communities, artistic and other, as the “other”, as something different that seeks an opportunity to fit in (Tramboulis 2017). At the same time, however, as E. Tsokanta (2019) points out about the Athenian art scene, no one can deny that Athens is a liminal space determined by economic, political and social conditions which art attempts to describe, evaluate and ultimately influence structurally. As she says, shared geography and a sense of locality cannot but be decisive.

The SNF Artist Fellowship Program of ARTWORKS, which started with a first cycle of monetary prizes in 2018, provides an opportunity for revisiting these issues. With several artists being rewarded for their work, the initiative aims to support and empower the artistic and generally creative community in Greece and particularly in Athens through meetings, presentations and debates among the grantee artists and curators, scholars and guests of the programme. The remainder of this paper discusses the role of locality and temporality and the key questions raised herein through the work of those participants of the programme who touch upon such matters.

Aiming to re-contextualise events that link the past and the present, the local and the global, Giannis Delagrammatikas seeks out the spaces where they occur. Places like open markets, international fairs or archaeological sites provide the setting for recounting and discussing stories and events. The artist presents selected archive material, texts, images and objects through which he demonstrates the actual or potential relations among individuals, objects, ideas and cultures. Delagrammatikas uses suspicion as a methodological tool to enable micro-revelations and turnarounds of reality. His recent work focuses specifically on the role of collective and political narratives. In plot hole_do what is fair!, golf as a sport serves as the starting point for discussing issues of inequality, exclusion and discrimination in contemporary reality. Seemingly unconnected events from Greece and beyond end up revealing points of conflict, contention and exploitation that recur and get transformed depending on the characteristics of the time.

Paky Vlassopoulou is concerned about the socio-political situation of the place where an artwork is presented or for which it is produced. In recent years her work ―which combines a sculptural character with elements of performance― has been examining issues of care and hospitality in today’s world. Objects that form part of performative tasks are used to discuss forms of emotive or domestic labour that are invisible but essential for the smooth running of a society’s structures and infrastructures. The artist emphasises the need for them to be recognised, and points out the gender and class discriminations often associated with them. In her latest work, At your Service, Vlassopoulou explores these issues on the internet, where communication is automated and disembodied. What ways, then, remain to emerge or to be rediscovered to establish relationships and bring the voices and bodies together? Her artistic work and positioning brings to mind Fisher’s urgent call for “a movement that abolishes the present state of things, a movement that offers unconditional care without community”5 (Fisher 2015).

The space and time of the internet and the coexistence of heterogeneous information, symbols and images are clearly evident in the current work of Pavlos Tsakonas. Through unexpected encounters and syntheses, the artist questions the dipoles of religion and science, reason and emotion, art and nature, order and chaos. In a workin-progress inspired by the twelve zodiac signs of Western astrology he comments on the classification systems of human traits. His 12 paintings, one for each zodiac sign, comprise elements from different traditions, eras and cultures and appropriate the aesthetics of online communication as well as those of graphic design and advertising. Can we really avoid the limitations, categorisations and generalisations we tend to use in order to interpret the world? Can we defuse and enervate symbols and “constructs”? The questions posed by the work of Tsakonas seem more crucial than ever. The need for “living classifications” (Bowker & Leigh Start 2000, 326) in times of polarisation and controversy is urgent — which means a need for fluid categories capable of changing to facilitate shifts and transformations.

Kyriaki Goni focuses on locality or interlocality and the relations and communities enabled by modern technologies. Using methods of critical or hypothetical design, she narrates stories about future topologies and existing topographies. In recent years her research has centred on the networks of the Aegean Sea, among other things. In her latest work, Networks of Trust ―presented as an installation but with research and its activation on islands as an integral part of it― the prehistory of the Aegean archipelago becomes the springboard for discussing the pre-existing and necessary connections and forms of coexistence between both human and non-human elements such as the relations between future and past, civilisation and nature. Reminding us that the Mediterranean is a medium that both unites and divides, Goni points out the fragmented reality of the islands and the networks that kept them going. As she notes with reference to Glissant (2010), by thinking with the archipelago we have the ability to go beyond closed and rigid categories and turn to a future more open to difference and pluralism.

