ThereWasLandHereBefore_englishversion

Ammophila Vol.3: There Was Land Here Before

Writers:

Natalia Damigou Papoti, Emmanouela Kiriakopoulou, Anastasia Michopoulou, Christina Papoulia, Eleni Riga, Theophilos Tramboulis, Vicky Tsirou, EvitaT sokanta, Stefanos Yiannoulis, Costis Zouliatis.

Visual Artists: Alexis Fidetzis, Fotini Kalle, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Panagiotis Kefalas, Electra Maipa, Persephone Nikolakopoulou, Ilias Papailiakis, Poka-Yio, Dimitris Rentoumis, Nana Sachini, Nana Seferli, Eva Stefani, Sasha Streshna, Garden Thief, Kleopatra Tsali, Manos Tsichlis, VASKOS, Marina Velisioti, Christos Venetis, 3 137.

Curated by: Ammophila

© writings: The Writers: © artworks: The Visual Artists

© translations: Dimitris Vitiniotis

The production takes place within the framework of the 2022 program of «All Greece is one Culture» institution of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Detailed information and seat reservations at https://digitalculture.gov.gr/

With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Region of Peloponnese, the Municipality of Elafonisos, the Greek National Tourism Organization,NEON Organization for Culture and Developmentand ZOE.

Acknowledgements

We want to sincerely thank the institutions that supported us so that ammophila Vol.3 There Was Land Here Before could be implemented.

First of all, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to the institutions that supported us. For the financial support of ammophila Vol.3 There was land here before, we would like to thank : «All Greece in one Culture» institution of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Ministry of Culture and Sports, Region of Peloponnese, Municipality of Elafonisos, Greek National Tourism Organization, NEON Organization for Culture and Development and ZOE Lifestyle Brand.

We sincerely thank the Municipality of Elafonisos and especially Mrs. Efi Liarou, Mayor of Elafonisos for supporting and hosting the exhibition and for providing us with the school building.

For hosting the musical performance we also thank the Ephorate of Antiquities of Laconia and the Archaeological Museum of Neapolis Voion Laconia.

We could not have undertaken this journey without our fellow visual artists, writers and musicians who participated and, with their work and presence, gave life to the event.

Finally, we are also grateful to everyone who helped in any way to make the exhibition ammophila vol.3 There was Land Here Before and the musical performance «posttruth is another water game I play against my mouth» come to life.

The production takes place within the framework of the 2022 program of «All Greece is one Culture» institution of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Detailed information and seat reservations at https://digitalculture.gov.gr/

With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Region of Peloponnese, the Municipality of Elafonisos, the Greek National Tourism Organization, NEON Organization for Culture and Development and ZOE.

Vol.3: There Was Land Here Before 18-28 August 2022

Elafonisos School, Elafonisos, Laconia Archaeological Museum of Neapolis Voion, Laconia

The exhibition Ammophila vol.3: There Was Land Here Before renegotiates our relationship to land, as well as the dominant narratives associated with it. We often think of land as our subsoil, a common ground for coexistence, and we create stories and histories to reinforce this relationship. The exhibition invites us to think of new interpretations and stories regarding real lands, as well as those constructed through our collective fantasies: fantasies of a non-existent land, a land that is different or inhabited differently, a land that can shake us off, a decaying land, a flourishing land, a trembling land, a land without borders. There Was Land Here Before creates narratives around our sense of place and time and how these form our different lives.

Elafonisos, once a peninsula connected to the mainland, was transformed into an island by an earthquake. On this trembling ground, how can we reexamine past narratives and narratives of the past, while replacing them with collective dreams and radical gestures?

Contemporary Art Exhibition

Visual Artists: Alexis Fidetzis, Fotini Kalle, Dionisis Kavallieratos, Panagiotis Kefalas, Electra Maipa, Persephone Nikolakopoulou, Ilias Papailiakis, Poka-Yio, Dimitris Rentoumis, Nana Sachini, Nana Seferli, Eva Stefani, Sasha Streshna, Garden Thief, Kleopatra Tsali, Manos Tsichlis, Vaskos, Marina Velisioti, Christos Venetis, 3 137.

Writers:

Natalia Damigou Papoti, Emmanouela Kiriakopoulou, Anastasia Michopoulou, Christina Papoulia, Eleni Riga, Theophilos Tramboulis, Vicky Tsirou, Evita Tsokanta, Stefanos Yiannoulis, Costis Zouliatis.

Guest performance by Sofia Kouloukouri

Location: Elafonisos School, Elafonisos, Laconia

Duration: 18-28 August 2022

Visiting hours: 18:00-21:00 Curated by: Ammophila

Musical Performance

post-truth is another water game I play against my mouth (electro-acoustic Lamento for 4 performers / sound installation)

5000 years ago, there was a city — there, we can immerse ourselves in its own perspective with what is left to be true. Now beings live in the World of the Mouth (inter-verbal space)

but the gates of what remains, are outside their sight

Participating Artists:

Anna Papathanasiou: vox - performance / Stella N. Christou: vox - performance – digital electronics / Tasos Stamou: Improvised sound sources - analog electronics / Kostas Tzekos: Bass Clarinet - analog electronics.

Composition – Installation – Words: Stella N.Christou

Location: Archaeological Museum of Neapolis Voion, Laconia Start: 19:30 Duration: 40min Days: 23 & 24 August 2022

The production takes place within the framework of the 2022 program of «All Greece is one Culture» institution of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Detailed information and seat reservations at https://digitalculture.gov.gr/

With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the Region of Peloponnese, the Municipality of Elafonisos, the Greek National Tourism Organization, NEON Organization for Culture and Development and ZOE.

My dears Tasos, Kostas and Anna, I am in Cyprus recording in the valley of Solea, by the river Klarios (or Karkotis) and in Skouriotissa, one of the oldest mines in Cyprus1.

The sounds that I am collecting will compose the soundscape for our performance in Archaeological Museum of Neapolis Voion.

It will be our continuo, in the manner of Jani Christou, that will help us achieve the transitions of the themes / the cues / the broader «psychological» state of the live narration.

Here is a brief -emotional- score of the work. We will go into the details in the following days.

☼

1. The mine of Skouriotissa

PART A

“I wear stone glasses and I am called Petra”2

(And I became a stone - let there be no depth... / a “stone” visual lament for this lost dispute between the museum›s ancient exhibits taken from the bottom of Pavlopetri and the living active artistic beings / burning stones coming out of my mouth - mouth made of stone - eyes made of stone manoula mou…)

Line-up in the form of an early-80s Greek popular orchestra.

-Tasos: “bouzouki” — electronics

-Kostas: bass clarinet — “clarinet”

-Anna, Stella: “popular” singers

PART B “Christ, if I go crazy, it will be from a fish and from indolence”3

— the freshwater fish paradox — (Freshwater from lakes and rivers —0.1% of all surface water— is home to half the population of fish, while the sea and the seabed —99.6% of all surface water— is home to the other half. I wish today we would look after at least one river - how the contemporary Greek civilization remains inactive before the hunt for the “depths” of place and time)

-Tasos: fish - grains - clunks / the movement of elements in space

-Kostas: drones / 2 / from the dark bottom - to the sweet river

-Anna, Stella: bodies and voices move in a fragmented verbal state -Hydrophones

2. Miltos Sachtouris, “I wear stone glasses and I am called Peter”, PARALOGAIS, 1948

3. Katerina Zisaki, Without self (Χωρίς Εαυτό), 2022

The pus – or, regarding the places that exist even if you don’t see them

Strange things happened to her that winter.

