Fellow Field: Εικαστικές Τέχνες

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

In a way, honeybees are like artists. They venture into their surroundings, seeking out nourishment. In moving from plant to plant, they fertilize flowers and thus bring new life and more beauty to the world. Besides that, deep within their labyrinthine hives, they pool their nectar and painstakingly transform their labor into sustenance. Much like artists, the honeybees’ creative process is opaque from the outside. Few of us ever make the effort to peer into the honeycomb to understand how everyday materials are transfigured into something so sweet and nourishing. The artist’s studio remains similarly remote.

But if any two people are in a position to understand these twinned mysteries, it is the artist-couple Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi. After both growing up on the mainland, and later spending time abroad, the couple have settled together in Komi, a small village on the ruggedly picturesque Cycladic island of Tinos. Ioannis, alongside his artistic practice, has avidly embraced a different art form: beekeeping. And Paola, whose family hails from the island, participates fully in their rural Aegean community while maintaining her own creative output. Together, the pair have formed Hypercomf, a “multidisciplinary artist identity materialized as a company profile.” To understand their playful, boundlessly inventive efforts more clearly, I journeyed to the couple’s charming, white-washed home. While Ioannis was away on a neighboring island, Paola welcomed me into their shared creative universe.

In doing so, Paola put into practice one of her strongest beliefs: that artists need to open up, making both their profession and their work more inviting to the public. She tells me, “I’m against the fantasy of the artist alone in their studio; me alone with my brilliant thoughts. We should involve people in the making. Most times, they only see what happens at the end, and that makes our work needlessly mysterious and misunderstood. If people are let into the creative process from the start, they will have a better appreciation of what the final artwork means.” And so, with our task clearly laid out before us, Paola and I begin, slowly unraveling what Hypercomf — and more generally, what a transparent and truly open artistic mindset — might have to teach us about how we look at the world.

Paola and Ioannis met in London when they were 21 years old. Paola had grown up in Athens, Ioannis in the flat, central city of Karditsa. Both had left Greece for London in order to study art and see more of the world. Each was looking for something bigger out there and amidst this immense metropolis, they found each other. Paola has no trouble recounting the exact moment when their relationship deepened: “From the beginning, we were painting together. That is to say, side by side, in the same space, but still focused on our own canvases. Slowly, we began to play exquisite corpse. That is, we put a canvas in the middle of the room and one person would start painting. Then, they would leave it and allow the other person to pick up in their own direction. We continued this exchange, truly painting together now. It was like a game.”

Paola and Ioannis now had each other; next, they needed to fashion an environment in which they could both flourish. They returned to Athens where, individually, their practices were busy. They found the city’s artistic community welcoming and especially appreciated being once more amidst the Greek sense of humor. But over time, Paola began to recognize a “psychological need to be close to landscapes and nature.” Within the choked streets of the city, Paola did what she could, creating a personal oasis of “a balcony with 500 plants.” Still, she felt she had to get away. When she saw an opportunity to go to Tinos for work — helping run an educational program at a museum on the island — she jumped at it and Ioannis followed.

Upon arrival, Paola and Ioannis connected deeply with their surroundings. Ioannis, who had never before lived in such a rural setting, took up beekeeping. Paola, meanwhile, connected with the community from where her grandmother had originally come. “In Komi, half the people are my family. I call everyone aunt or uncle, since we are all somehow related.” More deeply, the island’s culture resonated with her and began to shape her perspective on the world. “Everything is more real here. I think it’s because death is so close at hand. There are over 200 people in Komi and only a few dozen are under the age of 50. That means people are dying a lot. Just outside my house, there is a bell ringing each time someone has passed away; that’s when you know the soul is departing. But none of this is morbid — it’s simply part of life. Death sharpens your focus and keeps away some of the pointless distractions of modern living.”

Immersed in the rhythms of their island village, the ideas behind Hypercomf began to percolate. Far from the galleries of Athens and the city-dwellers’ need to impress each other with their wit, originality, or cynicism, the project adopted a distinctly approachable character. Paola says, “We wanted to make functional art pieces that incorporated elements of design. The pieces would be easy to buy and appeal to a wide range of people. Our humble goal was to make everyday life a little more interesting.” At the same time, since the project emerged from the playful minds of Paola and Ioannis, it came with a twist. Hypercomf, from its beginning, adopted a “fictitious company profile,” a sort of faux corporate sheen that allowed them to poke fun at the commercialization of art while also opening themselves to the possibilities of reaching a wider audience. As Paola tells me, “For our first public event, we held an exhibition that doubled as a pop-up shop. It felt much warmer than an ‘art exhibition’ — we felt we were with the people. Out of this success, the idea of a fake company became established.”