The region of the Mediterranean and specifically the island of Malta was the object of research and the venue for one of the recent projects of Kosmas Nikolaou. Choir and Manoeuvre (a guided tour to imaginary gardens) was created specifically for the gardens of Villa Bologna in 2018. Having studied the geography, the archaeology and the history of an oft-colonised island literally in the middle of the Mediterranean, the artist ―whose work explores spatial qualities, architectural structures and traces of memory― wanted to speak about Malta’s identity. A series of spatial interventions that Nikolaou designed at Villa Bologna were linked together with specially prepared guided tours which included various references and stories and hovered between myth and reality. The work was thus activated for the viewers through these performative actions of the guides, leaving room for mental associations, interpretations and correlations. For instance, specific birds which are endemic in Malta and the Mediterranean, are mentioned as a reference to colonialism, migration and the crossbreeding of civilisations.

So are place ―Athens, and Greece― and time ―the years of the economic crisis― decisive for the new art scene, in view of the aforementioned examples? On the basis of these, the following points can be made. Locality plays a key role as a point of reference or departure. The socio-political conditions, possibilities and limitations discussed with reference to place. It is observed, however, that the emphasis is not particularly on Athens or Greece; on the contrary, place becomes the basis for correlations and connections between regions and cultures. Similarly, as far as time is concerned we find that different periods and temporalities come together to balance out and ultimately coexist. Past, present and future are brought close and are often deliberately confused so as to be redefined through their references and relations. The emphasis thus seems in all cases to be on the correlations and encounters. The works seem to wish to evade definitions and concrete descriptions, attempting instead to establish common or intermediary places which connect or encompass different worlds. In a time of oppositions, this new generation of artists turns to heterogeneous, open patterns capable of accommodating affective differences (Munoz 2000, 70) and allowing new connections and ways of coexistence. The notion of belonging to an artistic community is thus changing as it turns to spatialities and temporalities that can keep multiplying and mutating.

Daphne Dragona, ARTWORKS Mentor 2018 writes about ‘’The multiple temporalities and spatialities of the new generation of Greek artists’’. Daphne is a Berlin-based theorist and curator. She regularly contributes articles to journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues. Since 2015, she serves as the conference curator of Transmediale festival.

Looking at Eleni Bagaki’s latest series of paintings at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) entitled Something like a poem, a nude, and flowers in a vase, I think spontaneously of Celia Hampton’s work. Beyond the fact that both artists represent male nudes from a female perspective, their respective artistic processes intersect at the boundary between life and work. Hampton’s paintings represent close-ups of men’s genitals she encounters during her live chat conversations with strangers on websites from her intimate space, while Bagaki’s work derives from her experience of strolling during working hours in the quasi empty Pedion Areos park, in central Athens. This measured quantity of nature within the cityscape is a liberating background for the artist to project her fantasies and observe the non-verbal communication between its temporary habitants. Inspired by postures of men in advertisements and magazines, the artist places their naked silhouettes in scenes of nature within her work in a palette ranging from pastel yellow, orange, pink to light blue. Their inviting figures, devoid of any aggressive masculinity, appear elusive as they emerge effortlessly through the canvas.

Nakedness had not appeared this way in Bagaki’s previous works. Fragmented body parts, like in her work Torso (2016) or in the publication Ding Dong Dick (2013) and sex toys such as those in her painting Just kidding (Dildo in the woods) (2020) were part of a wider narrative in which they appeared misplaced or dehumanized. Interestingly, a body part to which she refers obsessively is the foot. Such is the case in her video She was whistling he was shooting (2016) where we look at the artist’s feet with sneakers for several minutes while subtitles inform us of an impossible love story, or in her video There, only feet matter, (2018) or again in Sock Tune (2015). There is also a reference to both legs and feet in her work Poems for him (2023), presented in dialogue with the paintings at EMST:

