Between critical times of “not knowing what to do”: (Spontaneous Storytelling) interventions and re-evaluations

One month after the obscure Tuesday morning of 9/11, John Berger writes in, ‘To Try and Understand’, the foreword to novelist, essayist and activist, Arundhati Roy’s, the algebra of infinite justice. ‘I’m tempted to say that the world has never been more confused. Yet this would be untrue. The world has never had to face such a global confusion. Only in facing it can we make sense of what we have to do. And this is precisely what Arundhati Roy does in the pages which follow. She makes sense of what we have to do. Thereby offering an example. An example of what? Of being fully alive in our world, such as it is, and of getting close to listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.’[1]  

Talking of her native India, Arundhati Roy makes a very strikingly vital and humane observation that seems to escape all realities where opportunist governments aim to keep citizens under hardhearted control. Following the order in 1998 of India’s then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to go ahead with the nuclear tests due to a ‘deteriorating security environment,’[2] Arundhati Roy brings crucial reminders from India to our attention. ‘We are a nation of a billion people… More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and over 200 million have no drinking water’[3], she tells us. Given these inhumane conditions, how can any consumption of destructive nuclear power or exorbitant bombs not amount to a criminal and unethical act committed in an age and world of deep crises, when eating and drinking clean water remains a real struggle for millions of people in only one country. For those of us living in countries where we still have enough food to eat and water to drink, we can wrestle harder to ‘get closer to listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.’    

Ten years after 9/11, the big question of whether this overall confusion has settled in to our lives and created a deeper gap between ourselves and the systems we vote for, remains life-size. As global confusion and public opinion (c)rises, and, spontaneous narratives and artificial democracies spread out and root themselves, respectively, we search for new ways to collect our actions and connect our narratives with those most pushed out of the humane social conditions which keep us in the only world we have to live. My goal, here, is to show, and push, activist art-making, writing and intervening, which produce provoking and transforming truths that undermine media sources, and form a new field of aesthetic and critical action. Today, more than ever, we wonder what we should be doing to ‘get closer to listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.’

Working with means, which communicate ideas and issues – whether with art, aesthetics, language and critical writing – holds us open to current challenges of the vast value of producing truths today. In a period of detrimentally high rates of unemployment, a phenomenal concentration of corporate greed, elevated levels of consumption beyond our means, increasingly excluding anti-immigration laws which, at best, keep the vulnerable on the fringes of society, a deeply unequal distribution of wealth and energy, and, high levels of distrust towards democratically elected governments[4], we are, more than ever, perhaps, called as responsible citizens of this world to re-evaluate how we produce truths, and, to keep on creating spaces from which to disseminate stories and transforming messages, capable of reaching large audiences worldwide.

Mitch Epstein, American Power, 2011 ("a five-year long, twenty-five state investigation of energy production and consumption in the American landscape, it questions the power of nature, government, corporations, and mass consumption in the United States."[5])

  Maria Petrides, on wall st., 2011

Maria Petrides, on wall st., 2011 (to watch a video made by Cypriot visual artist, Kakia Catselli and myself, in October 2011, during Occupy Wall St. visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLJFf4r0S7g)

Writer, curator, editor and artist, Alfredo Cramerotti, in Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing, talks about tracing a shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism. He writes, ‘we no longer consider artists as specialized craftspeople: to produce sense socially and politically one has to abandon the idea of artisanship in favour of innumerable forms of expression, which include film festivals, newspapers, television, internet, radio and magazines’[6]. If every artist is a journalist, as the title of the Blowup Reader series[7] suggests, then our ongoing belief that ‘journalism is intended to be a service in the interest of the highest number of people possible’[8] can work its way imaginatively through infinite forms of visual and textual articulation, focusing on the importance of what art practice and research transforms, and not what it represents. With a real emphasis insistent on what artistic means can do rather than “be”, they bring us, I believe, ‘closer to listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.’

Artists as intervening tellers of critical communication, and as reclaimed journalists, in the way that journalism ought to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable[9] was born in the 1960s. As media historian, critic and curator, Deirdre Boyle writes, ‘[This] was an auspicious time for the debut of portable video. The role of the artist as individualist and alienated hero was being eclipsed by a resurgence of interest in the artist’s social responsibility, and as art became politically and socially engaged, the distinctions between art and communication blurred. At first there were few distinctions between video artists and activists, and nearly everyone made documentary tapes.’[10]

On April 22, 2011, a year after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, art activist group  Liberate Tate protested against Tate’s sponsorship relationship with BP. Their intervention involved pouring charcoaled sunflower oil from “gas cans painted with the BP logo on them” over a third member’s naked body”. On the same day, 166 artists published a letter in the Guardian calling on Tate to end its sponsorship with BP.[11] To watch the documented video of the protest/performance, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4-vGbsBLKM

