Fellow Field: Εικαστικές Τέχνες

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina Petkopoulou

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Paky Vlassopoulou, Explosions in the sky – Welcome Ghosts, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. His research explores how artistic practices register the contradictions inherent in ideas of crisis, periphery, and technology, with a focus on how these tensions are felt acutely in contemporary Greece while also resonating worldwide. Working in close collaboration with the Artworks team, Alexander conducted a series of interviews with a group of the 2018 Fellows, hoping to understand how their artistic practices register and reflect some of the contradictions inherent in Greece today.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

“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).

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

(Heinrich von Kleist — quoted by Martin Heidegger)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Text by Danai Giannoglou
Copy edited by EG Figure of Speech (Geli Mademli & Eleanna Papathanasiadi)

When I first told Chrysanthi Koumianaki that I thought she was a performance artist, she laughed. That was the beginning of an intensely interesting ongoing conversation we’ve been having for the past few months, during and after her solo project RSVP, which I curated in September 2022 at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation in Athens as part of the THF Raw exhibition series. “I direct events, I orchestrate them,” she keeps telling me, and even though I agree with her that she is most probably not a performer herself, I keep thinking that her practice expands the boundaries and the terminology of performance art.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, RSVP, installation and performance view, cur. by Danai Giannoglou, B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music, 2022 | Photo by Alexandra Masmanidi

RSVP, which for me is the starting point of all these thoughts around Koumianaki’s work, encapsulates many different aspects of her practice; a performance enacted by the staff of the Theocharakis Foundation responding to the daily ritual of the presidential guard (Evzones in Greek), a stage and a backstage whose essence depend on where the viewer is standing and what they are looking for, a series of sculptures that function as potential and actual props, an invented code, and a careful, profound, and humorous observation of the elements that surround the work within and outside the institution.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, RSVP, installation and performance view, cur. by Danai Giannoglou, B&M Theocharakis Foundation for the Fine Arts and Music, 2022 | photo by Alexandra Masmanidi

Performance - or orchestrated events - were not always part of Koumianaki’s artistic vernacular. For her solo exhibition Chroachym (2017), curated by locus athens (Maria-Thalia Carras and Olga Hatzidaki) at the MENTIS Center for the Preservation of Traditional Textile Techniques Athens (Benaki Museum), it is the first time that she asks performers to follow a set of instructions she creates. For this project, Pavlina Andriopoulou and Yiota Alexiou were asked to choreographically interpret a score drafted by Koumianaki drawing inspiration from the mechanical movement of the textile machines found at MENTIS. These choreographies were performed, filmed, and presented in the form of videos alongside sculptures.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Chroachym, installation view, cur. by locus Athens, Maria-Thalia Carras & Olga Hatzidaki, Mentis / Benaki Museum, 2016 | Photo by Pinelopi Gerasimou

From that moment onwards, Koumianaki has been incorporating more and more performative techniques in her practice. In Statues that don’t move, don’t speak, don’t laugh, a group show curated by Galini Notti in 2020, it is the first time the performance unravels in the physical space. In the middle of a neighborhood basketball court and park in Patissia, actress Eva Vlassopoulos was posing as a live monument on a daily basis, wearing a uniform covered in transcribed graffiti tags.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Enchanted life, performance view, part of the show Statues that don’t move, don’t speak, don’t laugh cur. by Galini Notti, public space in the area of Kato Patisia, Athens, 2020 | Photo by Nikos Alexopoulos

Koumianaki’s approach to performance is indeed not always evident, but remains definitely open-ended. She understands most things as performances but her gestures to highlight that are not always performances themselves. A keystone that often appears in her practice is the creation of interactive sculptures that, through a language of translation and deduction, allude to elements of the Athenian public space. However, the public space she is interested in is the one that has already undergone interventions which make the existence of citizens visible within the ‘set’ they inhabit. In Equilibrists (2016), a group show curated by Helga Christoffersen and Gary Carrion-Murayari and organized by DESTE Foundation, Athens, and New Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Koumianaki creates sculptures inspired by the broken railings in the streets of Athens, as well as the handles in public transportation vehicles. At the same time, a mural behind the sculptures serves as a score for the visitors, prompting them to interact with them and reflect on different choreographical and bodily uses of such elements commonly found in the public space.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Notes for Someone who is 1.67m or Higher and is Bored on a Bus, installation view, part of the show The Equilibrists, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari & Helga Christoffersen with Massimiliano Gioni, organized by the DESTE Foundation and the New Museum, New York in collaboration with the Benaki Museum, Athens, 2016

For her solo exhibition They Keep Chewing Walls (2018), curated by Els Silvrants-Barclay and Pieternel Vermoortel at Netwerk, Aalst, Belgium, she follows a similar pattern. This time she creates terrazzo-like surfaces on wheels, referring to the pavements and the chewed gums that people throw on them without much thought, as well as curtains with magnified graffiti symbols and poles like the ones carrying traffic lights and signs, always full of stickers and ads. While she borrows the aesthetics of architectural tools such as mood-boards and renders, she is not using them to imagine an ideal city, but to map the existing one in its glorious reality. The ‘insignificant’ elements - the gum, the handles, the broken railings, the tags on the walls - interrupt the experience of the public space in the way it was ideally organized, and become landmarks. They are no longer ephemeral gestures: they create non-verbal vocabularies of disruption which attest to our presence in the city as performers. For Koumianaki, their existence and our co-existence with these elements has vivid similarities with our everyday ritualistic automatizations that become a universal language. Her practice distills this language and turns it into yet another code emphatically twisting the automatization into something pleasingly uncanny that you cannot overlook.

In later projects, such as her piece The Stage is Empty: Part I & Part II (2021), commissioned by NEON Organization for Culture and Development for the exhibition Portals, curated by Elina Kountouri and Madeleine Grynsztejn at the former Public Tobacco Factory in Athens, it is evident that Koumianaki keeps thinking about the living monuments, the use of public space, and our everyday dramaturgy. The first part of the work, which takes place in Kolonos Hill, consists of banners that map the life and activity of the hill in a codified language. The banners were hung throughout the park on existing pillars. The second part, which appears in the Kolonos open-air theater, “is a play realized exclusively through light,” as mentioned in the exhibition’s promotional material. With a light performance loaded with dramaturgical connotations, movement, and expression, Koumianaki leaves the stage seemingly ’empty’ for visitors and passers-by to witness or to be part of it. Scattered around, actors are performing in conversation with everything that is happening on- and offstage.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, The Stage is Empty, performance view, commissioned by NEON for the group exhibition Portals |Πύλη, 2021 | Photo by Pinelopi Gerasimou

