Eva Vaslamatzi Independent curator and writer

Portfolio

EXHIBITIONS (selection)

→p. 2

I Heard it From the Valleyscurated by Eva Vaslamatzi

artists Hera Büyüktaşçıyan Aslι Çavuşoğlu Anastasia Douka Marina Papazyan Evi Souli VASKOS (Vasilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis)

↓ Haus N Athen Athens, Greece

1.10 – 05.11.2021

The show presents a series of new productions linked through techniques, narratives and symbols related to the expansive field of folk art. Artists are confronted with these traces of the recent past, retrieved and transferred through their work in an attempt at connecting or distancing themselves from them. Folk production and forms of knowledge, mainly anonymous, are approached here as a field of inspiration and possibility for understanding forms and behaviors which function individually and independently from grander national narratives. Each work, with references to textiles, ceramics, dance, folk medicine and fairy tales amongst others, is a reminder of different models of life, production and economies linked often with provincial regions, the pre-eminent spaces where folk art flourishes. While also incorporating the notion of the urban landscape as an ongoing province, the exhibition focuses on the constant reliance of humans on their environment and the transfer of these relations into the material world.

→p. 3

p. 4

Like a magician (that immediately reveals the secret to his tricks)curated by Eva Vaslamatzi and Corinne Digard

artists Samira Ahmadi Ghotbi, Sarah Belhadjali, Léandre Bernard Brunel, Io Burgard, ExposerPublier, Philomène Hoël, Princia Itoua, Karolina Krasouli, Gabrielle Le Bayon, Géraldine Longueville, David Perreard, Céline Pelcé, Zoé Philibert, Gina Proenza & Antonin Fassio, Yoan Sorin, Maxime Testu, Lauren Tortil, Qingmei Yao

↓ As part of the 2019–20 edition of Orange Rouge Paris, France

ongoing project

The online project Like a magician (that immediately reveals the secret to his tricks) is an attempt to focus and publicly expose the methodology and processes of Orange Rouge, an organization that brings together disabled adolescents with contemporary artists in order to produce a collective artwork. Part of my work as an associate curator was to select and invite 18 artists to join the project, follow their collaborative workshops with the adolescents, and conceive a “space” for presenting the outcome of the workshops.

Working together with the group of graphic designers ExposerPublier and taking into account the restrictions of COVID-19 as well as the risk of presenting artworks in physical space, we conceived a digital space for the exhibition of the project. The visitor of the platform is invited to engage in a simple card game and simultaneously discover elements of the process during workshops, as well as the final artworks. The platform is inter-connected with a private digital archive where the artists, adolescents and teachers are able to upload any material - sketches, sounds, notes, videos, references - during the whole period of the workshops that automatically appear in the public platform.

→p. 5

→

p. 6

Gone today, here tomorrowcurated by Eva Vaslamatzi

artists Marcos Lutyens, Basim Magdy, Kosmas Nikolaou, Malvina Panagiotidi, Maria Theodoraki

↓ annexM Center for the Visual Arts, Athens Concert Hall Greece

20.11.2019 – 26.01.2020

The exhibition Gone today, here tomorrow is an answer to the invitation of annexM to imagine a show in the former motorcycle parking lot for employees of the Athens Concert Hall, renovated in order to be used as one of the official spaces for its Center for Visual Arts. Taking this transformation as a starting point, I proposed an in-situ research process on the phenomenology of spaces, especially the exhibition space and its unique characteristics as an ephemeral territory, perpetually redefined through artistic practises and the visitor’s own gaze.

Selection of the participating artists was based on their interest in finding new ways to approach the exhibition space, and their ability to reflect on their own practices as well as on the methods of art institutions themselves: for example, the work of Marcos Lutyens that uses hypnosis as a medium to revisit major art museums around the world from another perspective, or the performative actions of Maria Theodoraki that take place inside exhibitions she is not part of, as a guerilla action.Through performance, video installation, archival research, sculpture (including two existing works and three new commissions) the aforementioned questions were explored and left unanswered, to be completed by the visitor’s experience.