However, unlike the mid to end of the 20^th century, this century has abundant means by which to re-tell its histories and stories, and to make its interventions, digital and physical postings, or direct actions. And it’s important that we have access to so many places from which to be inventive and truthful in speaking critically to the social injustices around us. American hacker-ethicist Steven Levy in discussion with British poet and blogger Rick Holland tells us that, ‘the daily forms of communication and storytelling have changed drastically, and I think that affects how we think. I think our brains are hard-wired to respond to narrative and storytelling, so it’s not surprising to me that we construct narratives out of all possible forms of communication and expression, and that’s why platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and instant messaging have become such rich wells of ideas: because they each present different forms of spontaneous narrative.’[12]

Digital narratives and literacy actually stir us from being idle consumers of a technology where information is received without much critique, to becoming cradles of awareness by posting ourselves publicly in the world which we live, both online and off. This publicized process of production and prophetic endorsement potentially transforms public opinion and destabilizes the protocol of traditional media and mainstream platforms of news broadcasting. It is not the question of truths that is in any crisis, I don’t think. It is how we evaluate these truths and the means made available to us so that we can relay them that we ought to be concerned about keeping current, truthful and imaginative. And what these visual and other means share is their effectiveness as tools to enhance critical reflection and provoke action in public and private spaces, consequently, showing us how to ‘get closer to listening to those for whom this world has become intolerable.’

Jane and Louise Wilson, Untitled 1 (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) 2010 - (interior of building in Pripyat) the ghost town situated within proximity to the Chernobyl disaster. The artists travelled to the Ukraine to “shoot a series of large- format photographs in a 30-square km radius known as the Exclusion Zone. This area marks the limits of radioactive territory that is still considered too dangerous to support prolonged exposure (although thousands of people entered the zone each day to work in the three remaining nuclear reactors until December 2000).”[13]

Maria Petrides, Independent Writer

Appeared in The Cyprus Dossier - Issue 3: 'In Crisis - Countdown To Infinite Crisis'

Notes

Boyle Deirdre, ‘A Brief History of American Documentary Video’, Subject to Change: Guerilla Television Revisited, Oxford University Press, 1997

Cramerotti Alfredo, Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing, Intellect:   

   The University of Chicago Press, 2009

Griffee Susannah L, Ojalvo Holly Epstein, ‘Do You Trust Your Government’, The New            

   York Times, May 8, 2012

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/do-you-trus-your-government/

Ed. Gordon MacDonald, photoworks, Issue: November-April 2011/12

Ed. Dax Max, Electronic Beats Magazine, Issue: No 29, Spring 2012

Popken Ben, ‘Art Activists Cover Naked Body In Oil In Tate Museum To Protest Censorship And BP Sponsorship’, The Consumerist, April 22, 2011, retrieved May 5, 2012, from 

http://consumerist.com/2011/04/art-activists-cover-naked-body-in-oil-tate-to-protest-bp-sponsorship.html

Roy Arundhati, the algebra of infinite justice, Viking by Penguin Books, 2001

---

[1] Roy Arundhati. (2001) the algebra of infinite justice, p. xxii

[2] Indian governments have often used the pretext of threat to both India and Kashmir from neighbouring Pakistan in order to enforce extreme nationalist agendas. ‘Text of Vajpayee’s Letter to Bill Clinton’, The Hindu, 14 May 1998

[3] Roy Arundhati. (2001) the algebra of infinite justice, p. 24

[4] In October 2011, a relatively recent poll found that Americans’ distrust of government is at its highest levels in history. Almost half of the public thought that the sentiment at the root of the Occupy movement generally reflects the views of most Americans.

See  http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/do-you-trus-your-government/

[5] Visit http://americanpowermusic.com/

[6] Cramerotti Alfredo. (2009), ‘Why Aesthetic? P. 22. See also Cramerotti’s website. http://www.alcramer.net/

[7] This particular series collected texts on the subject of art as a form of journalism. Visit http://www.v2.nl/archive/articles/every-artist-a-journalist-blowup-reader-2/view

[8] Cramerotti Alfredo. (2009), ‘Why Journalism? P. 22. See also Cramerotti’s website. http://www.alcramer.net/

[9] Dunne Finley Peter. (1899), Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War. The whole quote of the humorist is as follows: ‘The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead, and roasts them afterward’.

[10] Boyle Deirdre. (1997), A Brief History of American Documentary Video, p. 51

[11] Popken Ben. (2011) Art Activists Cover Naked Body In Oil In Tate Museum To Protest Censorship And BP Sponsorship

[12] Ed. Dax Max (2011) Holland Rick & Levy Steven during a skype discussion, “I thought I was staring into the mystery of life itself”, Electronic Beats Magazine, p. 71

[13] Schuppli Susan. (2011) ‘Material Malfeasance: Trace Evidence of Violence in Three Image-Acts’, photoworks, p. 29

   

 2 seconds of clapping 
(Kids are people too)

In this 8' 09" black and white video, time and place take on another significance. The environment in which social categorizing generally happens is not necessarily contingent upon, or sensitive to, the individual features of each member, which escape generalizations. One such grouping is that of the officially underrepresented, children and teenagers, whose diverging voices are, often, squashed into a frame. Already taxed on the milk they are ‘nourished’ with, these ‘growing into’ citizens are regularly deprived of their voices, or, at best, represented through decision-making adults.  

