FLAT ΕXPANDED CONTAINERS OF UNKNOWN IDENTITY | EVERYDAY OBJECTS of DE-FAMELIARIZATION | THE FOREIGN IN OUR TOWN SERIES | CHALANDRI SETTLEMENT [#5] – ATHENS 2024

About This Project

This is a visual, ephemeral intervention in the public space of the Chalandri settlement, with a parallel performative presentation to the public, on site. The Flat Expanded Containers of Unknown Identity consist of various patterns from paper packaging of foods and other products colored with phosphorescent pigment on non-shrinking tracing paper. The dimensions are variable, and each pattern has a size from 5X5 cm to 50X70 cm. The exhibition/visual intervention was curated by Panagiotis Daramaras, Thodoris Korelis, Ira Papadopoulou and Dimitris Chalatsis. The project focuses on the spatial-class dimensions of social interaction and the relationship with the “foreigner”.

Our daily necessities and care & entertainment items are contained in packaging. These are made on a very well thought out plan by skilled designers with the aim of briefly captivating consumers, and they end up in the trash very quickly. Here, in this presentation, these charming and enigmatic figures are presented in all their innocence on the fringes of visibility, creating a ghostly aura in the perception of their audience. The opened, expanded containers are contained in their turn within a larger one. The form of the work usually takes that of an installation in space. The basic material is a ready-made, food and other product packaging and the sizes vary. The work initially has been presented at the exhibition Ten Year After Friends at the Sarantopoulos Roller Mills, in Piraeus in March 2008, curated and organized by Antonis Vathis.

Keywords and terms: forms of defamiliarization, mutation, recycling

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.

Athens, May 2010

Some thoughts

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.