THE MOVEMENT (BEFORE THE EYES) OF THE STANDSTILL | ATHENS 2019

About This Project

Peristeri my first neighborhood, Lot’s wife and Natrum Muriaticum

An individual project in process, an installation in space made out of two parts, a photo album and a sculptural installation.

1^st session: the photo album is consisting out of 100 pieces. It is a first, imperfect attempt to capture some aura of those times, in order to realize the project, as this goes on for making a documentary, in the future. The photo album was presented at the patio of the Architecture School of the Metsovion Polytechnic School in Athens, during the presentation of the book «Nomadic Architecture», on the 17th October 2018.

2^st session: I make numerous statuettes out of salt -spells, fragments of people in my memory, persons missing from the photos- standing on a similar site.

Keywords and terms: nostalgia, city, memory, wandering, recording, mapping, movement, attitude, quotes, rock culture and political consciousness, punk, sense of “belonging”, freezing, salt column, mother, maintenance, spell, homeopathy

Seeking my most intimate landscapes, Ι wander around my first neighborhood, in the area of Peristeri. Ι record a series of images, mapping the area that has characterized more than all others in which I have lived, culturally, socially and politically, my emotional intelligence. Throughout an autobiographical view, I try to discern the layers of culture, that have characterized an entire generation, my generation, that of 1974 (metapoliteysi). This effort takes place in particular, in this working-class neighborhood, which was built and inhabited primarily by internal migrants. Those immigrants lived and built their homes around the industrial plants which radiated from the Decade of the 60s next to the beds of the river Kifissos till Piraeus. But older than those, were the immigrants who came running away from the Asia Minor catastrophe. Their children and grandchildren lived in more contemporary times, with rock culture and political awareness-and commitment-, cinema, making music bands, making celebrations, hang out in the squares and the little bars, going to concerts in cinema, playing guitar in the parks of participating in political protests, making modern subcultures.

This gesture is made with the naiveté that carries a child, the child who grew up in these landscapes, with the people of the neighborhood, with the healthy «vagrancy» youth, while hanging out in the places of the era. All this movement is alternating with stillness. Incriminating both, I let go of this era –which I, almost nowhere can’t recognize on the site anymore- for good. Through feelings of intense nostalgia, I resemble with Lot’s wife. Looking back while leaving her most intimate place -destroyed and renewed by a new Treaty-, she immobilized, becomes a salt column, trapped in situations and images of the past, in my case, of my childhood and adolescence. Eras in human lives classified, searching for safety into a larger family, of craze, impulse, game, discovery, wandering and intense sociability, build shared experiences, and finally learning more in life.

In homeopathy, the medicine given for curing intense nostalgia –and not only- is the salt Natrum Muriaticum. I construct numerous figurines, spells, made out of salt, in an effort to liberate from the past. My wish would be while visiting each place to smash a statuette on the spot, making a personal ritual in public.