She has always had pimples. Not many, a couple of relatively large ones before her period and some smaller ones at unexpected moments. That winter, however, her body began a strange and incomprehensible production. Pimples were popping up in entirely new places, pimples which were different from the ones she had before : when she squeezed them they wouldn’t empty out, or rather they ended up only partially emptied and while she was sure to have exterminated them, the following day they reappeared larger than before and instead of having turned into a sore as she would have expected, they no longer had any visible exit point. They continued to grow bigger, trapped under her skin, turning little reddish lumps that she didn’t know how to deal with; she would temporarily forget about them but they reminded her of their existence every time she contracted her facial muscles to talk.

Ever since she cut her hair into a fringe, they had been popping up uncontrollably on her forehead; as soon as one was about to disappear, her skin would throb announcing an imminent inflammation just a centimetre away. It was as if they were deliberately trying to remain invisible to the eyes of others; only she knew of their existence or of the fact that under her fringe there was an entire constellation of swollen red bumps.

Just before the end, she got a pimple in a place she didn’t even know existed. She was about to wear a pair of earrings in front of the half-broken bathroom mirror of an unkempt rented room right across the island of Spinalonga. As she was sliding the hoop into her left ear she momentarily felt the mellow heat of pooled pus. She manically started searching for its source. She looked behind the ear, under the ear, around the ear, even inside it. No luck. All over, her skin was as expected; white and smooth. Until she suddenly saw it: one pimple had popped up right where the earlobe meets her face. She couldn’t comprehend how a pimple could have appeared in this non-place, she could hardly believe that there were sebum-secreting pores in that area! And yet. The soft slit that would normally be there was now swollen and warm, an accumulated morbidity that was festering and would have gone unnoticed having sprouted where it did, but she had accidentally uncovered it. She moved the earlobe to the side, examined the area thoroughly, located its exit point, found the optimal position to place her fingers, and squeezed it. It was so close

to her ear that for the first time in her life she could actually hear the pus coming out, that faint crunchy noise which she could never say with certainty whether it was a sound or a sensation, this time resembled a small explosion. The discharge poured out thick as cream. It was no longer possible to pretend that she hadn’t seen the slit at the edge of her face.

Natalia Damigou-Papoti

Portrait of an unknown land

The image of a land that once existed and has currently taken on a new form inevitably brings to mind the concept of memory. Mankind has learned to persistently operate through visualizations, through reconstructions of previously experienced memories, and leaps of fantasy to a time and place that has not yet arrived (and usually never will). Memory comes along with terms such as mnemonic practices and documentation, as elements associated with something that once existed and is now lost. This, ultimately, leads to reflecting on what has not yet been experienced, at the level which is dominated by fantasy, utopia and vision.

Memory and utopia have always provided the ground for artistic creation. They are two sides of a complementary bipolarity, which is deeply rooted in our perceptions and every manifestation of it. Convention plays a very important role within this dense nexus. In Art and Illusion (1960) Ernst Gombrich had eloquently expressed the ways in which convention, in the sense of having knowledge of a particular visual vocabulary and reducing symbols from intellectual to real, is the basis on which artists create their works with a relative certainty that they can become legible. Convention, this “prior knowledge”, as a concept, essentially gives meaning to a memory to which we turn again and again in order to interpret the world around us. This clearly presupposes the existence of common places; however, nothing can give us the comforting or even suffocating certainty that we all interpret common symbols in common ways, perhaps with the exception of their first level. Visual symbols, like language, are more like mnemonic anchors. And ultimately, all communication systems, as well as the concept of narration at their core, leave plenty of room for the expectations of creators and of those who complement and consume their works. We only have to recall Akira Kurosawa in Rashōmon (1950) and his argument that human beings, willingly or not, are constantly completing aspects of their lives, their own personal stories and those they have picked up and become part of them.

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) by Céline Sciamma, a female artist is commissioned to create a portrait of a French woman of the gentry to be sent to her future husband in Italy before her arrival. This portrait, like so many others that were created and sent to prospective spouses who had never met the person they were about to marry, is, to my eyes, the embodiment of the imaginary and of insightful practice. Frans Hals’

The Laughing Cavalier (1624) has been considered, among other interpretations, as a work commissioned by the person portrayed in it to be sent to a prospective bride. If this is indeed true, we can picture a woman in 17th-century Holland examining closely the entire painting, closing her eyes, taking notes of the man’s features and creating his face in her mind, a face made of a material that is malleable, luminous, indistinct, freed from reality but inescapably profoundly anchored in it. In fact, it was Hals himself who, through brushstrokes that are more suggestive than descriptive, seems to achieve an intensely philosophical alignment between form and substance. As regards this imaginary woman who received the portrait created by Hals, the multiple interpretations from one medium to another, from one convention to the next, and from one system of expectations to a new one, resulted in creating a land that rises up to the surface for as long as the intermediate stage between complete ignorance of this person’s existence and the encounter lasts. So, through an intuitive sequence reminiscent of “Chinese whispers”, the Dutch woman holding the portrait of the Laughing Cavalier in her hands creates a certain expectation and, ultimately, oddly enough (but not quite), a memory of her future husband. The Laughing Cavalier, if indeed he did send this portrait to a prospective bride and if the marriage was indeed consummated, he saw himself confronting a memory of his own existence, which although it had nothing to do with reality at the same time it cannot be considered as fictional because someone (the Dutch woman) had dreamt of it. In Nagisa Ōshima’s Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) which was released in 1968, a convict who survives hanging but loses his memory is called by his executioners to take part in a play in which he is taught how to become himself again, that is, the man who must face execution for his evil deeds. The man does not remember anything, but those around him have a detailed “memory” of his crimes, his childhood and of his everyday life, and they constantly refer to events that are communicated for the first time both to himself as well as to the film’s audience. It is a land that pre-existed and a new one which is now emerging in the same place. This land of before is both an ally (as a precondition) and an enemy to the new one.

Back to portraiture, Rubens’ Henry IV Receives the Portrait of Marie de’ Medici, is the perfect embodiment of the exalting, pragmatic, yet deeply imaginary nature of creating and sending portraits before the couple’s first encounter. Rubens’ work can be interpreted in an intensely self-referential way which leads to a web of multiple associations. First of all, it opens a window to the other side of the story, namely the one that has to do with the delivery of the portrait to the prospective spouse and the subsequent beginning of the construction of a memory. Marie de’ Medici had commissioned the painting and this fact links the incident to

the then established practice of women sending images of themselves. However, the picture was commissioned after the wedding; in fact it was commissioned after the death of the portrayed love-struck King Henry of France. At a first level, the context as regards the commissioning of this work was dictated by politics, as Marie de’ Medici was facing expulsion from the French capital, accused of having usurped the throne, and she was desperately looking for a way to legitimize her position. But ultimately, through a work of art aimed at restoring the prestige of its protagonist, Marie de’ Medici (or Rubens and on her behalf for that matter) ends up presenting a vision: she fantasizes a moment of the past -in a later timewhich she has never actually experienced, and this very moment concerns a man who has just started reflecting on it. While we focus on the work, Rubens puts us between two mirrors and we find ourselves, together with Rubens’ protagonist, trapped in a perpetual sequence of feedbacks between the past and the future, a moment that lasts forever without ever connecting to its present.