→p. 7

→p. 8

Finite-State Family Structures Maria Varela

curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

↓ Hydroexpress Project Athens, Greece

15 – 23.5.2021

The work ‘‘Finite-State Family Structures’’ by Maria Varela takes the popular family house as its starting point. Through architectural research and personal data, she creates a new narrative in the absence of the human element. Influenced by the HYDROEXPRESS space, the artist presents a house-like construction that extends over three levels, as a reference to the three-story building that in Greece traditionally houses the extended family. Inside she places the “intermediate space”, the space between the body of the occupant in the house and its walls, as depicted in architectural plans of the early 20th century which aim at finding the minimum possible functional space in working class houses. The empty space takes shape to imply the human scale while commenting on the physical - and mental - adaptability of the inhabitant to environments structured by mass design, and the impossibility of implementing the opposite process.

→p. 9

→p. 10

(De)mythologise: A brief retrospective Distruktur

curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

25.5 – 1.6.2019

For the show (De)mythologise: A brief retrospective, the exhibition space was transformed into a cinema. The encounter of filmmakers Gustavo Jahn and Melissa Dullius, also known as Distruktur, takes a simple form: a projection covering the entirety of one wall, perfectly adapted to the square format of their films. Six of their films, produced since 2006, were screened for one week at a frequency varying from day to day. These six individual films took a larger, collective form, gaining a new existence and meaning.

→p. 11

→p. 12

Mental Radio Kosmas Nikolaou

curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

14.2 – 3.3.2019

The solo show Mental Radio by Kosmas Nikolaou was the result of research conducted by both me and the artist in the archive of the Institut Metapsychique Internationale in Paris and the Society for Psychical Research in Athens. Through archival material, like letters and sketches from a telepathy experiment conducted between the two cities in the turn of the century, the artist worked on a series of new works in relation to it, starting by restaging the experiment on the exact same day 91 years later. Being interested in pseudo-scientific methods in his practice, and as his great-grandfather was part of the Psychical Society in Greece, Nikolaou further explored the theme of parapsychology and its echo today through installation, performance, and sound, exposing part of the archive.

→p. 13

→p. 14

Abstract Attraction Mahalia Kohnke-Jehl

curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

22 – 25.06.2018

The exhibition was part of the launch of the edition Everything I picture disappears (see below in EDITIONS). Mahalia Kohnke-Jehl presented some sketches in the edition experimenting with the act of signing, an everyday gesture that she understands as an abstract line that can be drawn by anybody in a spontaneous way. This research led her to the creation of four sculptures that she exhibited together with a video and a sound piece.

→p. 15

→p. 16

Linda, Linda, Linda Philomène Hoel

curated by Corentin Canesson and Eva Vaslamatzi

↓ Carreau du temple Paris, France

8.2. – 31.3.2018

The show Linda, Linda, Linda by Philomène Hoel takes place in the changing room of the Carreau du Temple, an iconic industrial building in the Haut-Marais district, a former clothes market transformed in 2014 into a multidisciplinary venue. At the time of the invitation the artist was working on the restaging of Linda Marlowe, a 70 years old actress who played a stripper in a polemic experimental film made by Steven Dwoskin in the 70's; she decided to perform this piece, whose content had been deemed provocative, across 3 screens.

The room was open during the day mostly for the users of the venue so it was a rather informal and intimate way to experience the film. We built a motion detector under the screen and 2 monitors that triggered a switch from the old footage (Steven Dwoskin’s film) to new footage she filmed with the actress Linda Marlowe. The 3 strippers were dancing on their own all day in the changing room until a viewer opened the door and the motion detector shifted the image on the video, keeping their performance in a way invisible.