Since its founding, Hypercomf has been a success: brisk sales, numerous openings, and an international footprint. On paper, the envy of many aspiring brands. But all of this, Paola reports to me with a mischievous glint in her eye, is part of the fun. To anyone who has seen their output, it is abundantly clear that Hypercomf is not your average company. For example, on the company’s e-shop, Hypercomf asks people to use its products for “multiple lifetimes” — an unlikely basis for a profitable business model. And anyways, as Paola reveals to me with a laugh, “The e-shop isn’t open yet. Two years after we started, it still says, ‘Coming soon.’ Yes, real soon, real soon — we’ll keep them waiting.”

But for Paola and Ioannis, the real interest of Hypercomf has been creating a new space for their playful explorations — an updated, online channel for their old games of painting-studio exquisite corpse. Given that the two artists have matured since their art school days, their creative spark has leapt beyond the bounds of their own partnership. As Paola tells me, they discovered that adopting a group identity opened up the possibilities of working with other artists. Paola says, “Something about the utopian idea of Hypercomf seems to activate people’s openness.” Such projects have included curating other artists’ work, set-designing exhibition spaces, all while utilizing a diverse range of mediums ranging from film to purely digital experiences.

Indeed, as she hinted at the beginning of our conversation, this expanding spirit of collaboration extends beyond fellow artists to the wider world. She tells me, “Right now, most people have no idea what artists do all day. Yes, making art is complicated — investigating materials, working through concepts, experimenting in the studio, finding money (that’s part of it too!) — but all of this work is real and many kinds of people can have a worthwhile input. I believe we need to involve our potential audiences: inform them, get their opinion, make them part of the process. Not only will they better understand the work, but I think it will make the work itself more interesting.”

She starts with an example close to home. Komi, her village, and the entire island of Tinos have contributed greatly to the material form of Hypercomf’s work. Like the honeybees which Ioannis tends, Paola describes a symbiotic relationship with the two artists’ immediate environment. “We try to find different ways to repurpose what’s already been made. Our work is not fully organic — we use computers and all kinds of manmade materials. But this reflects the reality that humans are everywhere now and so there is no ‘pure’ nature. For example, we use plastics we find on the beach. We use bones. And most of all, we use fabrics that we find stowed away, hidden in the community. A particularly good source are handmade tapestries and rugs. Our neighbors have been happy to open up their ancestral chests and give us their old fabrics; they just want to see them put to good use.”

She goes on to give another example from a project done in Italy. “We were invited to a textile factory and asked to respond to the building as well as the surrounding landscape. Of course, we could have done all our research online, taking ideas from elsewhere and looking at satellite images of the nearby mountains. Instead, we hiked up onto the slopes, found some shepherds, and explained our project to them. We asked if they would put GPS trackers on their sheep and suddenly, we had live data coming in from the locals. As the sheep’s wool had been used to create textiles, we used the sheep’s data to create new weavings that represented their journeys. We were so happy when the shepherd then came to the exhibition opening. He saw his own lands in a new way and he easily understood everything since he was involved in its creation.”

Hypercomf’s projects, both in Tinos and abroad, exemplify Paola’s belief of getting to know a place through its inhabitants and of making art almost literally from the ground up. In this light, then, it can seem odd that Hypercomf bases itself in such a remote location, seemingly secluded from wider connections to the world. But this is perhaps one of the key contradictions that the couple has learned to relax: between place and movement. With the lessons Paola and Ioannis have learned in Tinos about becoming embedded in their community, their fake company has put itself into global circulation, carrying its embodied wisdom everywhere it goes. She says, “Maybe 50% of our creativity happens in Tinos. We think internationally; we are nomadic. If the internet has done something good, it’s that you can live anywhere and still work just fine.”

This winter, for example, the couple will be in residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Among the endless activities pursued in New York City, Paola and Ioannis found out about a small but tight-knit community of pigeon keepers who understand the city in a way different than anyone else. “Our goal was to research the various networks of the city: urban, digital, natural, transportation, jogging routes, etc. And then we discovered a great entry-point — these crazy pigeons! We plan to explore how this peculiar subculture works as a social structure — both for the humans and their animals.” And then she adds, characteristically, “It also suits us since people claim to love nature but they certainly don’t love pigeons or rats or cockroaches. We’re proud to have a victim of speciesism as the grounding for our next project.”