Artist and architect, Alkis Hadjiandreou, takes off from the ‘real’ setting of an American TV series from the 1980s called, Kids are people too, hosted by actor, Michael Young. Hadjiandreou re-treats a speedy and cheesy entertainment show with an endoscopic meticulousness. The children and teenagers in the audience are brought to the forefront of their own portraits. Zooming into the experience of being sidelined by virtue of categorization, the artist imagines what these individual portraits might look like, decontextualized from the blurriness of unruly media projection. Slowing down the rhythm of this TV show, suggesting that we, too, take our time to consider who each ‘kid’ might be, the video dissects, in parts, the imagery of these mashed-up children and teenagers.

The result works as a moving visual and sound rendering decelerated to show how fragile these profiles are. Time is prolonged without dictating limits, to neutralize the misconfiguration of the ‘kids’ in the show. Hadjiandreou’s images perform a sort of unpacking of the mass, where the crowd is defined each time by authorities and regulators, institutions and guardians. A teenage audience staged to applaud celebrities, making themselves ‘personalities’ by inference, is powerfully transformed anew into a space pixelated with self determined young people whose clapping celebrates their own eccentricities.  

The group show Revolv∙er will run from April 28 until May 26, 2012 at the Phytorio, Visual Artists Association, Nicosia

Maria Petrides – Independent Writer

Sowieso at Kreuzberg Pavillon

Athina Antoniadou, Klass Hübner, Astrid Menze, Demetris Neokleous, Maria Petrides, Panikos Tembriotis, Witte Wartena

Bang! Pow! Pff!
Simon says, 'let...'
Simon says, 'let us...'
Simon says, 'let us explode...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an hour...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an hour today.'
Syria - shuffling with spades to dig out our positions to empathise. Where can we empathise from? We're spraying connections to stay connected with the other side of things. Half an hour of activity diffuses aggression. Sounds soiled from de-lighted daily found events and objects, people and places, subjects and sirens, re-imagine another space in the other side of things.

Please turn your head to the left.

We're in a life of documentary-ing.
Carrying events from far away into present forms.
Norms shift and slip once we capture them on screen and in ink.
We do think.
But we look anew at terms of reconsideration.
Exhilaration builds bonds for crossing those difficult differences. Interferences rehearsing themselves; improving relations and forming new interactions. Scratching surfaces. Counting curves. Fiddling falsehoods.
Unimportant men making decisions, very important ones, about our lives, our documentary-ing.
Repeating wrecking rituals.
And we, dance, deliriously, in another documentary-ing, of our claimed, desires.
Barack says, 'we...'
Barack says, 'we believe...'
Barack says, 'we believe in...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom and...'
My ink ran out on the last two words.
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom' (and revolution).

20 minutes – moments of form and bliss

Most of us living in Cyprus would probably agree that any development in the arts on the island is a great thing, as we are continuing to ‘culturally position’ ourselves between Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. But after the 12th Contemporary Dance Platform which took place at Limassol’s Rialto Theatre from March 9th to 11th, some twitchy gestures, and long and deep sighs heaving from the audience, suggest that some would have wished away a bit of dance and theatricality. And this wish isn’t necessarily an ill-intended one; it’s a charged change from an unreceptive Cyprus audience to a brave one equipped to raise its critical voice.

There’s a certain magical challenge that comes with having a dense amount of time in which to present and perform. And there’s also an equal challenge for a lively audience to remain intrigued in the present time for 20 minutes each time.

Time, at all times, in whatever space created, can be experienced as a drag to our feet through a painfully slow sense of moments approaching their ‘end’. But time can also suspend our own expectations by placing us in another experience of a time escaped. Lia Haraki’s fresh piece, Tune In, worked powerfully on the level of zoning us out of our sense of time. Like a devoted dervish ecstatic at the point of a spiritual pinnacle, Lia Haraki’s concentrated and liberating performance whirled us into an airy space and engrossing timelessness.

In a very different tone, the collaborative initiative of Noema Dance Work’s, Haze, recreated another form of space on stage, and off, altering our perception of where the dancer’s body and its movement, between fragile screens, appeared each moment in relation to its blurred audience. I, myself, was tuned in the spectacular Weather Project (2003) of visual artist, Olafur Eliasson, where artificial mist permeating the air and a yolk sun rising out of the haze to illuminate the refigured ceilings of the Turbine Hall, altered the room’s temperature and the viewer’s perception. Refined and consistent in its concept and visual imagery, Alexandra Waierstall’s study of haze has whet our appetite for her following full evening piece.