→p. 17

→

p. 18

1+1=1curated by Eva Vaslamatzi

artists Io Burgard, Cécile Chaput, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Léonard Martin & François Mark, Collectif Superfluide: Marie Deren, Charlotte Jankowski et Cecile Wautelet, Raphael Sitbon, Lauren Tortil, Marie Glaize, Anne-Charlotte Finel, Bérénice Lefebvre & Etaïnn Zwer

↓ Villa Belleville Paris, France

22 – 25.02.2018

Having been invited to curate the final show of the residents artists in Villa Belleville, I faced the challenge of presenting art practices that did not share any theoretical or aesthetic common ground within the same space. My starting point was a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia where the mathematical equation “1+1=1” appears written on a wall in the house of the protagonist, a person considered by society as mentally ill.

Applying this mathematical relationship in the architectural form of the exhibition space (which was separated by a wall in the middle creating two identical spaces) I invited each artist to present two artworks instead of one, one in each space. There was no restriction concerning the formal or conceptual relationship between the two works as long as it was considered as “one work” by the artist. This protocol gave rise to unexpected associations between the artworks of each artist but also between the rest of the works, and engaged the artists in the curatorial process.

The reference to 1+1=1 is a commentary on artistic creation as a methodology that often overcomes rational rules; even though it may not make any sense seen from one perspective, it can be legitimate from another.

→p. 19

→p. 20

La nuit juste avant le forêt curated by Corentin Canesson, Lucas Erin, Arthur Fouray, Eva Vaslamatzi

artists Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Benjamin Husson, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Flora Moscovici, Rallou Panagiotou

20.10 – 12.11.2017

The show borrows its title from the eponymous book by Bernard Marie-Koltez and was an in-situ experiment based on a previous exhibition by the artist Flora Moscovici that covered the space’s walls with a variation of colors related to the space’s former identity when DOC was still a high school. Keeping her work as a background for the show, we worked with five artists on the existing atmosphere of the space to present the plot of the book in three dimensions.

Each of us suggested one artist. My proposal was Rallou Panagiotou’s video Two-hander (2017) that takes as a reference another book of Koltez (Solitude of Cotton Fields, 1985) to comment on the relationship between buyer and seller while exposing her personal collection of T-shirts from the 80’s.

As part of the public program the hall of DOC! was transformed in an ephemeral bookstore for the duration of the show.

→p. 21

→p. 22

Our shadows before usCurated by Basalte - Association of Students at the Curating Masters program, Paris - Sorbonne University

artists Timothée Chalazonitis, Matthieu Haberard, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Vladimir Hermand, Mahalia Köhnke-Jehl, Nid Gâté, Lucie Planty, Cécile Serres and Radouan Zeghidour

↓ Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris France

6 – 15.07.2017

On the basis of a collaborative partnership between Paris-Sorbonne University and the Beaux-Arts de Paris (School of Fine Arts of Paris), we selected nine visual artists to work on new productions for a thematic show at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard.

Our proposal was the outcome of brainstorming sessions with Claire Le Restif, director of the Contemporary Art Center of Ivry – le Crédac, in which we reflected upon what ties the same generation of artists together, and sought to question our ways of living in the present. The title is borrowed by the eponymous poem of Yves Bonnefoy, a trip where human beings are evoked only by their figure, balancing between elimination and presence. His poem poses an open question about our relationship with time, the linear and circular evolution of history, mostly favoring its repetitive and recurrent character.

The invited artists set up new myths, with atemporal axes and values. They conceived stratagems and fictions that borrowed their forms from popular fables, archives and chronicles of past centuries, associating them with contemporary life. Being witnesses to the present, the artists participate in the construction of new collective memories and invite the public into their unprecedented stories.

→p. 23

→p. 24

Prec(ar)ious Collectivesartists Manolis Daskalakis-Lemos, Lola Gonzàlez, Taloi Havini, Yu Ji, Thomas Teurlai, Wataru Tominagachoreographers Markella Manoliadi, Aris Papadopoulos, Joanna Toumpakari, Stylianos Tsatsos, Yiannis Tsigkris, Alexandros Vardaxoglou, Andi Xhuma, Christos Xyrafakis

↓ Pavillon Neuflize OBC, artist-in-residence programme of Palais de Tokyo in collaboration with Flux Laboratory Akadimias 23 str, Athens Greece

6 – 12.4.2017

During my internship with the Pavillon residency’s team in 2017, we realised a hybrid contemporary project in Athens bringing together six international visual artists in residence with eight contemporary Greek choreographers. An emblematic modernist building in the center of Athens was at the core of the project; over one month, workshops between artists and choreographers took place there, while it also served as an exhibition space for the public presentation. The artists' installations, conceived and produced in Athens and in relation with the city, were activated on a series of occasions by the dancers’ performances.