“̵T̵h̵i̵s̵ ̵i̵s̵ ̵a̵ ̵l̵e̵g̵

I have no feelings for this leg anymore

He also had other body parts

He wasn’t just a leg

[…]

His shoe size was 47”

Bagaki uses various mediums in her work, such as video, text, painting, and installations. Each of them seems to borrow characteristics from the content of the work, and vice versa. For her first institutional show in Athens, she chose to present a less known aspect of her work, that is painting; this was partly for practical reasons, as the nomadic life she led during multiple residencies did not allow for a stable working space, which she only found upon moving back to Athens. Compared to the photographic image or video that confronts us with reality, painting, like writing, offers a coded image of reality leaving space for the artist to shift multiple roles, and disguise herself. For example, Bagaki’s videos are usually marked by a lack of action; we see her reclining (Reclining artist, the artist is reclining, 2021), driving, eating, looking (Making a movie in solitude and in conversation with others, 2020); other times, they are devoid of the human element, like in her work The Film (2017). In these cases, all the action takes place in a parallel layer through her text, appearing in the form of subtitles without any sound of human voice. If the image of the artist is there, she plays herself.

The choice of painting allows the artist to fully present a fantasy that works simultaneously as a means of prevention shield but also as a reaction against the male gaze. These works constitute impulsive exercises that reverse the male gaze that she, like all women, has experienced in public space, and that for personal reasons (and not for the sake of a heteronormative representation) take on a male form in her work. This feeling is extended in the exhibition space, where the visitor becomes an exhibit as she/he is invited to sit on the bench-like seat to experience her work, multiplying the intersections of the gazes.

Her research on the gaze brings two more thoughts/references to mind: Barbara Kruger’s Your gaze hits the side of my face (1981), and an excerpt from Bagaki’s publication She left, she left again, she left once more (2022) that she wrote during her residency in Fogo Island:

“I look at myself in the mirror and touch my face and body

to prove that I am here. I repeat: “The lack of someone

else’s gaze doesn’t make me invisible.”

Τhe gaze of others can be aggressive and irritating but it can also signify existence through attention-something the artist seeks to resist. Her work also contains her gaze on herself, a continuous process of introspection. In this process, her status as an artist could hardly be absent, as this element is something to which Bagaki keeps on returning in an attempt to affirm it. It is a role that, as presented to us through methodically woven conversations between women and men, occurring over the course of a romantic relationship (or in a potential one) between herself and the other, is not easily understood and accepted, like in this excerpt from her video The Film (2017):

“He said he didn’t like art, he liked films. […]

I said I wanted to do a film too.

He laughed.

He said films are hard to make.

He said female filmmakers are not good enough.”

or from her text in She left, she left again, she left once more:

“I talked to him about my art project on embracing precarity and pursuing a nomadic artistic life. I told him that traveling alone can be scary and very difficult, but I hoped to grow more confident. He interrupted me, “…and you call this art?”

“…yes,” I said, feeling confused.

“Oh, you, artists! Whatever you do, you call it art. You travel, it’s art! You are alone; it’s art! Everything you do, you think it’s art!”

These general conclusions, like gazes, are what the artist (or narrator) receives for who she is. Bagaki’s research around what it means to be an artist from her own point of view and that of others, concretized in the presence of other female artists as presented in the video Making a movie in solitude and in conversation with others (2020), realized during her two-month stay on Fogo Island, Canada. In the work, we see her driving through empty streets on the island, a ride interrupted by scattered excerpts from interviews of female artists, mainly filmmakers, since she herself uses this medium. Quotes in the video that revolve around the issue of existence such as “In life you very often encounter impasse. But that impasse turns out ultimately to be a passage. It is a way of leading you to an elsewhere”, (Trinh T. Minh-ha) or belonging such as “I don’t feel that I belong, at all. Sometimes it’s hard because belonging can give you a kind of peacefulness but I don’t, I don’t belong.” (Chantal Akerman) seem to echo the artist’s own concerns. In one of the quotes, Sheila Heti refers to her own model of artists on the process of finding your voice as an artist, something that is central in Bagaki’s work: “To me, what the artists that I love, model is that just kind of freedom, and there is discipline in it too. But it’s the discipline of doing what you want to do. And it’s very hard to do what you want to do. It takes forever to do what you want to do.”