This strong association between memory and vision is reminiscent of a practice that was quite common in 15th-century Europe. Those who had travelled to the Holy Land used to write down their experiences and share them with Christian worshippers who, although they had never visited the Holy Land, they knew the paths of Jerusalem down to the tiniest detail. Whether studying at an academy or at home gazing out of an open window, with one finger holding the page they were reading, those devoted Christians would close their eyes and enter a world shaped by the narrations of the itinerant writers using a raw material that was fluid, but also full of personal and social conventions, prejudices, expectations and memories (which stemmed from the world of reality or their reasoning). I don’t know how many of them did actually make the journey or how the austere material place before them interacted with the one they had imagined; I am sure, however, that they never saw the visit to the Holy Land as a pending issue, because the pilgrimage and the vision of it had ended up fusing into one entity.

We constantly narrate stories about events we’ve experienced, but also about others we’ve chosen to associate ourselves with. Art has been one of the most favourite codes that we have made use of in order to organise the vast material of life, in an attempt to adequately satisfy our need for causality, but it has failed to distant itself from the self-referential aspect of time that opens up –simultaneously– to a recollection of the past and a reflection on the future. This intermediate state of an ever-expanding present takes place, this time, in a place which is old, submerged, and reborn. In a land that may be afraid to engage in a confrontation with

our memories, even for those of us who we have simply dreamed of it while holding a wedding portrait of it in our hands.

Emmanouela Kiriakopoulou

Locus,

loci:

An interdisciplinary approach to the ideal place

Place and space. Interrelated concepts that recur frequently in the history of human intellect, art, and literature. Place and space, sometimes as key drivers for the evolution of the myth and sometimes as the context within which the action takes place.

Place serves multiple functions and that is why it has been subjected to various categorisations. Michel Foucault (1926-1984), in his effort to retrace “a history of space”, argues that in the Middle Ages there was “a hierarchic ensemble of places”. Places were usually divided into two opposite poles; sacred or profane, protected or open, urban or rural, supercelestial as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial.1 As regards contemporary space, the philosopher opines that we may still not have reached the point of a “practical desanctification of space” because “the oppositions that we regard as simple givens […] are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred”. For example the distinction between the space of leisure and that of work, private space and public space, etc.2 As regards this last dipole, Walter Siebel suggests that the public space differs from the private, in that the former is characterized by the “ritual anonymity of a pretentious behaviour that preserves distances” while the latter “is a space of intimacy, physicality and sentimentality”.3 On the other hand, Foucault talks about utopia, which, according to him, is “a site with no real place” distinct from heterotopia because the latter is “an effectively enacted utopia, […] a sort of place that is outside of all places” even though it may be possible to indicate its location in reality.4

In folktales, place plays an essential role in the evolution of the story and heroes’ mindset. In some cases it can be a place “unknown and magical” that “can be reached only after having worn out the soles of forty pairs

1. Michel Foucault, Άλλοι χώροι [Ετεροτοπίες] (Other places [Heterotopias]) in Ετεροτοπίες Και Άλλα Κείμενα [Heterotopias and Other Essays], translated by Tassos Betzelos, Athens, Πλέθρον editions, 2012, p. 256 (hereinafter referred to as “Foucault, 2012”).

2. Foucault, 2012, p. 258.

3. Walter Siebel, «Τα θεμελιώδη χαρακτηριστικά και το μέλλον της Ευρωπαϊκής πόλης» (The fundamental characteristics and the future of the European city) in Αύριο οι Πόλεις [The cities tomorrow], edited by: Pavlos Lefas, Athens, Πλέθρον editions, pp.87-93

4. Foucault, 2012, p. 260

of iron shoes”.5 In other cases, the supernatural beings of the tale inhabit a place of real, identifiable surroundings, such as a deserted location, a nearby hill or meadow “on the outskirts of the community” of the narrator, a cave or a house.6 A frequent motif used in folktales is that of the descent, in which the hero or heroine, using a forty-step staircase, is transported to a palace unlike any other building in the real world.7 If we adopt a psychoanalytic interpretation, this is most definitely a symbol, that of the process of coming of age, but also of the immersion in the subconscious.

Ideal places occupy a prominent place in theatre, literature and painting. An archetypal example is found in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the form of the island where Prospero lives, after having fled from Milan. It is a place inspired by colonialism and by a shipwreck that occurred in 1609, and also by the writings of Thomas More (1478-1535) and Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).8 In literature, Utopia has quite often been identified with Arcadia, as is the case of Philip Sidney’s (1554-1586) pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593). In the art of painting, the most famous example of utopia is the Shepherds of Arcadia (16371638) by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). Ernst Gombrich’s interpretation of the painting is considered a classic: in an idyllic landscape, shepherds read an inscription on a marble tombstone: “Et in Arcadia Ego” (“I am in Arcadia too”). The subject of the sentence is Death who exists even in such an idyllic landscape.9

Another case of an ideal place, which is found in literature and inspired paintings and operas, is that of the magical island of witch Alcina, which is mentioned in Orlando Furioso (1516), the epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533). Like Aeaea and Ogygia, Alcina’s island is a mythical place, a heaven on earth of sensual pleasure and lovemaking, far removed from the burden of civilian duties in an organised society.10 Knight Ruggiero arrives 5 Marianthi Kaplanoglou, Παραμύθι

νέα εποχή [Folktale and Storytelling in Greece: An Old Art in a New Era], Athens, Patakis editions, 2014 (1st edition, by the author herself, 2002), (hereinafter referred to as “Kaplanoglou, 2014”), p. 218.

6. Kaplanoglou, 2014, pp. 218-219

7. Kaplanoglou, 2014, p. 298

8 Marios Ploritis, Ο πολιτικός Σαίξπηρ. Η τραγωδία της εξουσίας [Political Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Power], Athens, Kastaniotis editions, 2002, pp. 300, 305, 307-308

9. Ernst H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, New York, Phaidon, p. 294

10. Ita Mac Carthy, “Alcina’s Island: From Imitation to Innovation in the ‘Orlando furioso’”, Italica, vol. 81, issue 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 325-350 (hereinafter referred to as “Mac Carthy, 2004”)

at Alcina’s island after his fight against the giantess Erfilla.11 However, the island is enchanted and Alcina has transformed her ex-lovers into plants, animals and inanimate objects12. Ruggiero succumbs to Alcina’s charms.13 Later in the poem, the fairy Melissa, hands him the Ring of Reason and this helps him understand that he has been deluding himself.14 Ruggiero leaves for another place, that of Logistilla, in pursuit of intellect and reason.15

Thus, these two places, the palaces of Alcina and Logistilla, constitute two opposing and symbolic poles, that of the spiritual and that of the physical, it is the amor celeste versus the amor vulgare, the heavenly against the earthly in Neoplatonic terms. Of course, the poet does not condemn the impulses and sensuality of the body, instead, he presents it as something natural, given that the main location of the Alcina incident is the locus amoenus, 16 a place of pleasure17 which of course, at least in the case of Alcina’s garden or of Circe, the more appealing it appears at first, the more dangerous turns out to be afterwards.18 In Canto VI, the poet is wondering, “is this heaven or hell? Or this is where Love is born?... There is no trace of white-haired contemplation…[this place] could easily be utopia”. Later in the poem, when talking about the population of the island, he says “One would assume that these girls and boys are posing for a painting of Arcadian theme”. 19