Koumianaki’s relationship to performance as a coherent recognizable language that touches upon recurrent subjects pertaining to the public space and urban environment might begin in 2016, with the exhibition Chroachym; however, it is clear that performative traces appear in her practice long before this. Her work I Love You, You Love Me (2013) might be a digital print, but it derives from a collective performance with Panos Papadopoulos and Albert Mayr. For this performance, Koumianaki had photographed her mouth making all the alphabet sounds and then used the photos to make collages that were “speaking words.” The ultimate goal was to develop a hybrid method of teaching Albert Mayr how to speak Greek. In 2019, in an act during which the performers remain hidden or in the backstage, she collaborates again with Papadopoulos and Mayr - this time in Petra Martinetz Gallery, Cologne.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki, I Love You, You Love Me, digital print on paper, 60*90 cm, 2013

Last but not least, in 2017, together with architect Fanis Kafantaris, she created a map of public space disruptions in the Exarchia neighborhood; its “punctuation marks,” as she often calls them. Consecutively, the two of them brought together museum labels which they placed next to each one of these marks together with mediators that would interact with the audiences, guiding them through the neighborhood.
Koumianaki speaks in tongues, but her codes are far from hermetic. Their existence as wholes, as entities, provide sub-textual tools to access the works, as well as everyday routines unraveling through different prisms. While her language is not revealing, it is in its concealing that matters open up to interpretation.

—

“The City as Orchestra, Language, Ritual. On the Performative Character of Chrysanthi Koumianaki’s Work.” was written in April 2023 by Danai Giannoglou.

Chrysanthi Koumianaki (1985, Heraklion) is a visual artist who lives and works in Athens. In her practice she explores the idea of ​​translation, creating symbolic systems, codings, alphabets that focus on non-verbal communication. She revises and tackles rules and methods of a universal visual language, creating new narratives that reflect different times. Her main work comprises installations that combine various media: prints, ephemeral drawings, videos, sound and metal structures. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in institutions, museums and galleries such as: Netwerk Aalst (2018), Kadist, Paris (2017); Benaki Museum, Athens (2016); DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2016); Biennale of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki (2015); Athens Biennale (2013) and National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2013). Her work has been shown in institutions and museums, at Fondazione Prada (Milan, 2017) and at New Museum (New York, 2016) among others. Ιn 2012, together with Kosmas Nikolaou and Paky Vlassopoulou, she co-founded the artist-run space 3 137.She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2018).

Danai Giannoglou (Athens, 1992) is an independent curator and writer based in Athens. She is the co-founder and curator of Enterprise Projects, a project space functioning independently and periodically since September 2015 in Athens, as well as the Editor of Enterprise Projects Journal, a publishing initiative by Enterprise Projects uploading newly commissioned theoretical and research essays. She has worked for public and private institutions in Athens and Paris. Between 2018–2019 Danai Giannoglou was the Exhibitions Archive Coordinator at DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has contributed texts in catalogues, publications and online art magazines and she has curated exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Giannoglou holds a BA in Theory and History of Art from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA in Cultural Management and Curating from Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne University. She has been resident at Rupert, Lithuania in 2016 and at the 8th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, South Korea in 2018. She is a recipient of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship Program (Curating) 2019/20 by ARTWORKS, as well as of Onassis AiR Emergency Fellowship 2019/20.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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 ARTWORKS Visual Arts Fellow 2019) is a visual artists working with painting, photography and film.

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

H ARTWORKS συνεργάζεται με το  Enterprise Projects υποστηρίζοντας το 8ο τεύχος EP Journal (ΕPJ) σε ανάθεση του SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2021 από το πεδίο της επιμέλειας, Πάνο Φουρτουλάκη.

Διαβάστε εδώ το EP J8 με τίτλο “ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΠΟΥ ΠΟΤΕ ΔΕΝ ΤΕΛΕΙΩΝΕΙ”

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

Abramović, Marina, with James Kaplan. 2016. Walk Through Walls: A Memoir. London: Penguin.
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.
— — — . 2004. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Bloomsbury.
— — — . 2013. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles Stivale. London: Bloomsbury.
— — — . 2017. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
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
— — — . 2013. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury.
Douady, Adrien, and John H. Hubbard. 1985. Étude dynamique des polynômes complexes. Orsay: Prépublications Mathémathiques d’Orsay.
Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
— — — . 2011. The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II — Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983– 1984. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
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.
Greene, Brian. 2000. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. London: Vintage. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.19379
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
Heidegger, Martin. 2011. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. London and New York: Routledge.
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.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1985. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Classics.
Klein, Melanie. 1975. Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921–1945. New York: The Free Press.
Klossowki, Pierre. 1991. Sade my Neighbor. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
— — — . 1997. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— — — . 2017. Living Currency. Translated by Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr Von. 1895. Psychopathia Sexualis. Translated by Émile Laurent and Sigismond Csapo. Paris: Georges Carré.
Le Brun, Annie. 2014. “Sade pose la Question de l’Irreprésentable: Entretien avec Annie Le Brun et Laurence des Cars, Commissaires de l’Exposition.” Interview by Florelle Guillaume. In Sade: Attaquer le soleil — Musée d’Orsay, 4–7. Paris: Beaux Arts/Tim Éditions.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. Libidinal Economy. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mandelbrot, Benoît. 1973. Les Objets fractals: forme, hasard et dimension. Paris: Flammarion.
Michaud, Philippe-Alain. 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Translated by Sophie Hawkes. New York: Zone Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Andrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812088
O’Brien, Martin, and David MacDiarmid, eds. 2018. Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien. London: Live Art Development Agency.
O’Dell, Kathy. 1998. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rabinow, Paul, ed. 2000. Michel Foucault: Ethics — Essential Works 1954–84. Translated by Robert Hurley and others. London: Penguin.
Spinoza, Benedict de (Baruch). 1996. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London and New York: Penguin.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2005. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden. London and New York: Routledge.

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.

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

by Danai Giannoglou
Copy edited by EG Figure of Speech (Geli Mademli & Eleanna Papathanasiadi)

In 2016, Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos found out about the history of Kallio, a village in Fokida, Greece, which was expropriated by the Greek junta in 1969 and covered by the waters of an artificial lake that would constitute the main water supply reservoir for the city of Athens. While researching and conducting interviews in order to gather more material with regards to this admittedly extraordinary case, not only did they discover that access to information was particularly difficult but also that surprisingly few people were aware of this series of events. Back then, Ionian and Sotiris were struck by the existence of a gap, something that was missing, which for them held a personal but also artistic interest.

