Fellow Field: Visual arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social sculpture

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

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

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

The incorporation of art within its everyday dimension

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

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

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

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

The peripatetic dialogues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read here EP J9 “FLOATING IMAGES”

“I spotted the animal as it exited its nest.

From that moment onwards, I started observing it.

I was impressed by the way it emerged,

Quite clumsily and abruptly.

Then it acted naturally, perhaps a bit suspiciously.

Then normally.

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

taking too long.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

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

Context and objectives

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

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

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

The thread

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

“Here is a fairy tale for you

Which is just as good as true

What unfolds will give you passion,

Castles on hills & also treason

How, from his cape a fatal thread

To her window the villains led”

Francis Alÿs, Fairy Tales

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

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

The performance and its documentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the extensive documentation of the students :

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

Tracks of reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Francis”

Collectif MASI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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