Whatever the medium, Bagaki is balancing between the rawness of reality, idealized expectations and representation, through “transporting” moments of the everyday into her work from the female perspective. This seemingly personal experience weighs, through the subject of love and romance, the possibilities of communication between man and woman, reflecting a woman’s place in society and functioning as a social psychograph. Autobiographical or fictional, Bagaki’s body of work is dedicated to the research of “what she wants to do”, of finding the self (or better, selves) that involve a third curious presence, a potential viewer through the sensual anticipation created.

Εva Vaslamatzi

Eleni Bagaki is an artist and writer based in Athens. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Drawing inspiration from feminist approaches and practices, she uses her work to explore autobiography and its relationship to fiction through texts, videos, sound, painting, and sculpture.

Solo Exhibitions include: Something like a poem, a nude, and flowers in a vase, (National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, 2023, She left, she left again, she left once more, (Aghios Rokkos, Chania, 2022), Falling into whispers and kisses, Chauffeur Gallery, Sydney and Reclining Artist, the Artist is reclining, Eleni Koroneou Gallery (2021); The importance of reading, writing, and exfoliating, Palette Terre, Paris (2018); A book, a film, and a soundtrack, Radio Athènes, Athens (2017); Economy Class, Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2016); Now you see me, oh now you don’t, NEW STUDIO, London and Crack, Crack, Pop, Pop…oh what a relief it is!, Radio Athènes, Athens (2015)

Selected Group Exhibitions include: This current between us, Former Neo Faliro Power Station, Athens, Moods & Memories, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Sheltered Gardens, Diomedes Botanic Garden, organized by PCAI, Athens, Ιdeas and Solutions for Υour Home, 3137, Athens, Femme4Femme4ever, Haus N Athens, Athens, Directed by Desire, Rongwrong, Amsterdam and Bread and Digestifs, Callirrhoë, Athens (all 2022); La vie gagneé, Syndicate potentiel, Strasbourg, Off Season, 9th Syros International Film Festival, Syros, Prizing Eccentric Talents, P.E.T. Projects, Athens (all 2021); Be water again, Koraï, Nicosia, A imensa preguiça, Sancovsky gallery, Sao Paulo, Seeping upwards, rupturing the surface, Art Gallery of Mississauga (all 2018); Vilniaus kontekstai, Vilnius, Millennial Feminisms, L’Inconnue gallery, Montreal (2018) The Equilibrists, DESTE Foundation and NEW MUSEUM, Athens (2017)

Bagaki is the recipient of the Artworks Fellowship, Niarchos Foundation (2020–21), the NEON Exhibition Grant, Athens and Pivô Artist Grant, Sao Paulo (2018), The Outset Greece 2017 Grant, and the Celeste Art Prize (2007). Residencies include: Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2020), Fogo Island Arts’ Residency, Canada (2019), IASPIS, Stockholm (2018–19), Pivô, Sao Paulo (2018) and Kantor Foundation (2017).

Some of her published books are Poems for him, 2023, Butter and Cracker, dolce, 2022, She left. She left again. She left once more, 2021, No script, 2017, and Look for love and find a log instead, Tadeusz Kantor Foundation, 2017.

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

Some years ago, in 2016, I came across Karolina Krasouli’s name on an artwork label at the Rennes Biennale in France. It was the first contact I had with her work, before I had met her: a series of folder-like forms creased into different shapes and painted in colors, which from afar gave the impression of a mysterious alphabet. It was a reference to Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, a series of manuscripts and notes on parts of unfolded envelopes. Dickinson, like many other authors that she studied while in high school, such as Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Robert Rost, TS Eliot, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ted Hughes among others, shaped her adolescent universe before she even knew that she would become an artist. Recently, in an old magazine of the Arsakeio school where I studied, I came across Krasouli’s name again but in a different context — as a 12 year old she had won the Literature Prize for a text she had written as a response to a painting in a school competition. In a strange way, this coincidence made sense to me. Krasouli’s recent works function as reassuring worlds, devoid of distortion, inviting one to get lost in them for a time, like the reprieve a child lost in the oppressive reality of middle school might find in literature.