To speak about how Latent Community came into being is to speak about this story and about Neromanna – their first video work, which carries the DNA of their practice in terms of subject matter, methodology, medium, and community engagement. The artist duo which was formed around this project, has been attempting to find ways to comprehend the world and our era way before that time, ever since they were teenagers, neighbors, and high-school classmates. Questions on how to position oneself within societies and towards political, societal, and ecological matters have prompted them to explore theoretical and practical tools rather than artistic ones. Later on, their shared practice became a vehicle for their attempt to answer these questions.

Latent Community, NEROMANNA, 2017 (still). Courtesy the artists. Installation view, 23rdBiennale of Sydney, rivus, 2022, National Art School. Photography: Document Photography

When they first visited Kallio and the surrounding areas, they realized that the information, knowledge, and experience they were looking for was in fact contained in the undocumented and non-communicated oral histories of the former residents of the village, the population that had to leave their homes behind “so that Athens can drink water,” as mentioned by them in the film.

Even though Ionian and Sotiris were trained as painters, it was this particular story that turned them to the moving image. To be able to tell this story, it was of utmost importance to find the most ‘immediate’ medium of communication and one that could potentially involve the community itself - either as directors or as subjects standing in front of the camera, reclaiming the narratives around what had happened. However, the duo remained skeptical and careful about the politics of observation and documentation: “The camera is not neutral, it is a separate body that exists within the bodies of the participants, and this surely creates a certain dynamic. However, we are interested in how the camera can oscillate between distant observation and active participation. When we film, we are not flies on the wall, we are actively engaged and we are not concerned about hiding it.”¹

Latent Community portrait

It is clear that their camera is used differently in each of their moving-image works, depending on the needs of the story, subject matter, or project. From the careful use of high production cameras cameras in Otranto, a film about the shipwreck of Katër i Radës in 1997 — the first boat that sank in a naval blockade against migration flows in the Mediterranean Sea, leading to the death of 81 passengers, whose families are still seeking justice; to the use of a mobile phone camera for Horses, a film on the human-animal relationship situated on the Greek island of Lesbos; Latent Community are interested in the power of different filmic tools. For them, the camera always plays a social role and addresses questions of access to image production, representation, and historicization through documentation.

Latent Community, OTRANTO, 2020 (still). Film 24:41, Full HD, Color, Sound, DCP. Courtesy the artists.

Nonetheless, they resist - and rightly so - a possible categorization as documentarists. Profoundly aware of the responsibility that often comes with the subject they choose to work with, they believe that the context itself dictates the filmic narration, the same way that the story dictates the camera style. Through their usage of sound, dialogue, and image - or the absence of them - this approach is becoming more and more evident as their practice evolves from Neromanna, (2017), Otranto (2020), and Horses (2022) to Water Voices (2022).

Locally and regionally rooted, in the sense that they are striving to break the center- periphery binary, and community-based, in the sense that their starting point is always the research on human or non-human societies, Latent Community’s work is its context in itself, usually informed by issues of political, social, and ecological justice. Without turning a blind eye towards privilege, their effort is to speak about communities and places as an immense constellation of interconnected concentric circles where any disruption will travel as a wave and affect different agents in different temporalities and intensities. Obviously and undoubtedly, the less privileged - people, communities, beings, regions - experience in the present time what will slowly but steadily then be the political, ecological, and social future of the rest.

Latent Community, Water Voices, 2022. Imageless Film / Sound Installation 07:06, Stereo Sound.Courtesy the artists.

The key word here is ‘wave.’ From Neromanna to one of their latest works that deals with the Mediterranean Sea, aquatic ecosystems, and how entire cities were built against the water, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Ionian and Sotiris recurrently use the language and voice of water: “It is through water that we understand our relationship with the world. It surrounds us and there are countless stories about it - mainly stories of violence. The Mediterranean Sea is a battlefield and this is intrinsically weaved into the Greek landscape. If you can scratch the surface of the sea, you can find not only lost stories, but also answers.”²

They look at water like an open wound where histories of oppression and extraction are inscribed, but at the same time they understand it as a deep connective tissue between communities. How did humans who were once connected with water, recognizing it as a source of life, have over the years - and especially in Western cultures - taken a stance that goes against it and against nature by and large?

Latent Community, OTRANTO, 2020 (still). Film 24:41, Full HD, Color, Sound, DCP. Courtesy the artists.

Latent Community’s interest in the liquid element manifests their wish to work with what surrounds us and hence to investigate what is our position with regards to these surroundings - physical and non-physical alike. In order to do that, the work has taken many different shapes throughout the years, challenging the moving image, sound and technological tools with abstraction, and they have been involved with different geographies and communities. What is particularly interesting about the evolution of their work, is that however versatile it is becoming, parts of it can always be traced back to Neromanna, reigniting something that creates a cyclical, manifesto-like consistency that runs through Latent Community’s entire practice.

During a visit of Ionian and Sotiris to Kallio for reasons of filming, a former resident tried to reinstate the lost topography of the village by pointing at areas of water and speaking about what was hidden underneath its surface. In that way, Neromanna marked not only the beginning of the collaboration between Jonian and Sotiris, their initiation in the world of the moving image, and the foundation of their recurrent research, but it also became the catalyst for selecting the name of their artistic group. Always delving into communities that are hidden or in hiding, sometimes as a self-defense mechanism and other times as a strategy imposed by the dominant context, delving into whispered stories and invisible presences, the duo writes about Kallio and Neromanna: “The ghost is not the sunken village, but the latent conflicts between the natural and the artificial, between the metropolis and the periphery, between the dominant narratives and the counter-stories.”³

Ionian Bisai (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2020) and Sotiris Tsiganos (SNF ARTWORKS Fellow 2021 )are visual artists and filmmakers based in Athens. In 2016, in the context of their long-term artistic collaboration they founded the Latent Community project, an ongoing artistic investigation intertwining fieldwork and moving image in order to tackle contemporary judicial, social and ecological issues. The duo aims to create conceptual and emotional experiences through which a more equal and sustainable future may be imagined. Their work has been presented in several international exhibitions and festivals (Athens Biennale, documenta14 - Public Programs, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative, Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete and the Recontemporary cultural association in Turin). Ionian Bisai and Sotiris Tsiganos have been awarded prizes by the LOOP artistic platform in Barcelona and Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arabic Emirates). For the period 2020–2021, they are fellows of Onassis AiR - School of Infinite Rehearsals.