In hindsight, a new wish foresees more thorough collaborations in the emerging arts scene of Cyprus, and an all the more involved and growing audience.

(Relax and let the right one in)

Sirens of distressed ambulances warned the walking busybodies of the city that they must get somewhere immediately. Heads turned swiftly as gravel hurled to their feet from the speed of the ambulance. Murmuring sounds of people anxiously trying to get to their 9-hour shifts on time could be heard like a fading beat, as they rushed into the underground wondering whether there were to be a delay on the trains. The outbursts of youth on the unswept streets of Athens had left their traits of deep disaffection behind. Smashed windows of stores in Kolonaki, the city’s only remaining clean and, until then, untouched area, awakened these citizens to new wonders. The month of April 2009 was happening for the first time. This marked the event as singular. Were all events exclusive, wondered Myrna as she walked away from the arresting scene of police crime at Constitution square and towards the lovers’ scene.

Outside a run-of-the-mill Costa Café, just at the beginning of darkness, Clement and I froze in a lock of gaze, the kind that holds you in a time where memory never seems to have existed. The arms of Clement wide open, the shape of desire and need (Barthes) unfolded as my longing eyes captured that zestful moment in a warm embrace. Two bodies met; their soft mouths lured each other’s breath. The heat between us lovers intensified as did the rage of the disaffected. And just as I was suspended in what seemed like a timeless moment, only several kilometres away the city of Athens was turning red in flames and fury, the fierce police fumbling for opposing inhabitants to drag to their dungeon. Trouble usually starts from authorities, overregulated and under, barring dissenting voices, and ignoring the injustices they help generate and keep in tact. Echoing and embryonic voices waiting at the line. One minute people are ready to slip off the slithering edge, and the next, they are just pending… without witnesses, an unimagined tomorrow and an unimaginable moment of the present.

And as the rioting environment came to a break and I released myself from the curved clasp of Clement, it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t the only one disconnected from the political passion surrounding us. The next day would swallow up the remaining tear gas and smoky air from the blasting molotovs; the enraged would still feel enraged, perhaps with a real sense of the city now vacuumed of several functioning shops; the government officials would turn their attention to new 'criminal' records; and it would seem like the purpose of these outbursts was to destroy a few small shops.




Published in The Moment at SMITH magazine

http://www.smithmag.net/moment/story.php?did=310210

Slipping Signs

Opening: 13 January 2012, 20:00
Duration: 14 January– 8 February 2012


Penindaplinena Gallery is pleased to  present the group show entitled, Slipping Signs.

Dimitra Bista | Socrates Fatouros | Anastasia Mina | Maria Aristotelous | Konstantinos Dregos

Landscapes seem seismic when burning colours from the sky and expressionistic strokes of thick paint envelop the canvas. In this group show at Penindaplinena Gallery, explosive remnants of material rephrase interruptions and form fresh beginnings. The exhibition Slipping Signs showcases five multi-media artists working from scapes to escapes, scopes, styles and space, as they seize them at shifty and slippery moments. In these works, random and anticipated transformations transpire from dark to light, from reflection to position, from networks of lines to swelling surfaces, addressing matters of identity and continuation, repetition and inscription, site and interiority, frame and de-centralization.   

A starting point for many of these artists’ works takes off from a given inner place, or  city, where, although the intention seems to be to move in this identifying place of ‘rest’, there is a longing to explore disruptions that ‘promising’ sites do not anticipate. The works composing the exhibition Slipping Signs evoke a new habitat to revive vision, to dream another dream, to embark on re-constructing intimate possibilities where the impulse of identifying insists on slithering. Comfortable in zones of indefinite and infinite connections, these artists’ works vigorously surface through a distinct treatment of pencil, paper, ink, acrylic, canvas and cardboard.               

Maria Aristotelous’ thick coats of paint in long strokes splattered in apparently unintended smears are pencil lined, like fluid feathers of interaction and interruption in these painting’s reflections. Dimitra Bista’s refined pencil on paper drawings subtly move in a net of lines and scratches which seem to meet somewhere between a deliberate de-centralization of ‘beginning’, and, a lack of colour and neat symmetry. Although working with seemingly inflexible materials, such as leather and porcelain, glass plaster and tar, Konstantinos Dregos’ sculptures, like flesh, flow organically through space without ever trapping these forms in a solid surface. Paint drips on canvas like water seething before the bubbles morph into flowers, half blooming, half fleeing. In a leveling and surging force, the drawings of Anastasia Mina work like pencil and writing; smooth surface and compulsive depth; an urging and urgent process of impulsive intensity which, while engrossed in a swirling repetition, also dissolves the raw residues of lead to reach a liberating coexistence of black on white. In City End, Socrates Fatouros handles the textures of oil and acrylic on cardboard through a fragile vigor of colour, which erupts, in a volcanic temper, from the centre out. The city doesn’t end somewhere; it unfolds. No longer a heart, the edges of this city extend beyond an ‘identifiable’ city, or as in the sculpture, City 1, the sign and the city stand tall yet dizzy, suspended from a precarious pole.