As we wrap up our conversation, we return again to the idea of structures and scale. It’s funny to think how New York City, a sprawling, bustling center of productivity, can also provide the setting for a small group of fanatics to fly pigeons, unnoticed by the city at large. For Paola, these nested frames are essential to how she sees the world. “I suggest everyone try to experience the full spectrum, from the micro to the macro. I have lived in a village with 200 people, an island with 8,000 people, a capital with four million, and a global metropolis with over ten. What I have learned is the universality of scale. My village neighborhood here in Tinos is like one building in Athens. But the city of Athens, as a community, is not so different from my island. The basic structure of hierarchies and what we individually pursue is always the same. In nature, the atom is round and the earth is round. Maybe the universe is round too? What works on the small scale seems to apply everywhere.”

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

Nana Seferli’s studio is situated near the Southern suburbs of the city, and that, in Athens, means it can be found within the dense urban tissue, yet a breath away from the seacoast. In the broader region of Kallithea, the artist found a store space, bright and calm, among other small businesses and family houses. The wide street allows the sunlight to enter the room, where she paints among large canvases that brim every available surface. An enormous pink Bougainvillea tree consumes the front window and the entrance of the studio and seems to be enjoying the sun, nearly as much as does the artist, who spends most of her day there, behind that facade that resembles a vibrant summer house.

Seferli started working there after the former resident of the studio, a friend and artist, moved abroad. She explains that her working hours in the studio are more fruitful in comparison with those in her apartment, where she used to paint before. Her house, not very far from Kallithea, is already filled with paintings, material ideas, sketches, drawings and her favorite objects, while it also provides vital space for a cat, two parrots and herself. Beyond being “busy”, her private space functions more like a dynamic ecosystem of affection, comfort and safety for the artist and her loved ones. After all, she tends to establish her painting work in such holistic, non-hierarchical, organic terrenes.

Nana Seferli, Wheat Boat, 2022, acrylic on paper, 32 X 24 cm

She studied at the Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences of the University of Ioannina and that progressive, decentralized department allowed Nana to explore her subjects, experiment with natural materials and envision the elements that were meant to reappear in her practice: organicity, textures, light, color. The calm and the uncongested environment of her student years in Ioannina is still present through her preferable working state: serene, yet approachable.

However, as part of her discipline and in absolute coherence with the principles that are suffused all over her work, Seferli has recently decided to expose herself in the challenging conditions of collaborative work process. With painting as a vehicle — probably the most lonesome artistic practice — she is currently in a creative dialogue with her colleague and artist Nicolas Simantirakis, sharing the same canvas’ surface. The result is a painting series in progress of monumental compositions, where conflict and unity can be both of great value. The fact that she confronts her tendency to work in isolation, not only challenges her off path, but also liberates her. In parallel, she is part of an alluring initiative, a closed weekly sketch session of a group of women artists that is taking place on a weekly basis at Olga Vlassi’s and Anna Zissi’s studio in Neos Kosmos. There, the participants draw using as models one another, in a healing and empowering process. Seferli is grateful for both experiences, and I find her passionate way of overcoming the challenges of co-creation is exquisitely inspiring and profoundly influential to her work in terms of practice, form and content.

Nana Seferli, Moose Hunt, 2013, ink and acrylic on canvas, 300 x 200 cm

Since her graduation, Nana was intrigued by the power relations between human and non-human entities within ecosystems, representation in patriarchal schemes and the invention of an abolishing iconography, as a response to the above. In her degree show, under the title Simulacra (2013), scenes of hunt intertwine with emblematic authoritative figures, hunters and armed women. Among other scenes and abstract portraits, she visualized an encounter between a moose and Theodore Roosevelt. The American president was a pillar of the belief that nature exists in favor of mankind. Incarnating a patriarchal and mechanical perception of the natural world, the president is here presented hunting the same animal that he used as his own, masculine symbol during his political campaign. Until today, Seferli investigates this arbitrary attribution of meaning — even speech — to silent and precarious subjects by those in power. In 2022, she published her limited self-published edition Metazoa, where she designed the whole Greek alphabet portraying an animal for every single letter.