Danai Giannoglou (Athens, 1992) is an independent curator and writer based in Athens. She currently participates in the De Appel Curatorial Programme 2019–2020 in Amsterdam. Giannoglou is the co-founder and curator of Enterprise Projects, a project space functioning independently and periodically since September 2015 in Athens, as well as the Editor of Enterprise Projects Journal, a publishing initiative by Enterprise Projects uploading newly commissioned theoretical and research essays. She has worked for public and private institutions in Athens and Paris. Between 2018–2019 Danai Giannoglou was the Exhibitions Archive Coordinator at DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art. She has contributed texts in catalogues, publications and online art magazines and she has curated exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Giannoglou holds a BA in Theory and History of Art from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MA in Cultural Management and Curating from Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne University. She has been resident at Rupert, Lithuania in 2016 and at the 8th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, South Korea in 2018. She is a recipient of the SNF ARTWORKS Artist Fellowship Program (Curating) 2019/20 as well as of Onassis AiR Emergency Fellowship 2019/20.

¹ Excerpt from a personal interview with Sotiris Tsiganos and Ionian Bisai, conducted on July 3, 2023.

² Excerpt from a personal interview with Sotiris Tsiganos and Ionian Bisai, conducted on July 3, 2023.

³ Excerpt from the text accompanying Latent Community’s participation in the 24th Biennale of Sydney, which is based on the essays “Entangled Visions” (The School of Infinite Rehearsals: Movement II, Scored Invocations, edited by Alkisti Efthymiou, Onassis Foundation, 2021) and “Latent Practices” (RCA — CAP: Moving Image, 2021).

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. What the Water Gave Me

2. King

3. Patricia

All songs by Florence + The Machine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture yourself in front of a masterful work of art. Standing there startled, paralyzed, silenced. The flow of emotions take control, words seem to fail you and the only thing left to do is pause in unsettling peace in a desperate attempt to take it all in, not to miss a single second of being there with it, of existing in the presence of ambiguity. Now imagine that work of art surrounding you, allowing you to immerse yourself in its three-dimensional plane while its sheer dimensions remind you of and liberate you from your negligible scale. Picture a work of art that has the power to induce an emotional grasp over a merely intellectual one, reconciling feeling and thinking, reminding you of the unknown as it can only be felt and not fathomed, of the complexity of human nature and consequently habitation. Such is the scope of the art of architecture. This was the experience of architect, photographer and painter Eleni Papanastasiou faced with Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1963). The affective power, the brilliance, the talent overcame her senses. A pure feeling that no words can be uttered to capture the complexity of visceral reactions, the dual sense of pain and pleasure, the sublimity evoked by the grandness of possibility. It was at that moment that her PhD research formed: finding the words to describe the architecture of emotions. Papanastasiou describes her creative process as interdisciplinary, centered on raw material: nature, language, and tactile structures. This process finds an outcome in the forms of architecture mainly, but also teaching, research, set design, photography, exhibitions, installations and cultural analysis.

Throughout Papanastasiou’s architectural work, the influence of Louis Kahn is evident. The use of béton brut in the name of an honest exposure of raw materials, the play between volumes, the pronounced superimposition of the fundamental triangle, circle and square, the elevation of the pilotis, the expansion of the belvedere perspective, the interchangeable character of interior and exterior spaces, all reveal her preoccupation to design structures that are of the land, not on it. In her 2017 proposal for the New Cyprus Museum international competition, she developed the notion of subtracting material from an elevated, concrete triangular building in order to frame the voids that would allow natural local vegetation, including endangered fauna, to protrude into the building and be explored alongside the antiquities of the collection. Following the prototype of the first Museum of Alexandria, she designed a building intended to highlight equally the natural and the man-made. Both the ground and top floors, sandwiching the historical exhibition, were designed to be green. Papanastasiou included a proposal for the collection display, making sure that navigation, although directed an obstructed at times, allowed for experiencing exhibits in a non-linear, non-didactic sequence, encouraging the viewer to explore artifacts of different eras in relation to one another, prioritizing an emotional intake to a logical one.

Similarly, in her proposal for the Florina Fine Arts School in 2019, she allowed the structure of the building to define its façade, making the use of the space by students and faculty her focal point. Like Kahn, the function of the building was the starting point and the intention was the fluid movement between spaces of different disciplines, allowing the studios of all art forms to be in contact with each other. Once again, Papanastasiou makes sure the surrounding environment and climate are omnipresent in spaces that blend interior and exterior. In both these designs, Papanastasiou concentrates on the experience of the buildings she proposes, on how they will determine the everyday life of the inhabitants and the ways in which they will affect and inspire them to do what they were meant to do there. In essence, she is designing suggestions for navigational experiences, anticipating, if not designating, the psychological trajectory of possible users.

In 2018 at Alphabet City in New York, Papanastasiou published Daydreaming. Diary for a walking distance measure, a photobook of 203 photos of her surroundings. When describing her attraction to the format of artists books, the artist mentions the intimacy and tactility of the medium as opposed to the pedantic dynamic of a wall-mounted object. Much like her architecture, the publication acts as an incitement to walk through and observe intently. In the tradition of psychogeography, Papanastasiou drifts while walking through a spatial reality and documents the outcome of the dérive into a visionary fantasy. The images, all out of focus black and white photos or video-stills read as if they have been layered on top of each other, picturing multiple simultaneous perceptions of the here and now, much like the wanderer who is submerged into a trance. For this optical effect, the artist references Macrovision signals that can cause synchronization failures, like a mistracked videotape that has lost its color. The illustrated surroundings act less as a documentation of a location and more as an imprint of a situation in its natural environment, in its best element. Like in her architecture, the series of photos are a sequence of natural elements within the urban environment, seemingly out of place but actually the protagonists of the story being told.

It isn’t often that an architect calls language a medium and references literature. Papanastasiou explores her interest in the sequence of narration, much like the routes in her buildings, through the format of a book while mentioning the effect induced by the stories of James Joyce, Paul Celan, Sappho and Thomas Symeonidis. She is interested in what has remained unsaid, in the sense of absence. Just like the spatial voids framed by her concrete volumes, the unsaid is implied only by the omissions of actual articulations. In constant quest to demonstrate polar opposites, she plays with binaries in her publication Landscrappings: New York-Sahara (2017). The tactility inferred by the title, prepares the viewer that this tangible experience will be layered and textured. It is an attempt to quietly showcase the close relations of opposites: natural vs. man-made, vast vs miniscule, positive vs negative space, rough vs smooth, empty vs overcrowded, introverted vs extroverted. A series of 12 diptychs, juxtapose shots of the two wildly different landscapes with the intention of depicting that opposites are supplementary. The imaginary line that connects the two is the unuttered by the narrator and left to be discovered by the viewer. The end result creates a complete landscape of silence.

