Fellow Field: Εικαστικές Τέχνες

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marina Velisioti was born in Thessaloniki, Greece 1982. She studied at the Department of Applied Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Thessaloniki. She is based in Athens. During her university studies she attended courses and seminars of scenography. Amongst her interests are video art applications and music themes of psychology, psychoacoustics and documentary. She has also attended courses in technical analogue and digital photo printing, engraving and sculpture. She is a scholar of U.F.Os, monsters, sci-fi culture. In her recent work, Marina Velisioti produces a series of collages, tapestries, sculptures developing narratives inspired by ancient buildings, deserted or forgotten landscapes, motifs symbols, over which she collides with the most prominent technique, turning them into astonishing, unrealistic universes, often with a playful mood. She is the founder and editor of the art zine Bebabebo. Marina Velisioti rthe Stavros Niarchos received the Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2022).

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

¹ Roger Vadim, Barbarella, 1968

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

“̵T̵h̵i̵s̵ ̵i̵s̵ ̵a̵ ̵l̵e̵g̵

I have no feelings for this leg anymore

He also had other body parts

He wasn’t just a leg

[…]

His shoe size was 47”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said I wanted to do a film too.

He laughed.

He said films are hard to make.

He said female filmmakers are not good enough.”

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

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

“…yes,” I said, feeling confused.

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

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

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

Εva Vaslamatzi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Dear,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours truly, Angeliki Tzortzakaki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

mother light

Every system around us has a voice

tender ghostly rough
or burned insane behave

acceleration is a thing
engagement is another
but the same

mothers and mothers and fluids

light is never a filter you said
quite the opposite

for when time escapes its institutional life

mother frame

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

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

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

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

You killed time and

mother orifice

we found freedom in the margins.

mother settle

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

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

mother material

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

It goes:

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

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

Collecting, composing, in touch,

mutations, subversions,
ownership (singular always),

it’s all yours anyway.

Papers are never just papers.
Papers are permissions;

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

You used them to prove exclusion.
You won.

mother work

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

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

I silenced yours.
Hearing it proves me guilty.

mother arrangement

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

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

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

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

mother arrangement

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

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

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

and I don’t know where it’ll all end.

Yet your work made me feel safe when very dysfunctional,

solid when fluid,

disciplined when destructed,

included when I was googling methods of disappearing,

mother notice

but no-one noticed.

By Ioanna Gerakidi

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

Clarice Lispector. “Água Viva”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTWORKS is a nonprofit organization exclusively supported by its founding donor, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Our aim is to create a fertile and nurturing environment for Greek artists through funding and public engagement opportunities. You can always learn more about our Fellows at art-works.gr

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

2. See Haraway, 2016, p. 41

3. See Lichens for Marxists (Milne, 2017)

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

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

Context and objectives

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

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

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

The thread

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

“Here is a fairy tale for you

Which is just as good as true

What unfolds will give you passion,

Castles on hills & also treason

How, from his cape a fatal thread

To her window the villains led”

Francis Alÿs, Fairy Tales

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

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

The performance and its documentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the extensive documentation of the students :

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

Tracks of reflection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Francis”

Collectif MASI

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

“I spotted the animal as it exited its nest.

From that moment onwards, I started observing it.

I was impressed by the way it emerged,

Quite clumsily and abruptly.

Then it acted naturally, perhaps a bit suspiciously.

Then normally.

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

taking too long.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.