MY MAPPING OUT | ATHENS 2005

About This Project

A project in the form of handwritten and digital drawings with mappings and diagrams, in variable sizes. Materials: colored pencils, plain paper and digital files. It was presented in the University of Tamba-Florida by prof. Adelheid Mers in 2005, and in the Fanzine exhibition catalogue What remains is future, issue#0, curated by Nadia Argyropoulou, in September 2006 at the old Arsakeion school in Patras, during the cultural events for the celebration of the city as Cultural Capital of Europe.

Keywords: agony, existential, death, time, man, body, transport, travel, size, digital, information era, charts

My Mapping Out Process – A Chronology

After my studies in Greece, I realized that art mainly is created around the idea of death, either praising it, or try to exorcise it. I was impressed to realize how people, tribes and of course artists of past and recent eras, would create whole worlds of objects and environments around this issue. At that time, I was in such a peculiar state of mind, because my whole living and working environment had changed completely. During an artist residency in Venice monumental art, and its meaning, was becoming more and more distinct to my consciousness. It is probably a fact by now that the whole world has made a turn from one given situation to another, from the mechanical to the information era. At the same time Europe seems to get older and older, together with its tradition. Everything in my mind alerted around the representation of the world. Existential problems were my concern, and at that point I decided I had to recollect all of my knowledge, and put it on a small piece of paper and carry it around with me, wherever I would go.

At that time I started studies in Germany. There seemed to be contradiction between the actual studies I had to accomplish and my aims and worries. Works through which I was trained to express myself in art making, and those I was practicing in the past, would not “work” anymore; they should be progressed and processed -like contemporary food. I thought that this “mapping out” process would help me to “get rid” of the past, and the obligation to have to deal with history as well. At the beginning I tried to focus on the basic ideas around which art is all about.

I tried to have a condensed picture of main existential issues as if I could control them in my thinking, and somehow be relieved from emotional pain, from nostalgia; being removed from my habitual spaces, being in “exile”, as I felt. Looking back, I tried to figure out how they were connected to each other: death, life, man, time, and mass, psyche, spirit, and so on. They were just some words. I was making a condensed meaning out of them.

This was my first diagram and it was in Greek. The title was Attack to death: Disappearance and how to become invisible. But the diagram never gave a solution to my main question. Instead, it would give me a good amount of significant “philosophical light bulbs” that would help me to proceeding and dealing with my anxieties.

After some time I traveled to Chicago. I would constantly “bump onto” this new for me style of art making, chart art, cartography, and diagrams. During that time I was asked by fellow artists to participate to an action with mapping processes. So I had to draw a personal map. There were different notions on personal map making, but the first task was to concentrate on art, activism, and politics, and the second one, on art and aesthetics. I would call my maps existential.

There came another one. It was on a big sheet of paper, and now, I tried to put all of what I had in mind on one piece. It was made by hand again in Greek and its name was “Control Freak”. Now, notions of politics and definitions of individual identity were involved. The problem that came up, was how to give an aesthetic form to these flat maps, and I must say, I am still in this process and still try to realize what is behind the idea of gathered information on a flat screen or a piece of paper. More than that, I question myself – and that brings me more into perplexity – how this form would affect the spectator. How would the form be “artistic”, or have an aesthetic feeling, and not only informational affect? I created a digital image, and I came up with a simple form that would show my present situation concluding my history in time, and the process of my life.

The next one was a combination of the control freak map and the first existential map. I was influenced by various parameters: information I gathered from research and from other kinds of mapping I became familiar with, during my stay in Chicago from presentations on relevant themes: exhibits, magazines, and more (Adelheid Mers, Brett Bloom and Temporary Services, Lombardi, Brian Holmes, Pong Map for the Internet in the Wired magazine). Finally, they looked digital.

Trying to affect better my audience in a more tactile way, after a couple of years, I realized a project and gave the map a sculptural form (Nova Vestis Deae).

Let’s start from elsewhere now. Let’s take as starting point the fact that, pretty often I/we play a certain social and political role, while becoming temporary residents in foreign cultures. My main research at the time I studied in Germany and Chicago was on the theme the artist as the “Outsider/Alien/Stranger”; his/her identity and position through a sociopolitical point of view, in the context of the information era. Language is communication, and it is one of the issues that bring foreigners in trouble. I made a research online in the Thesaurus dictionary, in order to define what each one of these terms exactly mean: “Outsider/Alien/Stranger”. I traveled throughout a labyrinth of words and came up with the relevant diagram similar to a cable, or electricity circuit.

I had to use colors to create categories, and to show how the words flow, how they would connect to each other, and how they would give some energy the one nother. The result was an upside-down tree form, a sequence of meanings that would expand in two different directions. The one went “down”, to the lower, or condense level of existence (buttocks, base, and essence) and the other to the “upper”, or encompassing one (grand). The in between area of words covered various meanings. Later I put the tree on a rainbow-like background, to indicate the chromatic palette of the variety of the meanings. I realized that all things are connected to each other.

I started to take notes of everything in this form.

I also initiated a new way of doing connections between the information I had gathered in my head, very confusing at the time; and create, or better reinvent my own thinking, make sense and gain knowledge out of it. So there came The “Village voice” and the “Métis” map. Someone can see there, another form of putting information together which would go far from the personal sphere to create an absurd system of classification of ideas and concerns around history, meanings, politics and the essence of art making.

Wishing for the future, I would like making an effort to “enter” all these actual spaces the words on the maps represent, and live in them actually and full hearted, “using” as vehicles the ideas “brought on the ground”.

Another future project would be to convert these maps to an interactive presentation. I would like to link the words to other forms of representation and documentary, fragments, or “ready-mades”, coming from all kinds of art media, produced during the history of art: videos, films and photographs, texts and poems. In other words, I would like to take the position of a contemporary artist/editor to edit an international/personal databank, and create a remix of recent history, the way I have been nourished, being born and living in the postmodern era.