Questioning the notion of ephemeral communities, the project was an experience of collective creation in situ and an experimentation to define a specific format for the presentation: something between an art exhibition and a dance performance.

→p. 25

→

p. 26

Diverse Universe Nomadic Performance Festival By Non grata

Invited by Eva Vaslamatzi

↓ Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) and the non-profit space “Frown” Greece

1 – 6.04.2012

After my first encounter with the nomadic performance group Non Grata in Paris, I invited them to realise a workshop at the Athens School of Fine Arts, where there was no performance department at the time. Through a series of workshops on various topics like sound, collective performance and performance costumes they interacted with the art students and presented two shows in collaboration with them, one at the school and one at the non-profit space “Frown.”

Non Grata is a performance art ensemble that travels around the world constantly, going on tour with the Diverse Universe Nomadic Performance festival. Its most notable features are the anonymity of the members in their group performances as well as their indifference towards the dominant art system.

→p. 27

→

p. 28

PUBLICATIONS

→p. 29

This catalog was published on the occasion of the 2019/2020 Orange Rouge edition “Like a magician (that immediately reveals the secrets to his tricks)”. Orange Rouge is an association that organizes creative workshops between adolescents with disabilities and contemporary artists which lead to the creation of collective works. Seventeen selected artists collaborated with adolescents in ULIS and IME schools between January 2020 and January 2021 for the production of collective artworks. Due to restrictions imposed by the pandemic, the public program of this year's edition took the form of an online platform (alamanieredunmagicien.com) and this publication.

“Usually, an exhibition catalogue comes at the end of a process and is a presumption, sometimes an a posteriori interpretation or even a two-dimensional version of its preceding event. In this case, the edition is not a presumption of an event; it is the event itself that brings us face to face with the absence of an event. Once the collective artworks were completed, artist and photographer Aurélien Mole asked the artists to send him printed photographs of the pieces which he then re-photographed, an “acceptance” from the outset of their two-dimensional existence and the way they would eventually be presented through social media given the absence of a physical event. Through Mole’s gaze - which led to the creation of different scenarios and stagings for each art work - the existence of the works in this edition signifies their first appearance as an “exhibition”, albeit through multiple filters that alter the original nature of the works, in a symbolic illustration of the period we are going through. Combining this with interviews with three of the artists (David Perreard, Philomène Hoël, and Géraldine Longueville) texts by our collaborators in the graphic design (ExposerPublier) and development processes (Jérôme Sullerot), the adolescents’ own words, documents from the online platform and documentation from the workshops, this publication is an attempt to showcase the artworks produced but also to give an overall view of the program taking into account all its participants.”

Eva Vaslamatzi

Like a magician (that immediately reveals the secrets to his tricks)

Editor ↓ Corinne Digard Eva VaslamatziGraphic design ↓ ExposerPublier

Edition of 700

→p. 30

→p. 31

→p. 32

This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition Gone Today, Here Tomorrow which was held at the Service Yard of annexM, in the framework of the series At work, from November 20,2019 to January 26, 2020. It contains the curatorial text of the exhibition, text describing the presented works as well as archive material that relate to some of the artist’s research, artist’s texts accompanying the creation of their work and some new works made especially for the publication.