Around 1550, painter Nicolò dell’Abate (ca. 1509/12-1571), inspired by Orlando Furioso, produced a series of eight frescoes in the Palazzo Torfanini, Bologna. One of them depicts the scene of Ruggiero’s arrival at Alcina’s palace. The witch and her entourage welcome the knight who can be seen on horseback on the left side of the fresco. In the middle and

11. Morten Steen Hansen, “Ariosto in the Hands of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Artists” in Teaching the Italian Renaissance Romance Epic, edited by Jo Ann Cavallo, New York, The Modern Language Association of America, 2018, pp. 251-258 (hereinafter referred to as “Steen Hansen, 2018”)

12. Mac Carthy, 2004

13 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: A New Verse translation translated by David R. Slavitt, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, (hereinafter referred to as “Ariosto, 2009”) Canto VΙI, stanza 16, p. 111

14. Mac Carthy, 2004

15. Mac Carthy, 2004

16. Mac Carthy, 2004

17. Eduardo Saccone, “Wood, Garden, ‘locus amoenus’ in Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’”, MLN, vol. 112, issue 1, (January 1997), pp. 1-20 (here in after referred to as “Saccone, 1997”)

18. Saccone, 1997

19. Ariosto, 2009, Canto VI, stanzas 73-74, p. 105

in the background, we see the fight between Ruggiero and Erfilla.20 The lush vegetation, although its main function is to serve as the background that embraces the protagonists and separates the narrative present (arrival at the palace) from the narrative past (duel), at the same time it is suggestive of this place of pleasure and also could be a reminder of Alcina’s transformed ex-lovers. Despite the illusionism of the fresco, the illogical proportions of figures, buildings, and landscape across the painted space lend an air of the uncanny21 and the fairytale-like.

In the course of humanity, places, whether appearing as utopias or heterotopias, shape, activate, or conceal all aspects of the meaning. Each place is a “language” that expresses the very core of the signified, it is a writing that precedes narrative, literary conception, intellectual construction, and visual creation, while at the same time it embraces and espouses the entire content. Place enhances communication and the level of comprehension of viewers or readers.

It is for these reasons that utopia and ideal places, which portray space as an illusion and as something that lacks spatial conventions, and compare it with the real environment of human life and of structured societies, have become common motifs in artistic creation and popular tradition, while they are often the subject of in-depth study by philosophers.

Anastasia Michopoulou, Philologist

Postgraduate student of History of Art, University of Crete

20. Steen Hansen, 2018

21. Steen Hansen, 2018

There Was Land Here Before – Will there be land here anymore?

Florence, November 4, 1966. The Arno river floods and the city centre sinks below the water level which covers everything but the domes and belfries of the city’s Renaissance monuments. At the same time, SUPERSTUDIO is born, an artistic movement that does not construct buildings but seeks to disrupt the architecture and design of the past. A past so insurmountable that ends up confining the present, leading to a dystopian future.

According to Tafuri, the utopian visions of the interwar avant-gardes are nothing more than an idealization of capitalism, a transformation of capitalist rationality into rationality of the form, of architectural design.1 What had been proposed as regards the reconstruction which took place during the post-war decades of the Golden Age, 2 led to the total elimination of the place through the universal domination of technique.

In a playful engagement with space, time and architecture, the Hyper-hypersurface, this everlasting and colourless surface of information and energy, promises to open up new possibilities of habitation based on the interplay between humans and technology. The concepts of space and time are renegotiated due to electronic plugs which connect and disconnect as they see fit. The internet allows for this kind of space-time transcendence. The boundaries between nature and dwelling are unclear and fluctuating, almost non-existent. The complete eradication of borders seems

1. Tafuri, M., 1969, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” [“Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology”], Contropiano, 1, 31-79.

2. Hobsbawm, E., 2010 [1994], Η Εποχή των Άκρων. Ο σύντομος Εικοστός Αιώνας (1914-1991) [The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (1914-1991)], Athens: Θεμέλιο editions.

SUPERSTUDIO, Salvataggi dei centri storici italiani (Italia vostra), Firenze, 1972

to provide the freedom that wanderers, migrants, nomads and travellers long for. There is no hierarchy on the canvas covering the ground; all its pieces appear equal to such an extent that the need to move between places hardly ever surfaces. Freed from property anxiety, the body itself turns into an architectural object a self-sufficient shell that inhabits and is inhabited at the same time.

SUPERSTUDIO, Supersuperficie, 1971-1972

The infinite supply of information and services appears to offer the muchsought variability of the “city” that has been freed from all kinds of structures but, in return, offers constant connectivity. The concept of the city is replaced by the impetus of the hub. Within such a new illusory sense of freedom of movement and choice, disconnection becomes the new challenge.

Land is replaced by a canvas, like the one placed by archaeologists on the ground before digging into its deep history, or the one used by architects before expanding ground surface towards the sky. SUPERSTUDIO’s canvas looks like a motionless sea of mirrors, almost like the present day meadows of photovoltaic panels which, accompanied by wind turbines, have come to defend the smooth relationship between man and the environment. In the same vein, cars are gradually becoming “eco-friendly” until

SUPERSTUDIO, Monumento Continuo, 1969-1970

they cease to exist. Ultra-luxurious smart cities are here to solve housing problems caused by overpopulation and involuntary displacement.3 In the “sustainable” cities of the future, culture is replaced by tourism, entertainment by leisure, education by lifelong learning, medicine by biotechnology. Our digestive tract will gradually get used to the intake of new forms of bio food so that humanity will eventually help release as less methane as possible into the atmosphere.

Technological utopias, utterly dystopian. Religion is dead. Long live science!

The new moment is the image of the moment, the one that is automatically transmitted by the hub to the entire planet and beyond. Through the interplanetary highway human civilization expands into the universe.

Debating with utopia seems inevitable. According to Koolhaas, without reference to utopia the work of the architect cannot have any real value, yet intertwined with utopia it will be found complicit in the commission of lesser or greater crimes. 4

Is there a measure on earth?

There is none. Because what we signify when we say “on earth” exists only insofar as man dwells on earth and, in dwelling, he lets the earth be as earth.5

3. https://www.neom.com/en-us/about

4. Koolhaas, R., 2003, Content. Köln: Taschen, 393.

5.Heidegger, M. 1971 [1951], “…Poetically man dwells…”, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Hofstadter). New York,: Harper & Row, 227

SUPERSTUDIO, L’ architettura interplanetaria, Autostrada Terra-Luna, 1970-1971

Christina Papoulia

Hydrophilic and ammophile

1904, Elafonisos

In 1904, the geologist Fokion Negris was the first to observe the architectural remains of the submerged settlement of Pavlopetri in Elafonisos. The settlement dates from 2,800 BC. The hydrophilic Fokionas had found his own Atlantis. His observations were confirmed only after a visit by the oceanographer Nicholas Flemming to the area years later. In 1967, Flemming, in an attempt to study sea level changes in the Aegean, rediscovered the ruins of the prehistoric settlement. In collaboration with Angelos Delivorias from Sparta’s Archaeological Authority, he mapped perhaps the oldest sunken city.

1996, Elafonisos

That summer was different from the others. Amongst the others but also apart from them. I spent two and a half hours in the back seat tangled between floral skirts. I do not remember if I was dizzy in the spiral streets or if the ferry was shaking. But I remember the little, round, green watermelon when we got out of the big, white house. It was so small I could hold it in my arms. Next to it was another: disemboweled, glittering, red with black seeds.

