2022
Exhibition at cross section archive, in Athens, 3.12.2022–1.02.2023.
good spaces left focussed on the fenced-off Exarchia square and the tension that such a barrier creates in public space. Fences appear throughout Athens as instruments of restriction – meant to keep out, to neutralize, to cover up, to redirect, to restrict, to limit, to confine, to mark a boundary – yet they also reveal the traces of what they attempt to conceal. The fence on Exarchia square was not just another fence. The goal of this particular fence and its towering presence was to repress and to intimidate former dwellers of the square – with an excuse of constructing a new subway station – while guarding a particular fortress created and now inhabited by police and developers.
Using the camera as a tool I kept returning to the square, trying to find different ways to ‘break through’ the fence in order to capture activities on the other side of it. The final installation documents this attempt and combines different vantage points of looking at the fence, looking over the fence, peeking through the holes in the fence as well as hovering over the fenced off square.
At cross section archive, the urban space meets the exhibition space, which is a recurring element in my work. There, I combined these different vantage points with physical elements of the space into a spatial sequence without a beginning nor an end – the installation consists of two projections on the windows of the venue, one on the rear wall, a video sequence on the monitor placed on the floor and two LED lights emphasising the ‘fences’ that are part of the space itself, i.e. the bars in front of one of the windows and the roll-down metal curtain in front of the other.
The text element in one of the projections is a transcription of the audio recording I made during the demonstration on September 24. I see it adding a contextual layer to the visual – it includes the slogans voiced by the demonstrators and scrolls over the video image as an infinite loop in both Greek and English. The other text element, the projection on the rear wall, is a footnote of sorts. It shows one of the buildings at the square with two banners attached to it, moving in the wind, which read: METPO ПEIΘAPXIKO. This translates roughly as ‘disciplinary measure’, but in Greek the word ‘metro’ stands both for ‘measure’ and ‘subway’ – a very telling double meaning in this context.
good spaces left marked the beginning of cross section archive’s annual thematic for 2022–23, Real Time History, curated by Maria Lalou and Skafte Aymo-Boot, and extended my ongoing practice of observing and recording unstable spatial conditions — demolition sites, leftover spaces, temporary structures. By excerpting moments from the process of documenting the fence surrounding the Exarchia square, I attempted to hold onto the fading fragments of a once good space now confined, and to register a piece of real time history as it unfolds.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, chapter XVII Walls (1998).
Related articles:
A contemporary art exhibition at cross section archive in Exarchia turns the focus on the square claiming a public space without barriers by Despina Zefkili, athinorama.gr, 17.03.2023
Gleaning and Material Thinking by Francisco Martinez, Kunst.ee 2022/1