Gone Today Here Tomorrow

Editor ↓ Eva VaslamatziGraphic design ↓ Stavros Bilionis

Edition of 500

→p. 33

3938

Αποσπάσματα από συζήτηση στο instagram μεταξύ του Basim Magdy και της Εύας Βασλαματζή Φεβρουάριος - Νοέμβριος 2019 Fragments from an instagram conversation between Basim Magdy and Eva Vaslamatzi February - November 2019

Απλά ένα φίλτρο προσώπου

και η τηλεόραση;

To θέλω σε τεράστιες διαστάσεις στον εκθεσιακό χώρο

μη λύνεις τα μάγια βαζοντάς τα στα μικροκύματα

ίδια μέρα

3

όχιιι

5554

Ευχαριστίες ΙΣΕΤ - Ινστιτούτο Σύγχρονης Ελληνικής Τέχνης Βιβλιοθήκη ΤΕΕ - Τεχνικό Επιμελητήριο ΕλλάδαςΑρετή Αδαμοπούλου, Πάκυ Βλασσοπουλου, Ιωάννα Γερακίδη, Έλενα Κεχαγιά, Χρυσάνθη Κουμιανάκη, Fleur Melbourne, Αλεξάνδρα Μουρτζίνη, Ελένη Πετρακάκη, Εβίτα Τσοκάντα , Κώστας Χατζηαλέξης

Thanks to Contemporary Greek Art Institute iset Technical Chamber of Greece Library (TEE-TCG)Areti Adamopoulou, Kostas Chatzialexis, Ioanna Gerakidi, Elena Kexagia, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Fleur Melbourne, Alexandra Mourtzini, Eleni Petrakaki, Evita Tsokanta, Paki Vlassopoulou

Αρχείο Τώνη Σπητέρη. Τελλόγλειο Ίδρυμα Τεχνών Α.Π.Θ. Tony Spiteris Archive-Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation

4948

Η μεταφορά των έργων και ο έλεγχος στο τελωνείο, που αποτελεί από μόνη της μια πρώτη εφήμερη υπαίθρια έκθεσή τους σε απουσία φόντου.The works’ transportation and customs inspection, in itself a �rst, ephemeral showing of the works without a backdrop.

Κοσμάς Νικολάου, 19,735 μέρες, 2019 (λεπτομέρεια)Kosmas Nikolaou, 19,735 days, 2019 (detail)

Parallel to my curatorial practice, over a year and a half I produced the artist edition “Everything I picture disappears.” For each issue, I invited an artist or thinker to conceive a new work related to her/his understanding of the notion of a “picture” (as painting, drawing, sketch, delineation, illustration, impression, mental image, concept, situation o.a.). The launch of each issue was an occasion to think of the associations between the edition and the three-dimensional space of an event, exhibition, installation or discussion.

Issues ↓

#1 Cosy and Nausea by Myrto Tzima Launch and installation in Void, Athens

#2 It might be a thing, maybe a sculpture by Mahalia Kohnke-Jehl Launch and exhibition in DOC, Paris

#3 I did an exhibition in my house, nobody came by Fabien Danesi Exhibition in the apartment of Fabien Danesi in Paris

#4 My great grandfather disappeared by Marina Maniadaki No event

Everything I picture disappears March 2018 – September 2019

Editor ↓ Eva VaslamatziGraphic design ↓ Stavros Bilionis

Limited edition of 100

→p. 34

→p. 35

TEXTS (selection)

→p. 36

At first I saw a big city text for the publication Desired Landscapes #4 2021

→p. 37

64 65

➌ In the medium’s report, the element of sound appears to be intensively present, perhaps even more so than the visual aspects of his description. Forthuny focuses on the languages spoken in the city, but also uses the image of mu-sical instruments as similes, while he also mentions the “cacoph-ony” of the crowd.

I imagine this city as a meeting point of a paralin-guistic community, a mod-ern Babel where all dialects coexist harmoniously or where they use a trace of

an ancient language before even the begin-ning of speech.➌ This feeling of harmony is violently interrupted by an unspecified event, “as if a brutal incident had struck all the strings of a harp-sichord in a single blow,”the medium continues.