I put on my swimsuit and pulled my curly hair into a bun in the hope that it would not get tangled and my grandmother would not pull it as tight as my mom’s braids. Since then, she said, she had a permanent headache, and I was afraid that maybe the same thing would happen to me. If the wind didn’t tangle them, the water would anyway. I had to rule out all possibilities.

Immediately after, we went down to the beach and I fell onto the sand to make little angels like they did in the movies in the snow. The sand made me golden and salty, almost crunchy, after a while under the sun. For the first time I had a sense of self-enjoyment. Since then, I have become a sand lover, an “ammophile”. I caressed the dunes that swung slowly with the wind and they in turn tenderly caressed me back.

1928, Fokionos Negri

Fokionos Negri was built on the Levidi stream that started from Turk-

ovounia. The stream separated the houses creating a “rive gauche - rive droite” situation that ended in a wooden bridge in Patission. The street was designed by the architect Vassilis Tsagris with poplars and fountains. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Great Fountain in Kypseli was a meeting point for the “neroulades”, the water sellers during the frequent periods of drought that afflicted Athens. In 1928, the name Fokionos Negri was given to the hydrophilic road.

2022, Fokionos Negri

Noon, fifth floor, large glass panel. To cool off, in the face of the water, I went down to the fountain with the swimmer entitled “Daughter in Ecstasy” by the sculptor Michalis Tombros. The bather is located between ivy and plane trees, surrendered to the eyes of passers-by.

For the first time I felt at home in Athens thanks to this fountain. After all, whenever we talk, we end up at my first fountain. Every fountain I come across refers to that.

My mom used to say it had goldfish when she was little. That’s why they said they went to “psarakia”: to the fish and not to the fountain. I didn’t see them, but I liked to watch the water jumping happily and continuously. This perpetual renewal of water was for me a pleasure, an Other pleasure, a hydrophilic one.

When I returned, the moving boxes were still there. Somewhere inside me I hoped they were gone. They would be tired of waiting for me to open them, to tame my fears, to settle my anger, to cool off from the heat. They would just be gone.

I started with the oldest box. The wounds had become friendly ghosts. In the polaroid of 1996, you are in the water and I am sitting on the dune, still trying to make perfect little angels. You are hydrophilic, I am ammophile. You were tall and handsome. She was left out of the plan. She had a big birthmark on her cheek. A mother who wanted something and did not get it. A sign of an Other desire. I tried to talk to you on the phone, I was on 53rd, just before 5th Avenue and a wall fountain appeared in front of me. You did not answer anymore and I felt my eyes wet, hydrophilic.

2022, Elafonisos

Veloxina

I saw the song “Veloxina” in my sleep, just the word “veloxina” to be precise, nothing else, just a single word, I woke up and googled it half-asleep on my mobile, it seems that “veloxina” is the name given to a large moth; being the middle of the night I was not lucid enough to search for more information so I fell back asleep, kept on dreaming of the same word, came up with the lyrics and a melody in my sleep but in the morning, when I woke up, the melody was gone.

Veloxina, silent moth My anger and sloth

The video lasts two seconds and shows the animal running, hunched over, its fisted hands hitting the ground. There is no clear indication of the actual location of the image. The parked cars, the blurry houses in the background, and the sparse vegetation in this raw footage could be found in any city; this could be Hanover, Paris or London. The animal itself is the locus. On the world map placed outside the animal’s cage in the zoo, on which –for educational purposes– its natural habitat in Africa is highlighted red, as the animal runs away, suddenly, a brand new dot, a new red habitat appears, there in Spata, amongst parked cars, blurry houses and sparse vegetation, and should the animal kept running, the red dot would spread, grow, and would occupy Spata, Mesogeia, and Attica. In a moment, the animal will fall dead from the bullets and the dot will disappear, the map will resume its original state, namely a map identical to those placed outside similar cages in Hanover, Paris, London, Prague, Rome that reveal the brutality of animal biopolitics: “this would be the place where

the animal would live, if it was not imprisoned, here and now, before your eyes, to protect itself from death and annihilation that would threaten it if it lived there”. The animal is the locus and it is running, hunched over and with fisted hands, without looking back, feeling no fear; in a moment it will fall dead from the bullets.

Are only to blame

For this time around I’ll burn to your flame

She gave me a call a month after our last talk. She had seen a dead cat and she remembered me. The cat had been run over and was lying dead on the road. She told me that she got out of the car, wrapped the cat in a piece of cloth she found in the trunk, took it in her arms, its body was still warm, she murmured some words of farewell and left it in a bin, so that it wouldn’t get squashed on the asphalt. An anxious flutter until it rests with folded wings on a fold of the curtain. I was still angry with her from our last encounter and I couldn’t understand why she had so tenderly offered me her grief as a present. Perhaps if I had been brave enough to stand beside her and listen to her farewell, the lifeless cat would have become our common body of intimacy, perhaps it would have united us more than our own bodies did the few times we met.

Veloxina, silent pest

Your flutter’s a

fest

The dogs were barking and kept on following us. We were walking in the then empty park that surrounds the Dromokaiteio psychiatric hospital, the well-kempt flower beds featured colourful wooden signs reminiscent of a Montessori elementary school, some windows in the buildings were iron-barred and in a dump by the forest, there were white metal hospital beds –some with bars– that had been stacked up, worn-out wheeled office chairs, old radiators that had turned yellowish. While we were going on an excursion, her car broke down on the Highway, a stone’s throw away from the entrance of the psychiatric hospital; the engine had overheated and while waiting for it to cool down we took a walk in the hospital premises. We got asked for smokes and were given instructions by an inmate who appeared to have stepped out of a book by Kostas Varnalis. Insects have been the object of a moral classification in myths, allegories, and metaphors. In this context, moths have been related to anthropomorphism; they are punished because they are drawn to the flamboyant life, they are burned because they seek pleasures that do not fit into their nature. A narrative of control which targets class and gender, totally unsuitable for

such an indolent and delicate creature which, of all insects, gives me the impression that it lives the most exciting part of its life while still a nymph and its final transformation finds it already old and exhausted. The dogs were barking, they circled us and went away only to return once again, changing positions and baring their teeth. The first one had appeared as we were passing by the hospital ovens and growled at us from afar. Then, as we kept on walking, more dogs appeared; they were large, well-fed, and, of course, territorial. The precarious and fragile balance between us had collapsed. I could feel her disdain as I unconsciously contorted my body into funny and awkward positions trying to maintain my composure, turning increasingly nervous as I could sense the imminent attack by the animals. She looked me in contempt and told me “I can smell your fear from where I am”.

I’m longing the feeling

To dread from the ground

Your short life on the ceiling

Minutes after I had fallen asleep, I was woken up by her caresses. In my sleep, I could feel her kisses, her fingertips on my breast, on my chest, in my mouth; I could feel her twitching her waist, wrapping her legs around my knees and squeezing them; I could taste her sweaty skin. The summer heat was stifling; when we entered her house she apologized and left for a couple of minutes in order to clean the bathroom; the spontaneous shyness of people who live alone makes them wanting to protect their odours, stains, and what their bodies leave behind against the intrusive gaze of a person who is still a stranger. We then sat on the porch and continued drinking; our conversation, just like the entire evening, never actually began, it was full of pauses and leaps, I was looking at the deformed bunion on her foot and the moles on her shoulder, I tried to kiss her again, she pulled away only to wake me up a bit later when I had fallen asleep with her fingers in my mouth. In springtime the white cocoons hatch and long strings of caterpillars crawl around the trunks of the pine trees, along the roads or up the walls. Veloxina was a song for it; there was no desire or pleasure, just an enchanted attraction to its furry body, its fragile wings with eyespots on their axis of symmetry, its transformation. The girl on the ceiling. Her body sinking into the water. The insect that spends years as a nymph and then burns itself for a few weeks under the light.