Nana Seferli, Bird crying, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 X 50 cm

Seferli’s animal figures are not wild, nor tamed or enslaved. They are wise, emotional and self-actualized, but not human-like, as her painting is a reflection on an organic, autonomous and unified world. Cats, birds, dogs and plants project a realm of circulation and undisrupted flow, to which they contribute with their own special character and emotional imprint. At the same time, layers of gesso, acrylic and aquarelles form mountains, bring rivers and pulsing arteries into the third dimension. An idealized animistic utopia is very far from her inherently haunted compositions. Enigmatic animal figures, dominating vegetal organisms, scattered undefinable bodily forms evoke a sense of agony, they imply an obscure silent threat. The world as we know it, is at stake. It is not about the death of nature, it is, however, the end of the reign of structure, duality and force.

Nana Seferli, Makkuro, 2023, oil on canvas, 18 X 24 cm

Interestingly, as I am writing these lines about Seferli’s work, an article is going viral: orca whales have been witnessed to be attacking vessels in the ocean, driven by the urge to take revenge for the loss of their babies due to interventional human activities. According to a team of scientists, it seems as though the orcas witnessed a repetitive phenomenon that activated an instinct for defense against extinction. One, of course, cannot argue with certainty that this behavior is entirely mechanical, at least I prefer to think it isn’t. I like to read this behavior as an emotional response to a collective, as well as personal threat. Seferli’s depictions of the natural world incorporate this sense of subliminal lack of safety. The viewer cannot easily choose their subject of identification: are we the endangered ones or the danger itself? The figures of cats and birds have always been used in the classical tradition to evoke feelings of affection, admiration and calmness or even as symbols of high ideas, or people of power, divinities and political personalities. In Seferli’s work, animals govern their own life, and her visual language is not appealing, cute or easy to read. It is, though, as beautiful as a flock of orcas floating in the Iberic sea, seeking for revenge.

As I am leaving the studio, I notice that the closed store next door is a former butcher’s shop. A sign on the glass window informs the business is on sale, along with the store and its equipment. I peek inside: everything is white and clean and the room is nearly of the same width as the artist’s workplace on the other side of the wall. Nothing suggests the slaughter that was once exhibited there. Nothing but the shiny, clean blade lying on the wooden cutting surface. I imagine Nana sneaking in there one night, with her parrots perched on her shoulders, using her magical paintbrush to resurrect the animals and set them free into the wild once again.

Christina Petkopoulou

Nana Seferli (b.1989) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She graduated from the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences of the University of Ioannina and continued her studies with a postgraduate degree from École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Quimper, France. She has presented her work at festivals and art venues in Greece and abroad. Selected group exhibitions include: Ammophila Vol.3 There Was Land Here Before (Elafonisos, 2022), Imago Mundi in Venice in 2015; PEINDRE # 2 in MICA Gallery, Rennes (France, 2014); 7> 5 in Quimper (2013); Thrills and Chills at CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery (Athens, 2013); and Kodra Fresh 2013 Floating Walls, part of the Action Field Kodra festival held annually in Thessaloniki (Greece, 2013). Together with Lucie Ferezou, she has co-curated and participated in the duo show Under the Luna, presented in Booze Cooperativa (Athens, 2018); and with Akis Karanos in the duo show The Way the Dog Ran Away, held at Galaxias Municipal Cultural Centre in Nea Smyrni, Attica (Greece, 2016). From 2014 to 2020 she worked as an art teacher in special and general education. She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS (2021).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

Augustus Veinoglou is a man in demand. Before we were able to find a moment to sit down and talk, I tried no fewer than a half dozen times to schedule a meeting. The recurring phrase I heard in reply was “non-stop.” But when I did finally get a hold of him, I began to understand the cause of his elusiveness. If you imagine that any single artist has x number of concurrent plans, project sketches, fantasies, and crazy ideas running through their mind on a given day, then just think about managing the experience of three or four other artists at the same time. This is Augustus’ daily juggling routine: trying to maintain clarity and headspace for his own work while simultaneously helping to sustain Snehta, an Athens-based artist residency that he founded in 2012, which has plans to welcome 12 different visiting artists over the course of the upcoming year.

Augustus has the stamina, perhaps even a bit of the masochist’s pleasure, to drive the tempo of this treadmill of endless demands. But as we sit together at a bar and ease into a moment of early evening repose — with the promise of a few days of August holiday ahead — I can see Augustus settle in, briefly, to a different mode of being. He seems to appreciate the rare pause for self-reflection. As the various, interlocking logistical loops begin to relax, we turn our attention away from the hustle of Athens and Snehta, focusing on Augustus’ creative origins as a sculptor. We start within the confines of the artist’s studio, and then slowly rippling outward, arrive at a wider view of the city’s contemporary artistic landscape, touching on the most fundamental questions facing Athens’ artists today.