Maria Petrides, Independent writer




Επικοινωνία:
PENINDAPLINENA Gallery
Τάσος Στυλιανού
Ε: tassos@50-1gallery.com, m: +357 99 522977, t: +357 25 340727

The Unwise Monkey

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B005OK4WWI/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending


Francoise Fautrel’s latest novel, The Unwise Monkey, draws its reader by its dazzling wit, and its suppleness in arousing suspense and evoking sensibility. In this powerfully humble and humbling novel, consistently crossing the crumbling boundaries of autobiography and fiction, Francoise Fautrel generously re-imagines the shocking experiences of her young survivor heroine, Clara, without ever relegating her to a position of victim. Written with the hindsight of a street-smart child, this book is an open gesture to anyone who has felt broken yet directed by a drumming desire to create new conditions for a dignified life.

Independent Writer - Maria Petrides

Υπεράνθρωποι

Ένας τρόπος με τον οποίο χαρακτηρίζεται η μεταμοντέρνα ταυτότητα, είναι μέσω του υψηλού libido, του οποίου η εκρηκτική και απελευθερωτική ενέργεια επεκτείνεται, οδηγώντας σε ένα ευκίνητο τόπο, όπου η ταυτότητα γίνεται μη-ταυτότητα. Στη δουλειά του Γιάννη Βαρελά αυτή η εύπλαστη ‘ταυτότητα’ μοιάζει να αποδομείται συνεχώς. Τα εντυπωσιακά κολάζ-σχέδιά του απεικονίζουν υπερμεγέθεις χαρακτήρες (με ένα, άν θέλετε, Νιτσε-ακό τρόπο του Ubermensch όπου ο άνθρωπος είναι παντοδύναμος/υπεράνθρωπος), των οποίων το φύλο παραμένει ακαθόριστο. Στα έργα του η δυναμικότητα και η υπερβολική αρρενωπότητα συνυπάρχουν με το εύθραυστο, η επιβλητικότητα με τη σεμνότητα. Και ενώ η ακριβής κάθετη γεωμετρία της δουλειάς του υποδηλώνει μια ισχυρή σύνθεση (όπως ένα υψηλό αστικό κτίριο), συγχρόνως αυτοαναιρείται με ένα ανάλαφρο αλλά υπονομευτικό τρόπο.

Ένα από τα τρία σχέδια του Βαρελά, τα οποία εκτίθενται τώρα στην 1η μπιενάλε της Αθήνας, σφίζει από πολιτισμικούς συνειρμούς, χριστιανικά σύμβολα, σεξουαλικά υπονοούμενα και μυθολογικές αναφορές. Στη βάση του υπεράνθρωπου, εκεί που ‘κανονικά’ θα ήταν τα πόδια, υπάρχει ένα κολάζ που απεικονίζει ένα Βαυαρό βασιλιά, και ακριβώς από πάνω, σε ένα δεύτερο κολάζ υπάρχει η μαρμάρινη εκδοχή του χριστού της καθολικής εκκλησίας. Συνεχίζοντας ανοδικά την παρατήρηση του σχεδίου, συναντούμε ένα Ελληνικό ξωκκλήσι του 14 αιώνα (σε ένα τρίτο κολάζ). θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε ότι παρακολουθούμε μία ιστορική-δημιουργική εξέλιξη. Και στη συνέχεια καταλείγουμε σε ένα σύγχρονο τοπίο του φαντασιακού, όπου το αφηρημένο και το διακοσμητικό συναντιούνται προσωρινά. Αυτή η μεταμόρφωση λειτουργεί ως η σπονδυλική στήλη της γιγαντιαίας φιγούρας που ενώ την στηρίζει, συγχρόνως τη μεταλλάσει και συνεπαγόμενα ολόκληρη τη σύνθεση – πιθανώς ένα σχόλιο για την αλληλοεξαρτώμενη σχέση του ατόμου με την ιστορία του.

Στο δεύτερο σχέδιο ο Βαρελάς αφαιρώντας τις όψεις ενός διαμερίσματος από το περιβάλλον τους, τις συναρμολογεί σε μία μορφή. Ένα πρόσωπο που προσωρινά προσδιορίζεται από το πιο χαρακτηριστικό αρχιτεκτονικό στοιχείο μιας πόλης -ίσως και της Αθήνας-, τις πολυκατοικίες της.
Ταυτόχρονη αποδόμηση και αναδόμηση. Μία διακριτική σύνθεση όπου τα μάτια κοιτάζουν ένα ευμετάβλητο και οριζόντιο τοπίο πόλης, ενώ στην απτή κατασκευή του διαμερίσματος προσδίδονται εύκαμπτες, ανθρωπομορφικές ιδιότητες. Είναι μία αδιόρατη έκκληση για ένα πιο ανθρώπινο Αθηναικό τοπίο, για την τροποποίηση της τωρινής ταυτότητας ώστε να αρχίσει να υλοποιείται μία καινούργια Αθήνα;