Veloxina, former caterpillar, Always a nymph and sometimes a pillar

The animal does not escape. The animal returns. It runs –robust, sober,

its head bowed– between parked cars, sparse vegetation and houses in the background. Chimpanzees born in Hanover, tapirs who reached their adulthood in Saigon or king cobras hatched from eggs in Rome travel each day from one city to another, airplanes filled with cages and containers transport sedated animals as part of a routine transaction, in an economy that claims to protect what soon will be gone forever. An eight-euro ticket for an ark that makes us feel like provisional and merciful Noahs. This false sense that we are in control. Duh. The girl who silently haunted my harsh winter sent me, while I was writing this text, the video of the animal rushing –sober and strong– to its death, to a new locus that will not exist. But I never opened her message.

To a Niña or Pinta or a family wreck

Trying to stay sound Or become an insect.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4knuEhXxWQPErCDtuhIFY8?si=dddaf7798c4f4214

Theophilos Tramboulis

E pur si muove1 : out-of-place narratives and heterotopias

Since Galileo Galilei dismissed the theory of geocentricism with the phrase “and yet it moves”, much ink has been spilled. The Roman Catholic Church of the Renaissance argued that Galileo’s idea was átopos, that is, out of place, absurd, foul; something that defied reason. This word contains the word tópos (place) in both Greek and French (dèplace) and describes the ineffability of things or feelings that are rarely experienced, that are extraordinary, original and genuine in the strictest sense of the word.

Lately, I have been feeling increasingly and inexplicably perplexed. It is like a slight sting, a momentary unease. As if I have experienced the same moment of the present in another time. I was trying to decipher this feeling, when I realized that there is actually a name for it: promnesia. It is the feeling we get that a situation experienced in the present has been repeated in the exact same way at a past moment in the same or different place. Commonly known as déjà vu, this “already seen” event may be accompanied by a sense of the odd, uncanny, dreamlike or hallucinatory even though the certainty that the same experience has occurred in the past could be strong. To this day, three forms of promnesia have been identified: déjà vécu which means “I have experienced this before” and is the most common form of promnesia, déjà senti which means “I have felt this before” and is an exclusively emotional state and, finally, déjà visité whose meaning is “I have visited this again” and is the only form of promnesia that has specific spatial and geographical dimensions, unlike the two previous ones which, mostly or exclusively, are linked to feelings.

Marco Polo, in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, recounts to Kublai Khan, emperor of the Tartars, his travels to imaginary cities, cities that have never existed in our common present but in a timeless time. These are cities that turn into parallel places and constitute and put together a set of things: memories, desires, trajectories, destinies, exchanges and language signs. As Marco Polo’s narration of these out-of-place places progresses, Kublai Khan interrupts him and says: “I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.” Using a rather figurative language, Marco Polo replies: “Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves. At the moment when I concentrate 1. “And yet it moves”, the phrase that caused a lot of controversy in the 17th century and led to the condemnation of Galileo Galilei, while dismissing the established theory of geocentricism.

and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold” 2 In this case, the narration of the Venetian explorer can be seen as a narration of other places, sometimes real ones, which question the existing ones.

In 1967, five years before Calvino wrote Invisible Cities, Michel Foucault had written about already existing places of normality that include other places. He called these places heterotopias (other places). Heterotopias represent a kind of questioning – mythical or real – of the space in which we live. They have the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible. According to Foucault, the oldest example of heterotopias, in the form of contradictory emplacements, is the garden: “One should not forget that the garden, an astonishing creation now thousands of years old, had in the Orient very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space whose rectangular interior was supposed to bring together four parts representing the four parts of the world, and at its centre there was a space more sacred than the others, that was like an umbilicus, the navel of the world (the water fountain was there). And all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to be distributed in that space, within this sort of microcosm”. For Foucault, the formations in the gardens evoke the decorative patterns of rugs, which, initially, were representations of gardens. “The garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that is mobile across space”. Foucault concludes that “the garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been, since the dawn of antiquity, a sort of blissful and universalizing heterotopia”. 3

From the garden of Kublai Khan to that of Michel Foucault, the earth becomes a ground of conflicts and contradictions throughout time, the space of our daydreams, where our lives erode or flourish, the space in which we live and from which we want to escape and move to other places which, ideally, are more compatible and more welcoming. In the books on American history, there is a bizarre description of the years of the Great Depression, known as the Dust Bowl. During the 1930s, a large area of land ranging from Colorado to Kansas and Oklahoma was severely affected by an eight-year drought accompanied by persistent water shortages,

2. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Kastaniotis editions, 2004, p.131

3. Michel Foucault, Ετεροτοπίες Και Άλλα Κείμενα [Heterotopias and Other Essays], Πλέθρον editions, 2012, pp.264-265

soil erosion and severe dust storms. In what was once fertile land, 100 million acres of farmland were destroyed, resulting in a massive ecological disaster and the displacement of millions of families. At present, if you fly over these areas, you see an interesting picture. In the same place where, in the past and for several years, sandstorms destroyed arable land, now there are green geometric patterns, which we could easily characterise as contemporary examples of land art. These elaborate formations, which are perceived only from high above, owe their well-defined geometry to an irrigation system that operates on a circular axis supplying water to large areas of land. This central-pivot irrigation system4 and the green circular plains saved the local population from starvation and helped preserve an entire way of life that would have literally perished under the effect of the drought of the 1930s and 1940s.

The geometric patterns of the American farmlands reflect another example of reshaping our perception of place and its spatial dimensions, that of land art. In art history, land art, as mentioned above, appeared in the 1960s as a cause-and-effect relationship in an effort to contradict and challenge the commodification of art that was becoming increasingly ev4. Also known as central-pivot irrigation..

Sandstorm in Hooker, Oklahoma, 4 June 1937, credits: Oklahoma Historical Society

Central-pivot irrigation in San Luis valley, Colorado

ident. By producing works that were almost impossible to exhibit in a museum or an art gallery, and whose sheer size negated the portability of traditional sculpture, artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria, Ana Mendieta, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, among others, rendered the natural landscape the ideal place for highlighting concepts such as fragility and ephemerality, while paving the way for what was later called “environmental consciousness”.

The sensory perception of space by the conscious and the unconscious, Marco Polo’s imaginary narrations and Foucault’s heterotopias, and the natural phenomenon of the Dust Bowl which led to the emergence of an early environmental awareness through the fragile yet imposing nature of land art indicate that the place, nature, the garden and every other manifestation of spatiality serve as a field of conflict and reflection. Space, material or imaginary, as defined by each of us, will always be a potential field of imposition and liberation.

Vicky Tsirou

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 © Holt Smithson Foundation

Be quiet now and wait. It may be that the ocean one, the one we desire so to move into and become, desires us out here on land a little longer, going our sundry roads to the shore.