Language

62 63

Without ever naming it, the medium descri- bes a multi-lingual border city, located close to Moscow: “There, they simultaneously speak German, Russian and Polish, in a dialect and accent coming from the region between the Russian-Polish borders.”In my mind’s eye I experience these sounds as images, as if synesthetically, seeing a city surrounded by dark blue, brown and silver hues.

“At �rst, I saw a very big city…”↕

∞

∑

3 positions, 3 perspectives, 3 thoughts - The Ephemeral, the Boundary and the Secret text for the publication "Prefix-co", Hydroexpress projects 2021

→p. 38

CONTINUES →

→p. 39

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

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

Spinning the present text on the artistic practice of Maria Varela 2020↳ https://medium.com/@artworksfellows/spinning-the-present-7d7ff485a2e9

CONTINUES →

→p. 40

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

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

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

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

→p. 41

There is not enough space to save this document text on the online Writing Space of Open Space Contemporary 2019

↳ https://www.openspacecontemporary.com/projects/writing-space/there-is-not-enough-space-to-save-this-document-copy/

→p. 42

The outcome is the creation of a new environment, a space within an existing space, an attempt to direct reality, in an extension of real time and real place. The issue is art’s ambivalent attitude towards modern social issues. The nature of art, by definition, is such that it gives artists the opportunity to observe, interpret and create new elements that are able to function alongside the real world but that, at the same time, also transform the world. The system in which art is situated sets limits to artistic freedom, since it places art into the global markets and thus, limits the effect it has on individuals. The power of performance art to create situations that go beyond the limits of these markets became apparent back in the mid 1970’s. For modern art, the example of Non Grata confirms the importance of this precondition, creating a new experience that heavily affects every-day life in an extremely direct manner. This is exactly why I was drawn to their work as a member of their audience in Paris last year and why I consequently decided to invite them to the School of Fine Arts in Athens.

Thoughts around praxis (action)The repetition of reality through its representation by imaginary elements constitutes a processing of the issues that arise in the mind of modern man. The driving force is the need for critical thinking that arises both through observation and also spontaneous objections towards social issues. In Estonia, the stimuli for triggering artistic experimentation were the prevalence of western influence over the country’s Soviet roots, as well as the conservative background in art education.

In a European historic city such as Athens, Non Grata explores issues concerning identity and descent, as well as the phenomenon of exploiting ancient Greek symbols within an attempt to confirm a Greek identity. Values, symbols and the figures of ancient Greece, all elements that have become commodities and have lost their meaningfulness, become victims of arson by the team. As a reaction to the country’s current deadlock, Non Grata proposes a distancing from history and the past in general, which has become an object of misinterpretation. Instead, the group suggests a turn to the present, to direct reaction and to active participation. Through the use of a variety of artistic media, the group creates a safe environment in which social issues may be processed and proposals put forward regarding solutions that could, at a first glance, seem to be utopic but could in the end be much closer to reality than we think.

PraxisAll the above lead to praxis, that is, communication. The oral and the written forms of language play a central role in guiding the spectator’s stream of thoughts. Without the spectator this praxis would be meaningless. At the same time praxis is autonomous, a delirium and a source of inspiration, not God-given but deriving from the world of mortals, the artist him/herself. It does not constitute a processed part of the procedure but rather an improvisation that arises from the specific environment in which it develops each time. The experience becomes complete with the visual dimension: the backdrops, the costumes, the various sensory effects and the human bodies that all create the right atmosphere and leading the audience into a world in which its role is not just to receive experiences. The possibility of the audience intervening is always open and therefore a performance’s development is never predetermined.

It is the constant flow of life rather than its interruptions which gives a drastic importance to the performances that I experienced. They thus become a continuation of the self and of the concerns of the artists, who develop their performance by constantly interacting with the audience. The same also applies for the members of the audience who seek, through art, a truth or a way out of their reality and who, sometimes expect a call for change or who are in other cases simply searching for different ways of passing their time. The performances of Non Grata, through the use of shock, do not allow for a superficial experience but rather attempt to trigger our senses and thoughts.

Praxis Catalogue text on the Non Grata performance in Athens 2014

→p. 43

Thank you