In 2017, Papanastasiou created the set design for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center Delivery Ceremony to the Greek public. In close collaboration with the director Thomas Moschopoulos, the scenography, and not dramaturgy as she is quick to point out as words are of vital importance to her, consisted of 15 large-scale projections on transparent material that overlapped either fully or partially. Papanastasiou compared the effect of the installation on stage to the layers of a watercolor painting, which is yet another one of her media. Each screening was of a different activity taking place on various parts of the Center. The dream-like atmosphere capturing the multiple potentials of simultaneity throughout the establishment was achieved due to the translucent material of the screens. When all the screens were projected on, the final visual effect became opaque, blurring the lines of what was being shown. The design ultimately showcased the fermentation of all the functions of the center occurring at once: in the Opera House, the Library and the Park. The outcome was the creation of a compete environment in which all actions take place separately but at the same time blend into a complete whole, a cosmos of human activity in the backdrop of the Renzo Piano structure. The sum of the parts became an abstract whole. Once again, the artist demonstrates her infatuation with the vague limits between lucidity and ambiguity and allows doubt to comfortably prevail.

Eleni Papanastasiou lectures at the University of Patras. When discussing about her teaching, she brings up the short-lived educational utopia of the Black Mountain College with the experimental didactic techniques that put forth art making and collective labor as core classes. Predisposed to Barnett Newman’s trial-and-error technique as a more organic and human way of reaching results, she guides her students into exercises in which they succumb to wherever their hand directs them. Patti Smith, famously spoke about the holistic development of the three h’s: head, heart and hand. Papanastasiou engages experience to produce knowledge through praxis, instead of theory. This non-hierachical approach to education, puts emotion and spontaneity in the forefront of creation. She urges the class to trust the effortless, instinctive process and permit the practice to lead to the concept, instead of vice versa. Driven by aesthetics, Eleni Papanastasiou is on a mission to emotionalize architectural design in order to secure its affective absorption. To her there is no linguistic ambiguity in the term kunstwollen. The formative will to art, the artistic volition is “the sum or unity of creative powers manifested in any given artistic phenomenon[1]”.

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] Panofsky, Erwin, “On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 43–71.

Τελευταία, όταν κυκλοφορώ στην Αθήνα η απώλεια μνήμης μου μοιάζει όλο και πιο απειλητική. Δεν φταίει η ηλικία μου. Ούτε τα χαμένα μου εγκεφαλικά κύτταρα. Η ροή του χρόνου και της ζωής έχει αλλάξει στην πόλη που μεγάλωσα. Η μεταβλητότητα του χώρου συναγωνίζεται τη ρευστότητα των εικόνων και της πληροφορίας στο διαδίκτυο. Βρίσκω τον εαυτό μου εγκλωβισμένο ανάμεσα σε ξενοδοχεία, πολυτελείς μπουτίκ και μαγαζιά πανομοιότυπης αισθητικής που αντικαθιστούν μικρές επιχειρήσεις. Δεν ξέρω προς τα που να κατευθυνθώ. Όλα μου φαίνονται αλλιώτικα και παραδόξως τόσο ομογενοποιημένα. Οι κατασκευές και τα εργοτάξια, μαζί με τα τραπεζοκαθίσματα στο διάβα μου, με περικυκλώνουν και με εκτοπίζουν διαρκώς. Αποπροσανατολίζομαι όσο οι συνδέσεις και οι σχέσεις εμπιστοσύνης που είχα με την Αθήνα, τους ανθρώπους και τις γειτονιές της ξεθωριάζουν. Τη βλέπω να ξεχειλίζει από επιτήδευση, «ποτάρες» και «φαγητάρες», αλλά να ξεμένει από οικεία σημεία αναφοράς, από ανθρώπινο υλικό και κοινωνικό κεφάλαιο.

Η εμπορευματοποίηση και ο εξευγενισμός [1] κάθε σπιθαμής της πόλης «κατεδαφίζει» τα στοιχεία του παρελθόντος, τις χαρές του, τις νίκες του, και σβήνει τον μικτό και λαϊκό χαρακτήρα που γνώριζα. H ορμητική νεοφιλελεύθερη μετάβασή[2] της από το παλιό στο νέο, αγνοεί τις ζωτικές ανάγκες των κατοίκων της και μετατρέπει την αναζήτηση του ανήκειν σε εξαιρετικά ασαφή και αγχωτική διαδικασία. Σε μία πόλη που οι πρωτοβουλίες γειτονιών για τη διασφάλιση της αξιοπρεπούς διαβίωσης αυξάνονται καθημερινά, οι συμμετοχικές/κοινωνικά εμπλεκόμενες καλλιτεχνικές πρακτικές αναδεικνύονται σε δραστηριότητα απόκλισης, που μπορεί να συμβάλλει στην υπεράσπιση του δικαιώματός μας να βιώνουμε τον δημόσιο χώρο ως ελεύθερη περιοχή. Πώς μπορούμε να εκφράσουμε τις απόψεις μας για το είδος της πόλης όπου θέλουμε να κατοικούμε και να συμβιώνουμε μέσω της τέχνης; Με ποιόν τρόπο οι δημόσιες καλλιτεχνικές εκφράσεις αποκαλύπτουν, οριοθετούν ή αμφισβητούν τη νεοφιλελεύθερη αστικοποίηση; Από τη δεκαετία του 1980, η σχέση των καλλιτεχνών με τον αστικό εξευγενισμό θεωρείται αμφιλεγόμενη καθώς έχουν υπάρξει περιπτώσεις που, άθελα τους ή και ηθελημένα, έχουν συνεισφέρει στην ανάπτυξη του. Δεν λείπουν παρ’ όλα αυτά και παραδείγματα που έχουν συντελέσει στο αντίθετο.