Augustus grew up in Athens and left promptly at the age of 18. He went to Scotland to study fine art for four years, focusing on sculpture. The rigor of art school was formative, and the approach he adopted for solving problems in the studio has stayed with him since. “Sculpture is a battle with matter,” he says. “It’s like being an athlete: you’re striving for a goal that is very hard to see when you begin. Instead, you just go back, day after day, trusting your persistence will bring you closer.” I had seen Augustus around the city many times over the previous months, most often at openings, enthusing about other people’s work. But now it becomes evident that he maintains a hidden reserve of energy for his own practice. He goes on, “When you have a studio full of materials, it is a messy space. In the midst of it, you are standing there, everything depending on your hands and your mind. At the start, it seems like a mythological labor — almost impossible. You forget that you have done this already. And then, suddenly, the reminiscence of those other 100 times gives you the courage to begin anew.”

The other important habit built up during art school was the balance between self-motivation and external critique. “What I learned in school was how to push a project until there are no other options. It’s easy to stop midway, but you know when you haven’t done the best you could do. For me, good art reveals that it went as far as it could. In London, some artists respond to critical feedback by saying, ‘Fuck your opinion, I’m more important than you.’ But I don’t support this position. I know when something works; there is a DNA understanding when ‘it’ is there. It’s a feeling in my whole body — and that belief will resonate with others.”

As we talk, it becomes evident how Augustus’ passions can be infectious, whether over a single work or an entire artistic program. But more deeply, I see that what drives all of Augustus’ efforts is a desire to draw structure out of chaos, coherency from entropy. He says, “Matter and ideas are really the same. To create shape, all you need is space and time. For example, when I’m working on Snehta, I need to have sketchbook time. I start by writing things down: a wood workshop, two interns, a gallery space, three artists. These are our materials. And then I begin putting them together in different arrangements, seeing what will resonate, and what new associations emerge.”

But I divert Augustus back to his early formation as an artist, before Snehta had come into being; its institutional structure was still a long way off. After finishing his BA, Augustus went on a trip to Italy. This turned out to be key to his creative perspective. Little enduring artwork came out of his travels, but he “worked by moving through space and writing many texts, poetry, and observations.” In retrospect, this is where the first seeds of Snehta were planted. “It was here that I became intrigued by the imaginary dimensions of a given place,” he explains. “I had always been drawn to Italian cinema, and as I moved through the landscape, I began to see Italy as a modern, industrialized Greece. It was like my homeland, but as a parallel reality.”

In the years that followed, Augustus bounced between Scotland and Athens, while the idea of reimagining the familiar slowly evolved in his mind. Snehta first began as a personal project, seen solely from the perspective of one person. By reversing the name of his hometown, Augustus pushed himself to understand it differently. “I was back in Athens and began driving around the city. I found myself drawn to its periphery, the lesser-known areas. I used my car as a studio, drawing what I saw from the front seat or out the side window.” All of this was before the crisis, when Athens was still basking in the glow of its 2004 Olympic Games. Having left at a young age, Augustus found that he had both an insider’s and outsider’s view of his birthplace. He became interested in telling a different story about the city, hinting at its echoes with the American way of life. He thought about the similarities between Athens and LA, two cityscapes similarly dominated by the automobile. “Often, I would drive with a friend of mine who is an architect. At the end of the day, we would go up Mt. Hymettus, on the edge of the city, and look down on the expanse below. By removing myself from the city center and the street level, I could contemplate Athens more clearly.”

In 2012, Snehta took on a new form: the artist residency that continues to this day. Rooted firmly in the neighborhood of Kypseli, where Augustus has a long family history, the space offers its residents a temporary home to produce new work, and to also make sense of the endless contradictions of Athens. Snehta, then, continues the mission that motivated Augustus from the start: taking that which is familiar about the city and turning it on its head (hence the name). He explains, “Each residency culminates in a group exhibition, giving the visiting artists a chance to share their experience of the city with others. To me, the core of the project is exchanging points of view.” As Snehta established itself and began to grow, Augustus saw that his own efforts in the studio were in continuity with the work of creating an organization. As with any sculpture, Augustus strove to balance flights of inspiration with stability. He says, “My personal investment in the idea had to exist within a professional, sustainable structure. I wanted to share my experience of Athens with all the guests, but I soon found that I couldn’t always be the one showing the artists around, especially if I wanted to maintain my excitement. So I invited new curators to work on each show. Sharing the burden has made it more sustainable, but it also threatens to become too managerial. Fortunately, its continued evolution means the challenges are always different. That’s what makes it creative.”