Μαρία Πετρίδη (συγγραφέας & υποψήφια Διδάκτωρ UCL)
Δημοσίευση στο Υ.Γ τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2007

'New News is Old News' - Wonder Women Residency

Stories Told Now, 2011

Ink on Paper


Working with words and language and seeing how these fit into a discourse particular to Cyprus set off this piece of work. In a kind of web language, not activated between communities - like the regional language of Cyprus - Maria Petrides explores how, if initiated, this language could spark new stories and/or revisit a past when language was set in motion. This piece looks at what new ‘function’ or impact a text, developing from oral stories, can have when moved into a gallery space where stories ‘speak’ to others. They are temporarily residing in a space, meters away from an erasing line, which keeps these stories apart. Unfettered and unfiltered, she forms free-for-all questions, which bring these stories together, and also join with many collected from viewers wishing to scrawl their own, short or long, on the paper sliding along the wall. Additionally, a pile of Post-its and a box are set aside for viewers to drop in their contact details, intended for a meeting with the artist.

ReSpass

IT

I want to play with you, dear stranger. I wish to give to you what is “mine”, and not.

Through my rucksack (inside my spine until it exits) I tag your head, T., with my knuckles.

My unrecognizable desires, my interrupting fears, my long cheers, and my dreams of planets where humanity trades in words, are IT.

T. strokes the left cheek of W. She passes on her ripe agitation, her freedom of uncertainty, her unruly mischievousness, and the map of her mind, which leads to random places yet to be found? She tickles her face as she makes W. IT. And W. smiles at the other gratefully, as she races after P. with a suitcase of my and T.’s touch. P. might have a transparent straw, two round black stones, a slender orange rope, and a red fountain pen in his container. As W. prods him, he freezes-he tags her. He ties her feet loosely with the orange rope, rests each stone in her open palms, unbuttons her shirt, and with his fountain pen writes on her bare stomach, ‘let’s play again’. At the caress of his fuzzy index finger against her skin, he forces her jaw open, pops in the straw and breathes into it with his salivating mouth. His oxygen-her oxygen-T.’s oxygen, my oxygen, whose oxygen?

You are now IT.

The exhibition ReSpass deals with notions of the “artist” and the “curator” in a linking game of role-playing, reminding us intensively of Tag, the children’s game.
The role of artist and curator is fused here. Ideas are fluidly exchanged between role-subvertors. In an open networking, each touches on the personal stories, emotions, conversions of objects, fears, mobile spaces, visions, con-fusions, memories, art collection, and is called to handle these under their own “curatorial” experimentations. A string of curating is unleashed in this show. “Professional” curating is approached humourously here. What makes a “curator” a curator and how do artists then become “curators”? The show invites the playful viewer to follow the tag, which connects the roles of “artists” with “curators”.
The basic rules of Tag are quite simple. All you need is a group of kids and a decent size backyard. One person is “designated” as “it” and that person runs around and tries to touch someone else. If they succeed, the person they touch is now “it” and tries to chase everyone else. The game continues until everyone is exhausted…

The exhibition ReSpass is taking place within the broader framework of the exhibition ReMap 2, which is running parallel to the 2nd Athens Biennale.
Opening parties start at 20.30 on June 16th and 17th. On these nights an interactive musical installation will take place.
Location: Millerou 27, Metaxourgeio
Duration: 
June 16th - July 31st

Passing sanctuaries in the life of a Palimpolis

Demetris Neokleous’ work never ceases to surprise its viewer. From the materials he chooses to work with, comics and photographs, the vibrant installations he constructs, to his humourous videos - verging on the grotesque, in a Paul McCarthyist vein of the artist emptying himself of public appeal - like the 2001 scatological study in Happening “Manure”, Neokleous makes sure that any intimation of a ‘peripheral’ art is ebbed away by actively placing it in the forefront. The settings and conditions for his works are important media for mobilization, just as the materials selected are valuable signifiers, pregnant with social-economic and political meanings patiently awaiting activation by participant/citizens.

Light and fun, colourful and rhythmical, supple and shifting, mobile and mobilizing, Neokleous’ work, since 2000, has marked a new territory in the art scene of Cyprus. Co-founder of the NGO artist run space, Stoa Aeschylous, and co-organizer of the international artists network, Noise of Coincidence, Demetris Neokleous belongs to the zeitgeist of the mid decade of the 21st century, when artists began to transform the functions and roles of galleries and curators by interfering with existing spaces, while reconstructing new ones intended to generate talk, at times a differing one, and to avoid living on any manipulated margin outside the mainstream art world.