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

Ως τέτοια περίπτωση θα μπορούσε να θεωρηθεί η δραστηριότητα της Collectif MASI[3]. Πρόκειται για μια ομάδα που ιδρύθηκε στο Παρίσι το 2018 από τη Μαντλέν Ανηψητάκη και τον Simon Riedler. Πολλαπλοί ορισμοί και χαρακτηρισμοί θα μπορούσαν να αποδώσουν τον πυρήνα της δουλειάς τους, με σταθερό παρονομαστή ωστόσο τον συνδυασμό των γνώσεων και των εμπειριών τους επάνω στην κοινωνιολογία και την αρχιτεκτονική. Πριν μετακομίσουν στην Ελλάδα, είχαν αφήσει το στίγμα τους στο Παρίσι, την πόλη της Γουατεμάλας, το Σαν Χοσέ, τη Λίμα, το Βαλπαραΐσο, το Σάο Πάολο, το Ρίο ντε Τζανέιρο, την Περέιρα, τη Μπογκοτά και την πόλη του Μεξικού με ποικίλα μέσα. Μέχρι στιγμής έχουν δημιουργήσει εφήμερες εγκαταστάσεις στο δημόσιο χώρο, assemblage, τοποειδής (site-specific) παρεμβάσεις, in situ περιβάλλοντα, γλυπτικές κατασκευές, σκηνογραφίες κοινωνικής αλληλεπίδρασης, επιτελεστικά και συμμετοχικά δρώμενα, βίντεο έργα και άλλα. Ανάλογα με τον τόπο στον οποίο βρίσκονται, η εικαστική τους γλώσσα αναδιαμορφώνεται και προσαρμόζεται στον κοινωνικό ιστό, αντικατοπτρίζοντας τις τοπικές συνθήκες. Συχνά μάλιστα αξιοποιούν και δίνουν δεύτερη ζωή σε ευτελή αντικείμενα που βρίσκουν παρατημένα (objet trouvé) προσθέτοντας σε αυτά επιπλέον υλικά καθώς και έντονα χρώματα. Κάθε αντικείμενο που επιλέγουν είναι φορέας προηγούμενων ανθρώπινων εμπειριών, ερμηνειών και χρήσεων. Η επανάχρηση και  η ευφάνταστη αναγέννησή του γίνεται με γνώμονα τις νέες παραδοχές που προέρχονται από τα βιώματα της ομάδας στο χώρο. Η σχέση που αποκτά η Collectif MASI με τα στοιχεία, τα αντικείμενα, και με τις κοινότητες που προσδιορίζουν τον εκάστοτε χώρο, καθορίζει εκ νέου την στρατηγική δημιουργικής σύνθεσης που θα επιλέξει.

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

Οι ετερογενείς μεθοδολογίες και προσεγγίσεις της, έχουν σχεδιαστεί με τέτοιο τρόπο ούτως ώστε να προσφέρουν εναλλακτικές και λιγότερο ιεραρχικές μορφές συνύπαρξης, ικανές να επεκτείνουν την κατανόησή μας για την οικοδόμηση των πόλεων και των κοινοτήτων της, όπως επίσης για τη διαφορετικότητα, την πολυπολιτισμικότητα, τη συλλογική ταυτότητα, τη διαπολιτισμική ανταλλαγή και την αναγνώριση των αναγκών εκτοπισμένων και ευπαθών κοινωνικών ομάδων. Στο έργο Πλατεία με θέα. Ανανεώνοντας το αυτοείδωλο μιας πλατείας (2021), που παράχθηκε για το πρόγραμμα φιλοξενίας καλλιτεχνών του Victoria Square Project, Station One AIR 2021, με θέμα Η Ιπποδάμεια εντός Πλαισίου, η ομάδα ενεργοποίησε μια σειρά αλληλεπιδράσεων στην πλατεία Βικτώριας, ένα σημείο της πόλης τραυματισμένο από κοινωνικές και ταξικές αποστάσεις, δίνοντας χώρο για αυτοσχεδιασμό και αυθορμητισμό. Έχοντας ως αφετηρία το νεοκλασικό άγαλμα του Johannes Pfuhl που κοσμεί την πλατεία και αναφέρεται στην Ιπποδάμεια, αρχικά επινόησαν μια παραλλαγή του μύθου της ηρωίδας προκειμένου να της προσδώσουν ένα ενδυναμωτικό τέλος. Σε αντίθεση με τα γεγονότα της πρωτότυπης εκδοχής, στην παραλλαγή της Collectif MASI η Ιπποδάμεια καταφέρνει και σώζει τον εαυτό της. Για την επίτευξη της διάδοσης αυτής της αφήγησης στη γειτονιά, η ομάδα δούλεψε συνεργατικά με κατοίκους της περιοχής. Οι κάτοικοι προσέφεραν φιλοξενία σε οκτώ σεντόνια/πίνακες με διαφορετικές εικόνες που οπτικοποιούν την εναλλακτική ιστορία της Ιπποδάμειας, τοποθετώντας τα στα μπαλκόνια τους. Εκτός από τα σεντόνια/πίνακες, η ομάδα μαζί με παιδιά πρόσφυγες που συχνάζουν στην πλατεία, δημιούργησαν από κοινού τέσσερα κινητά γλυπτά από επαναχρησιμοποιημένα υλικά, όπου Ιπποδάμεια απέκτησε τη μορφή πουλιού. Τα γλυπτά σύντομα μετατράπηκαν σε όχημα/παιχνίδι των παιδιών λειτουργώντας ως αντιπροτάσεις στην στατικότητα και την αποστασιοποίηση που εκπέμπει το υπάρχον δημόσιο μνημείο. Μέσα από αυτήν τη δράση προέκυψαν συμπληρωματικές χειρονομίες δημόσιας σύνδεσης και συμπερίληψης στον χώρο της πλατείας, όπως για παράδειγμα «χαιρετισμοί» ανάμεσα σε άτομα που βρίσκονταν στην πλατεία και σε αυτά που εξέθεταν τα σεντόνια/πίνακες στα μπαλκόνια, προδίδοντας έτσι την κοινή ανάγκη για επικοινωνία, έκφραση και αφύπνιση.