Seeing today the works of her first solo exhibition in Athens, entitled Promise, I realize that it is clearly a sequel, an enlargement of the folded envelopes of 2016, though this time the paper is replaced by the canvas. A continuous play of scale, perhaps an inversion of it, in which some details refer to objects, but are not exactly familiar to the eye. At the same Biennale, another work dealt with the theme of scale: that of Mark Manders, whose work is a reference for Krasouli. His obsession with objects and scale is usually reported with mathematical precision in the titles of his works, such as Chair (100%) or Kitchen (reduced to 88%). 88% is for him a minimal reduction of scale that you feel more than you see. He refers to photography as the pre-eminent medium that changes the scale of objects and perceives his works as three dimensional photography. The reference to photography and its relationship to the object is something that particularly concerns the work of Krasouli who, except her experimentation with painting, works simultaneously with photography and super 8.

After many years of studying clinical psychology, a fated internship at Saint-Remy de Provence Hospital (next to the psychiatric hospital where Van Gogh was hospitalized) made her realize that not everything can be put into words. She left the scientific community and found herself chasing fake realities instead of real answers; as a way of giving space to these kind of things that do not make any sense. Now, I see in her work remnants of the scientific process — in terms of the obsession, the methodology and the protocols that she establishes in her process. In fact, the working method functions like a personal healing process, a trance-like, meditative process that takes place in the absence of words. This process, especially the one employed in the Promise series, is governed by a very specific, long and arduous protocol. The work begins without any draft sketch, but with a decision on the canvas’s approximate dimensions, which is defined once the color is applied. The traditional process of preparing a canvas in painting, that is, passing several layers with a gesso, becomes the work itself. Mixed with paint pigments of many different colors that give paradoxically a pale tone, the gesso is the material Krasouli uses to create monochromatic surfaces that become so hard that are almost impossible to bend. This difficulty of bending and binding this material becomes the challenge that the artist overcomes by folding the canvas, often more than once, and sewing it with hidden seams that are not visible. The result, hiding the artist’s effort with mastery, gives the illusion of naturalness, like the image of an accidentally folded corner of a thin paper.

Decisions about other monochrome surfaces that are sewn in the background are made in terms of composition; the more specific the form, the more the narrative emerges. One such example is found in her work Departure in which the artist imagines someone who has emptied his/her personal things on a bed and is getting ready to prepare his/her suitcase. Between image and object, these works are hybrids, something like two-dimensional objects or three-dimensional pictures, like an envelope, which is almost, but not exactly, two-dimensional and at the same time has the capacity to contain something, which remains unknown and hidden from the outside.

Like Krasouli’s painting series, super 8 film is an object and potentially an image at the same time. In the same way that scaling and materiality shift in her Promise series, so Super 8, as a medium, presents a dashed reality — a set of sewed images where flow and duration become an almost conscious, but enjoyable, illusion. In her super8 film La Rose Krasouli dives in the ontology of the object by filming a story told about Agnes Martin — another major reference for her work — , where the appearance and the disappearance of a rose raises the question of the beauty contained in the memory of an object more than in the object itself.

In Krasouli’s work there is no recurring theme; instead there is a process and a constant need to illuminate parts of what we call the everyday. Language is present, without ever being included, but appears discreetly through the apparent contradictions that characterize her work; the poetry, the lyricism, the hidden and the uncanny versus systematic research, repetition, and method. Viewing her work, we see narratives featuring time and objects, which invite us to listen carefully to them and learn how to speak their language.

Karolina Krasouli (SNF Visual Arts Fellow 2019) is a visual artist working with painting, photography and film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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