In 2002, the smallest exhibition space in New York, two and a half square feet Wrong Gallery, in a posh-looking glass door, greeted its visitors with a brusque sign saying, “Fuck Off We’re Closed”. Non-commercial and accessible only to window shoppers, Wrong Gallery, located itself in the heart of the Chelsea white cubes it mocked. An art-world entertainer turned gallerist/curator, Maurizio Cattelan, and two editors turned curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, paved the way for fresh means of critiquing the mainstream from within it, escaping therefore, marginalization.

In an age of a collapsing globalism, Stoa Aeschylous, preserves the artist’s turned gallerist’s vision to host both local and international artists. A former ‘shopping arcade’, as its given Greek name, Στοα, also suggests, it promotes a transforming character of art shows developing in an age of ethical, cultural, intellectual and financial insecurity. Demetris Neokleous’ work addresses the issue of what it means to be mobile in an age of economic disaster. How might seeking for alternative refuges release the hostile political environment that surrounds his local, Cyprus? Sharp in his critique towards a social and material complacency, which dictates the daily lives of people, and consequently, festers apathy, he creates passing sanctuaries, beginning from the ones we each carry within and without us: our histories, personal and political.

Amusingly, although variable in the media Neokleous chooses to work with, a quality of magic, of the powerful, if you will, appears consistently in altered forms. Dating back to 2003, Worms, a series of oil on canvas, energetic in colour and Renaissance in detail, resemble flying magical carpets landing in a still white gallery. The same year, he creates, Camouflage, an installation of patchwork fabrics covering what look like tunnel tents from which one can view the outside world. Tents, sleeping bags and jackets in Neokleous’ work are like articles of faith one holds firmly to, and being loyal to, must make space for them to be inhabited. This fascinating installation, Camouflage, is self-transforming, and a shaper of its environment.

While Faith Ringgold’s celebrated 1970s painted story quilts create narratives of oppressed African-Americans in ways which weave forgotten history into the existing dominant one, Tracey Emin’s 1990s piece, Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995, also known as, The Tent, rejoiced the history of personal pleasures and tender gestures of cuddling up. Departing from this spirit, Demetris Neokleous’ tents, their quirky titles notwithstanding - Car-tent, a glossy self-contained Opportunist’s Tent, a cello case Passion Tent - are functional, individual and communal. Yet, some are overly adorned with lace and muslin, indicating the economic strata, which also emerge in ‘tent-life’.

Mobile and ephemerally made tents carried on one's shoulders like a backpack, transform into easily transportable sleeping bag shelters, which shift size according to demand. Since 2004, his work has featured sleeping bags, as both a metaphor for creating, wherever we are, new localities and histories, utopian and not, as well as a useful asset to mobilize rather than ‘have’ in an escalating time of economic emergency. His installation, The white jacket with red sleeping bag (2009) hints at a kind of un-human form, like a performer of magic drawing out his hidden white doves from metres of blood red material, an umbilical cord attached to innovative moments of living. Interestingly, locations become signifiers of untainted spaces where the freedom to diverge encourages growth and not conflict.

Adapting to each social context as we might find appropriate, we’re invited to ‘unload’ our shelter home. Each irreplaceable story, which unfolds from any given sleeping bag, bears, without ever possessing, its own history. As with all Demetris Neokleous’ work, it foresees an arbitrariness, which, in a post-neurotic and lethargic Cyprus, can maximize moments of celebrating everydayness. Utopian and not, a sort of urban anti-polis imagined, as his latest paintings suggest in Palimpolis (2010). These paintings, painstakingly thorough, almost in illustration fashion, spurt exorbitant paint, reflective, in some way, of their own medium and meanings. Wall paintings, but also oil and canvas, tease us with motion, colour, detail, and mixed metaphors. As, for example, one of his Untitled, which offers us little human figures suspended, on the one hand, by strings maneuvered by the “invisible” mechanisms of a city’s production, while, on the other, holding strings in a spirit of human unity, these beings float euphorically from the heights of the same anti-city.

Most of Demetris Neokleous’ work formulated in 2010 hubs around this tension between what it means to share historical events without clinging to harsh and habitual narratives. These light tents and sleeping bags become places where stories and histories unfurl. A safe haven far removed from a “house” attached to territorial possession, but a shifting one, always a work-in-progress, influenced by other histories, while inspiring next generations. The family sleeping bag (2010) anticipates an invention of citizens whose own tales will join past narrative moments, as the bags, themselves, link. Demetris Neokleous, therefore, offers a kind of utopian landscape free from oppressions and possessions, which we can foster, right now, for the following inhabitants. Wherever freedom matters, we live, and wherever we live, we are free.