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

Δύο χρόνια αργότερα, στο πλαίσιο του Προγράμματος 2023 ΕΛΕVΣΙΣ Πολιτιστική Πρωτεύουσα της Ευρώπης στην Ελευσίνα, η Collectif MASI ήταν υπεύθυνη για τη συμμετοχική δράση με τίτλο Περσεφόνη, το κόκκινο χαλί (2023), εμπνευσμένη από τον ομώνυμο μύθο. Για 30 συνεχόμενες μέρες ξεδίπλωνε ένα κόκκινο χαλί μήκους 40 μέτρων και πλάτους 1,5 μέτρου, σύμβολο του θανάτου και της γονιμότητας της ελευσινιακής γης. Πριν την έναρξη της επαναλαμβανόμενης δράσης, η ομάδα είχε έρθει σε επαφή με διάφορες γειτονιές, καθώς και με κοινότητες Ρομά, ώστε να εγκλιματιστεί με την κοινωνική παραγωγή των βιωμένων χώρων της Ελευσίνας και τα υποκείμενα που τους κατοικούν, και να προσκαλέσει τα τελευταία στο δρώμενο. Το χαλί δε βρέθηκε μόνο στο έδαφος, όπως είθισται σε επίσημες περιστάσεις. Μετατράπηκε σε ένα «γλυπτικό» αντικείμενο του οποίου οι όγκοι και η πλαστικότητα καθορίζονταν από την κινησιολογία, τη διάθεση, τη συνεργασία και την πορεία των συμμετεχόντων, που αποτελούνταν από ντόπιους και επισκέπτες. Περιφέρθηκε και απλώθηκε σε διαφορετικά σημεία της Ελευσίνας, μέσα από μία πομπή που έμοιαζε με κατάληψη, αποσυνδεδεμένη από χωρικούς και άλλου είδους διαχωρισμούς. Η πομπή πραγματοποιήθηκε με συνοδεία μουσικής από την τρομπέτα του Ανδρέα Πολυζωγόπουλου, καθώς και χορών και τραγουδιών από τοπικούς συλλόγους (Σύλλογος Μικρασιατών Ελευσίνας – Μουσείο Ιστορίας και Λαογραφίας, Σύλλογος Πελοποννησίων Ελευσίνας, Σύλλογος Ηπειρωτών Θριάσιου Πεδίου, Χιακή Ένωση Ελευσίνος, Συμφωνική Ορχήστρα της Δρέσδης). Ως αποτέλεσμα, μετατράπηκε σε μία θεραπευτική τελετουργία, με ενωτικές και συμφιλιωτικές ιδιότητες, που αντιμετώπισε τον συγκεκριμένο τόπο ως ζωντανό οργανισμό, αναγνωρίζοντας τη σημασία της διάδρασης και της συνυπευθυνότητας για τη διατήρηση της ζωτικότητάς του. Το δρώμενο έχει καταγραφεί και θα παρουσιαστεί στην ομώνυμη ταινία που έχει γυριστεί από τον Joshua Olsthoorn και την Collectif MASI.

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

Την ίδια χρονιά η ομάδα εργάστηκε επίσης στην υποβαθμισμένη και παραμελημένη περιοχή του Ελαιώνα, και συγκεκριμένα στη γειτονιά Μαρκόνι, για την έκθεση Ελαιώνας ‘23 – Χθόνιο και Ανθρωπόκαινος. Έχοντας περάσει αρκετό χρόνο στη γειτονιά, η Collectif MASI συνέθεσε μαζί με τους κατοίκους την επιτελεστική δράση Έφυγε η Ακρόπολη από το πιάτο μας (2023), που με παιγνιώδη διάθεση ήρθε να δώσει φως στις ανάγκες και τα κρίσιμα ζητήματα που επηρέαζαν την καθημερινότητα τους. Πρόκειται για μία συνάθροιση κατά τη διάρκεια της οποίας κάτοικοι είχαν στήσει ένα τραπέζι έξω από την πόρτα του σπιτιού τους. Σε κάθε τραπέζι είχαν τοποθετήσει ένα πιάτο με ασφαλτικά υλικά και πίσσα που προέρχονταν από τα βουνά μπάζων τα οποία συνθέτουν την τωρινή τους θέα (αντί για την Ακρόπολη που είχαν στο πιάτο πριν), ως προσφορά στους περαστικούς. Μεγάλος αριθμός επισκεπτών πέρασε από κάθε τραπέζι και άνοιξε συζητήσεις με τους κατοίκους, οι οποίοι με τη σειρά τους μοιράστηκαν τις ιστορίες τους αλλά και τα αιτήματα τους για ουσιαστική κρατική μέριμνα. Στη συνέχεια, όλα τα τραπέζια ενώθηκαν σε ένα κοινό. Εκεί συγκεντρώθηκαν οι κάτοικοι για να σπάσουν τα μπάζα με σφυριά ως ένδειξη διαμαρτυρίας αλλά και πράξη συναισθηματικής αποφόρτισης. Ακολούθησε ανοιχτό προς όλους δείπνο, μαγειρεμένο από τους ίδιους, όπου οι συζητήσεις έλαβαν συνέχεια. Η ουσία του έργου εντοπίζεται αφενός στη διαμόρφωση των απαραίτητων συνθηκών οικειότητας και ασφάλειας ώστε να προκύψει αβίαστα ο διάλογος και αφετέρου στην απόδοση του τρόπου με τον οποίο λειτουργεί, ανεπίσημα, μια δημοκρατική διαβούλευση όπου διαφορετικές φωνές εκπροσωπούνται φέρνοντας «στο τραπέζι» ένα πολιτικό ζήτημα. Το να επιτευχθεί η συμμετοχή, τόσο δημιουργικά όσο και κοινωνικά είναι ομολογουμένως μεγάλη πρόκληση. Αξίζει να σημειωθεί πως μετά από δύο βδομάδες ξεκίνησε η διαδικασία απόσυρσης.

Μπορεί τα χρόνια δραστηριότητας της Collectif MASI στην Ελλάδα ως καλλιτεχνική ομάδα να μην είναι πολλά, το κοινωνικό και καλλιτεχνικό της αντίκρισμα στον τόπο όμως δεν είναι καθόλου αμελητέο. Όπως γίνεται φανερό από τα έργα στα οποία αναφερθήκαμε, η δυναμική της πρακτικής τους έγκειται στην αξιοποίηση διαφορετικών τόπων και τρόπων κοινωνικότητας με διακριτικότητα και σεβασμό, και στην ευρηματική ενεργοποίηση όλων εκείνων των δομικών στοιχείων που μπορούν να οικοδομήσουν μια πραγματικά ανοιχτή, ευημερούσα και ενοποιημένη κοινωνία. Είναι γεγονός πως σε εποχές όπως η σημερινή, τέτοιου είδους πρακτικές δεν μπορούν να αντικαταστήσουν την πολιτική δράση, τη διεκδίκηση και την κριτική στους υφιστάμενους κρατικούς θεσμούς. Δεν μπορούν από μόνες τους να σώσουν την πόλη και να κάνουν τους κατοίκους της να ευδοκιμήσουν. Δεν θα επιφέρουν αυτόματα δικαιοσύνη και συστημική αλλαγή. Ωστόσο μπορούν να μας οχυρώσουν από τον κυνισμό, να μας αφυπνίσουν από την απάθεια και να μας κινητοποιήσουν. Μπορούν να γίνουν πολιτικό βίωμα και να μεταλλάξουν την αδράνεια σε αναστοχασμό. Μπορούν να μας βοηθήσουν να αποκτήσουμε (εν)συναίσθηση, να ανακτήσουμε την τρυφερότητά μας και να συντηρήσουμε την απαραίτητη μνήμη προκειμένου να τα επικαλούμαστε πιο τακτικά. Μπορούν ακόμη και να μας υπενθυμίσουν πού πηγαίνουμε και γιατί, σαν μία πυξίδα.