-Rumi

I get up after several days lying flat. I am greeted greeted by a sudden dizziness which I pretend I can get rid of by squinting my eyes shut and holding my head with one hand. My hair, bent by the salt, has turned into tamarinds. The strong wind is trying fiercely to detangle my curls. For a moment I lose my balance and take a small step back. I wonder whether my body wants to let itself drift away and it is I that prevents it from doing so or it is the other way around. Finally I refuse to give in and manage to stay upright. I stretch my arms up towards the sky to make room for my ribs. I turn into a lightning rod that is slowly being swallowed by the sand. Upon exhaling, a primal sound breaks out from somewhere deep within me and startles me. For a moment I feel palaeolithic . I lift my head up and let my arms fall down hard. I direct my fingers to caress my thighs, a reencounter of my upper and lower limbs. I can see my mind searching desperately for familiar ways to prevent the cancellation. I won’t give it a free ride.

I look left to see it in the distance. It’s still there; it seems it has always been there before everything else. Disproportionate, uncompromising and irreproachable. It seems such an unlikely combination that it makes you feel special just for having found it. I examine it from top to bottom. A continuous flow of welcoming curves leading to protruding ledges and back again to the top. There, at the top, the shining copestone, an unblemished source of light with the confidence of a lighthouse. I don’t dare to smile at it, for fear of seeming little. After all, it never ceases looking straight ahead, motionless, as if challenging the wind to a duel. I am thinking it’s an even fight. I don’t see it ending anytime soon.

I walk with difficulty towards the sea. With each step the ground recedes but never abandons me. The more I move forward the wetter the sand gets and stops sucking me in. It doesn’t need me anymore. White foam appears before my eyes for the first time and immediately hides itself from me with girlish playfulness. I take the first step into the water and I immediately get shivers up and down my spine. I automatically rise to my

tiptoes to prolong my surrender. I slowly go deeper still not allowing the sea to reach my belly. I sneak a look at it to see if it’s looking at me. It remains focused on its goal and I am left alone. I dive in and the sigh emerges once again by its own volition. I swim clumsily, yet resolutely, to warm up as fast as I can. I must look very confident about where I’m going. A good while later I look back at the shore. Feeling pleased by the distance, as if the land has granted me permission, I turn on my back and spread my arms to my sides. With my ears below the sea level I look at the sky. I have arrived. It’s the moment I return to the water and everything makes sense.

“Come”, I hear a whisper. I try to see who’s calling me. Not a soul around. Terrified, I roll around as if I’ve just woken up from a dream about falling down a flight of stairs. “Come closer”, the whisper is getting louder as if it is getting closer. I turn to look at it. It continues –steadfast– to compete against the wind, just as I had left it. It doesn’t seem to have noticed my unease. I start swimming towards it until it grows bigger; I want to see its entire figure and realise whether the whisper is coming from it or not. The sea current embraces me and I swim harder to get out of it. I feel my heart swelling up. I must get to the rock so I don’t lose my mind. I look at the shore once again and I realise that no matter how much I move my hands, I remain still. “I’m waiting for you” says the rock in a reassuring tone. “I’m coming”.

Evita Tsokanta Anafi, 2022

Land is a line that divides the surface on which I draw. Sometimes brown like the soil and sometimes green like fresh grass. Above the line, at the centre of the page: my family and I, with dots for eyes and curved lines for smiles. Nature always surrounds us. To our left and right, there are fruit-bearing orange trees, oversized flowers, bees, kittens, and elephants. Underneath hide roots, worms and a hare’s burrow.

My childhood compositions of harmonious coexistence attempt to find balance on a marker’s faded lines.

At the back, there is a small square house with a triangular roof and a smoking chimney. The apartment on the second floor, Margarita bakery and a series of streets leading to the small park by the creek. This was my world. Not once had it occurred to me that this place stood bare without man-made constructions, that the soil had known an infinite number of organisms, before it was swallowed by the tar of the road.

Large reptiles disappear, leaving huge bones behind. The Earth trembles, opens up and swallows them. A she-wolf nurses her young in a pine tree’s shade, whose roots are reaching for the Earth’s core.

We don’t live here anymore.

Today, I’m wandering around the old neighbourhood on a 360° photographic map. It hasn’t changed much. Digitalisation constantly gives birth to new places, web-sites and cyber-spaces. I can escape from a mundane life and find myself elsewhere - somewhere unknown, faraway and imaginary.

I play video games simulating our historical trajectory. I start with a handful of people. I have them gather fruit, hunt animals, cut down trees, collect rocks and minerals. I shape and transform the environment according to my needs. I dig, change river courses, construct buildings and cities, and constantly expand. But coded evolution dictates violence. At the end of the day, I conquer or am conquered. Either by way of attack or defence, battles with neighbouring peoples begin. The land’s pixels are thirsty for blood.

I recently borrowed the eyes of a much-travelled fox and ran carefree through 3D forests with HD graphics.

The Earth belongs to us along with everything it produces. The line returns

to virtually divide the land into fields and states. The battles never stop. Wars and inheritance feuds. Public land versus privatisation. Our interests are deeply rooted; they bind us by force to the ground.

A seagull flies in the clouds defying imaginary borders. I wanted to be a citizen of the Earth.

My imagination fashions a place out of material from dreams. Heaven wasn’t built with bricks. All those who succumbed under the weight of our world live here in unison. There are many narratives but no dominant one. We do not shout in the streets about power, injustice and borders, because, quite simply, they never existed. We don’t talk conspiratorially about a cyclical history that stopped making sense long ago. We are neither the reason that the ground is simmering nor that it is slowly sinking into the sea. The Earth never belonged to anyone. And we are safe.

Babies are born from the roots of trees and hens feed their mouths. The world is a drawing.

I empty myself. I let go of my thoughts and daydreams. I step on the ground. I can see the landscape clearly even if only for a moment. It hums and opens itself up to me. It breathes life into dialogues we once had. It awakens memories of fleeting sensations.

I stray away from my friends and walk alone. I hide behind a sand dune and hunched down I whisper “Why?” … maybe you’ll hear me.

I frantically dig in the wet and cold soil, to enclose you. Brown spots adorn my knees.

During the salty seaside licks, my eyes see only blurred flesh and pebbles.

I lie on crushed seashells and look towards the road. I am waiting to see you pass.

Stefanos Yiannoulis

Things pass through us with black lines and a persistent hum they pass with black lines through us

The place closes quietly with black lines it closes quietly behind us with black lines the place

Vassilis Mantzoukis, The place closes

picture of Paula Allen, from the collection of Flowers in the Desert : The Search for Chile’s Disappeared

They say there was a place here; there is a place. There is always a place.

According to Yi-Fu Tuan, the Chinese geographer, place is more than a mere cartographical location as it lives in the experience and consciousness of people who render meaning to it. It is a centre of felt value where biological needs, such as those for food, water, rest, and procreation are satisfied. He sees place as an organised world of meanings which, therefore, is essentially a fixed concept. Tuan argues that if we see the world as a process, as something that is constantly changing, we will not be able to develop any sense of place. Moreover, if we see space as a framework that allows for movement, then place is a pause. That is why space is associated with freedom and place with security. Thus, every pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.