Of course, from the first iteration of Snehta in 2006 until today, one thing that has evolved even more than Snehta itself is the city of Athens. In that time, the Greek capital has gone from Olympic host to a region wracked by crisis and, most recently, a city rediscovering itself through its (purported) recovery. Founding Snehta in 2012, amidst such a historically difficult time, has given Augustus a distinct perspective on Athens’ recent rebirth as an alternative, artistic hub.

He says, quite bluntly, “I’ve had a lot of problems with those who came during the crisis. They were opportunists. They came to Athens because it was cheap, warm, and a fun place to party.” Augustus’ opposition is not personal, but rather represents the substantive position of someone who has helped create an institution, however small, in a challenging environment. “My debate with these people is that they come with a very loose, free-spirited approach — and meanwhile, what we need most here is structure. We need to oppose ourselves to entropy. The fact that Athens became attractive to the press and the art world was a complete accident. A small group instrumentalized the crisis for themselves and in doing so, created a chain of effects outside of anyone’s control.” Skyrocketing rents in the center against stagnant salaries immediately come to mind as just one of these unintended consequences.

Augustus continues, “In Athens, we lack both internal structures and an awareness of our identity. As Greek artists, we are not good at contextualizing what we generate. For the outsiders who simply come here to enjoy the chaos, I have no respect. It’s like they’re putting their finger in the jam, and offering nothing in return. It shows that we’re still the tourist nation that we’ve always been. We can make nice facades, but we’re not able to generate anything of our own.”

Just as Augustus gets going, threatening to fall into that characteristic Greek position of criticizing everything to the point of paralysis — he steps outside of the pattern. His years abroad, it seems, grant him an ability to find a precious bit of remove. “It’s getting better, I’m positive about that. But improvement won’t happen on its own. In a city with a non-functional museum of contemporary art and no people in the ministry of culture who support artists, it’s easy to feel stuck. Or, if not stuck, at least demanding some legitimate institutions! Not foreign institutions, but home-grown ones. It’s not about trying to imitate what they’re doing in London or becoming the ‘new Berlin’ — that’s impossible. Even if we did everything like Berlin, we would still be different. But that’s a good thing; there should be thoughtful, structural calibrations towards our particularities.”

As the afternoon turns to evening and the bar around us begins to fill up, it’s easy to see what Augustus means. Anyone who has visited Athens knows the city has a unique energy, a rhythm and texture unlike anywhere else in Europe — as far from Berlin or London as you could imagine. Why should Athens resign itself to be merely an echo, an imitation of another city’s success? Augustus concludes, “We don’t need to become stiff, but we do require some organization. We must create the space to use our difference rather than try to break it; celebrate what makes us Greek, rather than dismissing it. Think about the importance of family structures here and how they are connected to one another. That’s just one example; we always look Westward for guidance without seriously studying our own country. We should maintain our freedom, openness, even our humor. But we can’t give in to chaos.”

Despite his grand vision, Augustus ends our conversation by admitting, “Listen to me going on — I’m just trying to survive.” Indeed, this is where his personal efforts, organizational forays, and institutional critique all come together. He says, “One thing we’re sorely lacking in this community, at all levels, is a discussion about sustainability. As an artist, I wonder how I can keep going, if I still have the fire it takes. For Snehta, I wonder if it can be sustained and continue serving the community. And for Athens more widely, I’m curious if this recovery (economic, creative, and otherwise) will last.”

But ever the problem-solver, Augustus doesn’t allow these questions to hang in the air unanswered. He quickly runs through a mental list of to-dos, areas for improvement. “One thing we are lacking is audience-building skills. I am always asking myself: Why is Snehta relevant to anyone beyond my little world? Who else could I invite to my next event? How can we relate the residency to more people? These are questions for all of contemporary art! I don’t believe the answer lies in changing the art or watering it down. Rather, it’s a question of how we exhibit the work, and how we invite others into the experience. At Snehta, we emphasize participation-based practices. I want to support artists who are interested in the community, and who feed their energy back into their surroundings.” And then, Augustus grows adventurous once more, his desire to develop new forms manifesting yet again. “An art exhibition might not always be the most successful vector. I love trying new things. For example, in the spring, I organized a treasure hunt across Kypseli. Why does art have to stay within the walls of the institution?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Γλώσσα πρωτότυπου κειμένου: Αγγλικά

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.