Η Collectif MASI (2018) ιδρύθηκε από την Μαντλέν Ανηψητάκη, αρχιτέκτονα και τον Simon Riedler κοινωνιολόγο. Επικεντρώνεται σε έργα πολεοδομικής σκηνογραφίας και κοινωνικής τέχνης. Έχει πραγματοποιήσει το Δίκτυο σχοινιών στον πολεοδομικό ιστό (Κεντρική και Νότια Αμερική, 2018-2019). H Μαντλέν Ανηψητάκη έχει κερδίσει το βραβείο ARTWORKS και είναι Fellow του Προγράμματος Υποστήριξης Καλλιτεχνών ΙΣΝ (2020). Έχει εκθέσει υλικό αρχείου στο Espace Voltaire, τη Cité internationale des arts (Παρίσι, 2020), το Steinzeit Gallery (Βερολίνο, 2022) και το Evia Film Project (2022). Πειραματίστηκε στη σύνδεση ιδιωτικού και δημόσιου χώρου στο Residency Ateliers Médicis (Pouillenay, 2020) και στο έργο “Crossing Walls” (Nuit Blanche, Παρίσι, 2021). Η συλλογική της περφόρμανς “1 km as the crow flies” (Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, 2021) αναγνωρίστηκε ως «εξαιρετική δράση αντίστασης στην πανδημία» από τον Francis Alÿs. Έχει συνεργαστεί με το Victoria Square Project για τα έργα Πλατεία με θέα (2021) και Trikiklo (2022), με την Greenpeace για το έργο Κλεψυδρόγειος (ΚΠΙΣΝ, 2022), με το ΕΛΕΥΣΙΣ 2023 για το έργο Περσεφόνη, το κόκκινο χαλί. Αυτό το φθινόπωρο, η MASI επιλέχθηκε στο Salon de Montrouge (Γαλλία), στο Ελαιώνας 2023 – Χθόνιο και Ανθρωπόκαινος, στο Στημόνι (Misc.Athens) και στο Platforms Project (Αθήνα).

H Μάρη Σπανουδάκη είναι ερευνήτρια, πολιτιστική διαχειρίστρια και επιμελήτρια. Καταπιάνεται με θέματα τα οποία συνδέονται με κοινωνικά κινήματα, πολιτικές ταυτότητας, λαϊκό πολιτισμό και pop κουλτούρα, θεσμική κριτική, μορφές κοινότητας και εγγύτητας, διαχείριση αρχείων και μελέτη εκθέσεων τέχνης. Η εκπαίδευσή της περιλαμβάνει πτυχίο Επικοινωνίας, Μέσων και Πολιτισμού από το Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο, μεταπτυχιακό τίτλο Πολιτιστικής Πολιτικής & Διαχείρισης από το City (Πανεπιστήμιο του Λονδίνου) καθώς και μεταπτυχιακό τίτλο στην Ιστορία των Εκθέσεων Σύγχρονης Τέχνης με εξειδίκευση στην έρευνα από το Central Saint Martins (Πανεπιστήμιο των Τεχνών του Λονδίνου). Ασχολείται ενεργά με την παραγωγή, την επικοινωνία και τη διοργάνωση πολιτιστικών εκδηλώσεων, ενώ έχει επιμεληθεί εκδόσεις, κοινοτικά έργα και εκθέσεις σύγχρονης τέχνης στην Ελλάδα, το Ηνωμένο Βασίλειο και τη Γερμανία, τόσο εντός όσο και εκτός διαδικτύου. Υπήρξε υπότροφος του προγράμματος Start – Create Cultural Change (2017-2018), και το 2019 βραβεύτηκε από την ARTWORKS για την επιμελητική της πρακτική, στα πλαίσια του Προγράμματος Υποστήριξης Καλλιτεχνών Ίδρυμα Σταύρος Νιάρχος (ΙΣΝ). Το 2023 επιλέχθηκε να συμμετάσχει στο πρόγραμμα φιλοξενίας UNIDEE «Ούτε στη Στεριά ούτε στη Θάλασσα» (Ενότητα IV) στην Ιταλία. Έχει γράψει κείμενα και άρθρα για καταλόγους εκθέσεων, βιβλία καλλιτεχνών και περιοδικά σύγχρονης τέχνης. Από το 2017, είναι το έτερον ήμισυ της γυναικείας καλλιτεχνικής/επιμελητικής συνέργειας This is not a feminist project, της οποία η δουλειά έχει παρουσιαστεί στο Μέγαρο Μουσικής Θεσσαλονίκης, στο Eleusis European Capital of Culture (Ελευσίνα), στο A-DASH και στο Εθνικό Μουσείου Σύγχρονης Τέχνης (ΕΜΣΤ) στην Αθήνα. Είναι επίσης ιδρυτικό μέλος του Σωματείου Εργαζομένων στη Σύγχρονη Τέχνη στην Ελλάδα, ερασιτέχνις φωτογράφος και dj, και συλλέκτρια αρχειακού υλικού και βινυλίων.

[1] Χαρακτηριστικά παραδείγματα ο Μεγάλος Περίπατος, η Ομόνοια, το Πεδίον του Άρεως, η Ακαδημία Πλάτωνος, η μεταφορά των Υπουργείων από το κέντρο σε «κυβερνητικό πάρκο» στην ΠΥΡΚΑΛ, ο λόφος του Στρέφη (που φαίνεται τελικά ότι σωθεί χάρη στις παρεμβάσεις των κατοίκων), η πλατεία Εξαρχείων, το Μεταξουργείο, το κλείσιμο του κινηματογράφου Ιντεάλ κ.α.

[2] Η ιδιωτικοποίηση και η ανάπλαση περιοχών, η στεγαστική επισφάλεια, η επέλαση των διαμερισμάτων βραχυχρόνιας διαμονής, η έκρηξη των ενοικίων, η μείωση περιοχών πρασίνου σε πάρκα και πλατείες, και η καταστρατήγηση τυπικών προβλέψεων της νομοθεσίας προς όφελος της τουριστικής ανάπτυξης. Δημόσιες διαβουλεύσεις παρακάμπτονται και αρχιτεκτονικοί διαγωνισμοί περιορίζονται ή/και δεν εφαρμόζονται. Όταν ο αστικός σχεδιασμός γίνεται αντικείμενο ιδιωτικής δωρεάς τότε αυτόματα το δικαίωμα στη διαμόρφωση της πόλης παραχωρείται στη διακριτική ευχέρεια ευεργετών που δεν είναι κάτοικοι της εκάστοτε περιοχής, αρχιτέκτονες, ούτε καν ειδικοί επί του θέματος.

[3] Το όνομα Masi προφέρεται όπως η ελληνική λέξη μαζί στα γαλλικά.