So, there is this fleeting place – a place in constant motion. That is, the people who move from one place to another. Refugees, for instance. In

Koine (common) Greek, a refugee [prósfiγas] is a person who seeks protection or is under protection; a person in search of a different destiny, to a place beyond the borders that delimit a world which is grim and unbearable, to the place beyond. And, as long as people change place, places, landscapes, there is a single place they always carry within. (So, this is how a place leaves, how it travels in the luggage of the people who defined it – the people it defined. This is how it never closes.) People are always defined by a single place; that is where they always belong. That is why the strongest bond that characterises someone who leaves their place is not with the place of relocation – and it never will be. Their place will always be the one they – perhaps forever – left behind. When elsewhere, they become a stranger in this elsewhere, it is the old place that everyone recognises. We say, “Let them go back to their country to fight”. How come we never ask them to fight in our country, here, to fight for us? Why do we deprive them of a place that could become their place?

But there is also that place that stands still, heavier than its land – as if it was made to cover life, people, the other places. I’m talking about places that are completely motionless, that hide springs from very deep beneath them. About people who fought, that’s why they always stayed in their country. People who were persecuted – by their own country. People who became their own place and their place has now become everything they once were. Thousands of homeless bones, without a place, without a sepulchre, banished from their bodies and from every map. Who could know where to dig to find water or a relative? There was definitely land here, there were people. An invisible geography that the place – the Atacama Desert, an area almost as large as our own country – has buried in stories and tears. Five decades have passed and they are still digging there, still looking for water and relatives. This place, quietly, has closed the other places, the people, the wars, no refugees, no life elsewhere, no strangers, nothing. They say that in this desert, astronomers seek for answers to the history of the universe and Chilean women still search for their loved ones. They throw carnations in the air, to the sky, because they have no other place to place them. They still say the names, in hope of finding water –names that are familiar to us, such as Manuel, Carlos, Bernardino, Rosario, Jose, Milton, Roberto, Luis.

They say that somewhere in this desert, thousands of years ago – before the pharaohs – the Chinchorro culture flourished. In this “driest place on Earth”, where biology forbids any form of life, people actually lived. They say that they did not bury the dead but turned them into mummies and kept them forever in the family, having the duty to carry them whenever they moved to another place. Somewhere in this desert, there is also a

place known as Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) because of the moonlike rock formations carved by time and wind. In another place within this desert, rocks are said to resemble those of planet Mars. There are places in the Atacama that have not seen a single drop of rain for a century. We cannot even dare to imagine what kind of place is the Atacama, not if we apply our criteria as regards life; a desert that exists only to hide what was life once. To test vehicles for other planets. To make you think you have travelled to the moon. To allow for women to throw carnations in the air, saying the names of their loved ones. To allow for the dead to stand next to the living, as if they were alive forever.

Costis Zouliatis

Alexis Fidetzis, Bela Lugosi and the Aegean book of horrors, 2022 Pencil on paper (Fabriano 220g.), 60 x 60 cm. each.

Limited publication the Aegean book of horrors, edition of five.

Fotini Kalle Hide and Seek, 2022 Video-performance, camera and video editing: Rena Tsaggaiou

Dionisis Kavalieratos, Noah’s Ark #1, 2013 Pencil on paper, 39 x 48 cm.

courtesy of the artist and Bernier / Eliades gallery.

Panagiotis Kefalas

Untitled, 2022

Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.

Ilektra Maipa Mountain VI, 2022

Digital collage, inkjet print on hahnemühle photo rag metallic paper, 340 gsm, 28 x 14,94 cm.

Mountain XI, 2022

Digital collage, inkjet print on hahnemühle photo rag metallic paper, 340 gsm, 28 x 14,68 cm.

Mountain V, 2022

Digital collage, inkjet print on hahnemühle photo rag metallic paper, 340 gsm, 28 x 15,96 εκ.

Persephone Nikolakopoulou, 5 of April, 2022 Oil, plaster and plastic glove on canvas, 160 x 200 cm.

Poka-Yio

History is anal, 2022 Oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm.

Dimitris Rentoumis Foundation, 2016 2 drawings, graphite and ink on paper, 380 x 150 cm. courtesy of Crux Galerie

Nana Sachini

Canals of breathing, 2013 Plaster, cardboard, food color, mirror, cinnamon sticks, polystyrene, expanding foam, bricks, acrylic color. 110 x 60 x 72 cm.

Nana Seferli Gate, 2020 watercolor on paper, 35 x 25 cm.

Eva Stefani Mouth, 2019 3.44΄, editing Giorgos Kravvaritis, First screened at the Greek Pavillon, Biennale di Venezia 2019 along with the work of fellow artists Zafos Xagoraris, Panos Charalampous.

x 64

Sasha Streshna Night Walk, 2019 Oil on canvas, 82

cm. courtesy of Ilias Papailiakis.

Garden Thief Autopoiesis, 2022 In situ installation, Variable dimensions.

Kleopatra Tsali Fereikos, 2021 Video, 5.02΄, 3d character design: Alexis Karantanas Music: Nikos Antonopoulos

Manos Tsichlis Balthazar, 2022 Veneer, graphite, cartboard, bronze, rope, 115 x 110 x 75 cm.

VASKOS ( Vasilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis) Cones and Stone from the series It Takes Two to Tango, 2022 Print on paper, 50 x 70 cm. each.

Marina Velisioti

Lake Luise, 2014 Yarns on postcard, 12 x 20 cm.

Ben my Chree, 2014 Yarns on postcard, 12 x 20 cm.

Birdseye view, 2014 Yarns on postcard, 12 x 20 cm.

Christos Venetis, Anemic Archives, 2013 Pencils on book covers, 20,5 x 31 cm.

3 137 (Paky Vlassopoulou, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Kosmoas Nikolaou) & Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik CO3(6)5, 2022

Video, digitized 16mm film, 4’13 ( in loop), Filmographer: Daphné Hérétakis

Performer: Eva Vlassopoulou Sound Designer: Giotis Paraskevaidis CO3(6)5 was realized within the framework of STUDIOTOPIA program at Onassis Stegi with the support of the ‘Creative Europe of the European Union’.

Ammophila Non-Profit consists of visual artists: Evi Roumani, Panagiotis Kefalas and Persefoni Nikolakopoulou and is a non-profit organization that aims to promote artistic research and to create a wide network of artists, curators, theorists and cultural practitioners, thus allowing the public to relate to contemporary art and artists in a climate of proximity and active participation.

ammophila is an annual contemporary art exhibition taking place in Elafonisos island, Lakonia. The exhibition aims to function as a living organism that constantly expands and at the same time promotes contemporary artistic creation. The exhibition is open to all artistic practice (painting, sculpture, installation, video art, performance, lectures etc.) and encourages experimental approaches in a creative context. ammophila is an invitation to meet, discourse, exchange views between artists, writers and the public in an idyllic location whilst recreating its character. As implied by its name, ammophila aspires to establish contemporary art discourse in a new site, under new circumstances that are always reconfigured and expanding.

* ammophila takes its name from a genus of plants with most common amongs species, ammophila arenaria. It grows from a network of thick rhizomes which give it a sturdy anchor in its sand substrate and allow it to spread upward as sand accumulates. The rhizomes tolerate submersion in sea water and can break off an float in the currents to establish the grass at new sites. As implied by its name, ammophila aspires to establish contemporary art discourse in a new site, under new circumstances that are always reconfigured and expanding.

The catalogue is printed in 100 copies at Ektipotiki Axion, Gadilon 9-11, 111 42, Athens, October 2022.