Panayiotis Michael

Ουρανέ, όχι δεν θα πω το ναι









At your own expense, buy a dream, watch it ‘mature’, ‘degenerate’, ‘collapse’, and ‘reconstruct’ itself. Who sells dreams today? Do we live them? Can we afford our dreams in a time of recession? We dream often, while awake or asleep, and feel immense pleasure by the experience itself. The material activity of dreams seems to work on second levels of interpretation. What if one were to dream of wanting to live in a world where communication, social happiness, and generous gesturing do not emanate from other motives? Does the process of activating this dream shrivel its vision, alienating the dreamer, since even dreams are evaluated by individual achievement? What is in a dream?

Moving ‘through’ Panayiotis Michael’s latest work, Ουρανέ, όχι δεν θα πω το ναι* (Hey Sky, No I Won’t Say Yes), the viewer enjoys the layers of materials and meanings. Panayiotis Michael composes the works using adverts from real estate company catalogues, cutting and cropping them to then edit and reconstruct them in a different setting. Drawings from architectural books are altered, just as our reality is when penetrated by social conventions and symbols. Negotiating the phenomenon of a constructed ‘reality’, product of a society that promises us ‘homes’/dreams, Panayiotis Michael seeks to reveal an aspect of the complex process whereby contemporary realities are created.

The private and the personal merge in a space, both inside and out, verging on the in-between. If a ‘house’ is also a space to inhabit one’s body, it is also the same place from which one must escape to re-create one’s daydreams of new possibilities, and even one’s notion of the ‘self’. Being inside and out of a body, a ‘home’, a society, is, to stand on a fertile ground, shifting ideals, transforming beliefs and regenerating dreams. Can this ‘home’ be inhabited? Is the ‘home’ a dream which can be re-imagined? A dream, one might say, which can help us dream better. Felix Gonzales-Torres has voiced how ‘theory [dreams] should make us live better by trying to show us certain ways of constructing reality'.1 To dream of social happiness and a flourishing generosity is to pave the way for a new reality.

Panayiotis Michael’s project is a shifter of space, images, time, illusions, memories and fears. It places notions of ‘security’ and ‘rivalry’, ‘daydream’ and ‘reality’, the ‘personal and the global’, ‘invention/destruction’ in in-between stages. Just as the cut-outs move around in the drawing, pushing the ‘frame’ from its limits, Stand-Home-Stand, a video animation on a loop, stretches our expectations of what a ‘house’ encompasses. Hypnotic in its glossy enter-ings and levelling exits, this imagined ‘house’ hardly prevails, suggesting that we re-invent the contents of happiness.

As Amerigo Nutolo has observed, ‘Panayiotis Michael’s social and political vision permeates his style perfectly. Trapped inside itself, it is totally uninhabitable. His house becomes an empty emblem in expectation of some sign of private life, of hospitality and of the constant attempt to extend the space’.2

* The title is borrowed from a very popular Greek song of the 1980’s, whose lyrics are written by Nicos Gatsos, and music by composer, Manos Hatzidakis.

1. Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr, ArtPress, January 1995. http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixInterv.html
2. Fuori-Nonluogo. 3 topografie poetiche della Submodernita – Torino 25 Settembre 2009. Catalogue published for the exhibition.

Ομάδα Πέντε - χωρογραφία Ρούλα Κλεοβούλου

Tender Genders



catching and falling

When i peep through the bedroom doors and no one is there, i fall.
When i look out for the stars in the morning and they're not there, i fall.
Each time you cry, i fall.
When i learn that the earth is round after experiencing it flat, i fall.
When brittle leaves fall from the tree, i fall.
When you build a wall, i fall.
When you're on the other side, i fall.
If i have cramps, i fall.
After i discover that i’m not someone else, i fall.
When you stumble, i fall.
When the sun cracks the day, i fall.
If i forget my name, i fall.
When you don’t catch me, i fall.






Tender Genders


i feel

- i feel…
- sulky.
- i feel…
- confused.
- i feel…
- aloofness.
- i feel…
- neglected, frustrated, enraged…
- i feel enraged…
- Feverish and deserted…
- i feel deleted, lost.
- Washed out?
- i feel your chapter is being completed, without me.
- excluded?
- i feel i’m a forgotten footnote, unmentioned.
- remembered.
- i feel… i feed you… with language.
You make no reference to my being,
yesterday, last year or eight years ago.
- i feel…
- wordy.
- i feel your absence.
You’re imagined absence is there, everywhere and nowhere.
And I am real and I am here!


i'm sorry

i would have loved to have said, i’m sorry, before, but my tongue twisted.
i’m sorry for not having been sorry yesterday, the day before, last year.
i’m sorry for not being at the airport waiting for you on that stormy December evening.
i’m sorry for not telling you why i wasn’t there.
i’m sorry for not looking back at you after you went away.
i’m sorry for forgetting that your eyes are the colour of a sheer sky.
i’m sorry for not loving your pain away.
i’m sorry that your pain is living and i’m not giving...
i’m sorry for recalling those moments of shallow silence.
i’m sorry that i’m no longer mourning you.
i’m sorry that i’m sorry.
But i am sorry now.