EVERYDAY FORMS OF DE-APPROPRIATION – SERIES: THE STRANGER IN OUR CITY | CHALANDRI SETTLEMENT [#5], CHALANDRI ATHENS 2024

About This Project

It is an artistic, ephemeral intervention in the public space of the Chalandri settlement, with a parallel performative presentation to the public, on the spot. The Flat Developed Unidentified Containers consist of a variety of patterns of paper packaging of packaged foods and other products colored with phosphor pigment on unexpanded paper, the dimensions are variable, and each pattern has a size of 5×5 cm. up to 50Χ70 cm. The exhibition/artistic intervention was curated by Panagiotis Daramaras, Thodoris Korelis, Ira Papadopoulou and Dimitris Halatsis. The project focuses on the spatial-class dimensions of social interaction and the relationship with the “foreign”.

Our daily necessities, care & entertainment items are included in packages. These are built on a very well thought out design by competent designers for the purpose of briefly appealing consumers, and end up very quickly in the trash. Here, these charming and riddle-like figures are presented with all their innocence on the edge of visibility, creating a spectacular aura in the sense of their audience.

The opened containers are contained in a larger one. The form of the project usually takes that of installation on site. The basic material is a ready-made, food packages and other products in various sizes. The work has been also presented in the past, at the exhibition Ten Year After Friends at Sarantopoulos Roller Mills, in Piraeus in March 2008, curated and organized by Antonis Vathis. In this exhibition there is a reversal of presentation(s): from the material substance of the work it passes to its spectral, by imprinting the shapes of the figures with phosphorous pigment on unexpanded paper. These new figures are placed on the walls and floor of the small abandoned shop located at the junction of Karella & Thrace streets.

Keywords and terms: forms of defamiliarization, mutation, recycling, strangeness-intimacy, allienation

The collection of packaging, from everyday products, and their diversion from modern objects of consumption and litter, diverted, sometimes, in totemic objects, and other times in reference to architectural spreads, and eventually in forms of defamiliarization or ostranie in everyday life, is an obsession that has begun to work artistically in my sense since a decade now, or so. The packages are objects designed by special order with the glamour to attract the buying public in consumption, a product that is thrown into the garbage immediately after its purchase. My other obsession is the recycling of a crafted art-object. In this phase of mutation of the project, I cover with a large number of pieces of my collection a surface of approximately 40 m2, for the needs of the Ten Year After Friends exhibition. In other phases of the project, the packages had turned into “magic” figures of the “Adventures of Alice in Wonderland”, or in totemic character figurines. The project evolves and mutates constantly, while the collection is growing. At this stage and for the needs of the exhibition/event of the Settlement, the work is transformed into an unidentified object which will come to live in the neighborhood of the Settlement, ephemerally, or more permanently.

Athens, June 2024

The material condemned to death

Parameters: 1. Recycling: a) cultural material as an unrecognized artistic work, destined to be thrown in the trash, (b) forms, through their transformation, or the recognition that they are “beings”, since these forms are perceived as abstract figures. 2. Repeating patterns. 3. a “other” form that emerges from the figures. A fantastic simulation of forms as caricatures of a world that “appears” in front of us, as soon as we put the glasses of creative imagination, which elevates things. That is, the objects above their apparent appearance. It animates them by giving them the right to exist beyond their purely material status. The status in which they are doomed to exist only as ephemeral, consumer products for throwing away. Therefore, the dialogue with the objects that surround us is possible through our transformative creative practice. It gives us a signal for these forms that are not life-empty, because they encompass actions that cannot be overlooked. The energy of condensed time around the creation of these forms. This elusive and transparent net of parameters that measure human creativity and life. It is the marriage of an old idea, that of animism and a newer of this post-industrial era and society. 4. They contain material, they are co-formulations. 5. This is a well thought out shot. 6. A poetic movement vs. of a revolutionary, regarding considerations that touch the grandiose, close to abstract concepts.