DORA ECONOMOU New Works (2019-2020)
DORA ECONOMOU
Pangrams and Slogans 12 February – 14 March 2020 @ Radio Athènes A pangram (Greek: παν γράμμα, pan gramma, “every letter”) or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram, accessed: 20.1.20, 2:16 pm) A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan, political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines a slogan as “a short and striking or memorable phrase used in advertising.”[1] A slogan usually has the attributes of being memorable, very concise and appealing to the audience. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slogan, accessed: 22.1.20, 11:46 am). Pangrams and Slogans opens almost a year to the day we visited the Epigraphic Museum of Athens with Dora Economou along with other artists and curators at the invitation of Art Athina. They wanted to organize a group exhibition that would run parallel to the 2019 edition of the fair in which contemporary artists would respond to the museum’s impressive collection of inscriptions from the eight century BC to the Late Roman period, mostly in Greece. After a captivating walkthrough with archeologist Irene Choremi in the rooms of this especially elegant museum, we sat with Dora at the café of the Archaeological Museum, a few steps away, to discuss what she might want to show next to displays of inscribed slabs of marble or stone and clay fragments recording daily life in ancient Greece, from cost-accounts of the construction of the Parthenon, to carved notes such as “meet you at dusk” (the equivalent of text-messages). Dora identifies herself as a sculptor, though she has made several detailed, large-scale drawings, is an avid photographer still enjoying analog processes, and a gifted writer, in both English and Greek. She proposed to make drawings of pangrams, in the two languages she has excellent command of, Greek and English and add French with a little help from google translate. She would also design an original typeface for each language. I didn’t know much about pangrams so she pulled out her phone and showed me examples, there are hundreds of them online in practically every language, they are ready-made phrases, authors unknown except in rare cases. In the spring of 2019 we were told the Epigraphic Museum project had been cancelled. Dora had already selected the most amusing, absurd, sparkling phrases and finished six of the eight drawings. We decided to show them at Radio Athènes instead. In the meantime she was also playing around with catchy phrases from tv commercials. Some were from the eighties —I think not a single person in Greece who lived in a household with a television receiver will fail to recognize them. These ad’s legacy survived in following decades. Her Slogans idea somehow sprung from her long-standing fascination with Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Good God of Manhattan (1958), a radio play about the impossibility of love in the social order, conflicting discourses at the apex of the Cold War, and the constant bombardment of indoctrinating slogans through the mass media. To keep it symmetrical, Dora used slogans from ad campaigns in Greek, French and English to create what you might call concrete poetry, or Dadaist poetry, or a form of linguistic conceptualism with a sense of humour, and inscribed them on the Radio Athènes walls using her customized typefaces.
Bonjour Tristesse (2019), 3 stoneware line drawings mounted on the wall. Each drawing was made by coiling high-fire, off-white stoneware clay flat on graph paper. The designs were based on live drawings of fall leaves. Green-blue stain was keneaded in the clay body to reference the natural colour of leaves and steel. So as to achieve even coils, the material was passed through an 8mm-hole extruder. Depending on the stain ratio, both the intensity of colour and the plasticity of the material changed. The higher ratio bunch came out dark but feeble like rusted metal. The coils were arranged considering the degradations of colour and consistency. When clay became leather-hard, the coils were connected using sludge. The connections were left raw-looking to reference welding. The stonewarew were fired to 1300 C to make them strong enough to be hung on a nail. The work is inspired by Art Nouveau metal balcony and window railings. Although most surviving early 20th C public architecture in Athens is classically inspired, there are many examples of an “indigenous� art nouveau style characterised by its decorative metal work. I aimed to revisit this traditional craft, focus on its aesthetic value and locality, disengage it from its structural objective and recreate the visual effect of the naturalistic metal artwork details using stoneware. I referenced a historical style whose objective was to break down the traditional distinction between fine and applied arts and introduced a literary reference in the title, investigating whether the visual arts united could compensate for the perceptive gap in translation between different languages and cultures.
Last Spring, I made a long trip to the East. First I visited Thailand where my brother currently lives and works, I went to Cambodia to see the Angkor temples, then I passed on to Japan and crossed the country by train from South to North. It was my second time in Japan, I had visited Tokyo and Kyoto in Spring 2016, looked for Mount Fuji and saw Rock Gardens. I had done no homework, didn’t have a smart phone and spent part of the journey looking for the way out of a metro station. This time, I prepared the trip the way I’d prepare one of my art works. I made a list with references and destinations, the underlying theme being the Volcano, literally or metaphorically. (For example, I highlighted the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok which houses the statue of the deity with the four faces that answers prayers and where a bomb exploded in 2015 killing and injuring many, the 1000 origami crane tribute at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Usuki stone Buddhas carved from soft volcanic rock from nearby Mt Aso, the sun rising from the Pacific, etc.). I compared and combined train and plane itineraries, google maps forecasts, tripadvisor tips, booking.com offers, drew points, connected them together and laid out a route on a piece of paper. Then I set out to test it. I brought with me my father’s analogue camera (which he had bought in Japan in 1970, when he visited the World Exposition in Osaka) and shot slides of the sights. During my first trip to Japan, I had briefly met some people whom I befriended on Instagram. On my recent trip, I sometimes arrived to a place I had seen a post of earlier that day. Due to the very tight, almost impossible, schedule I had devised for myself on paper, I would often reach my destination after closing time, on the verge of darkness. In Kamakura, I only got to shoot an under-lit slide of the Great Buddha, his head protruding over the closed gate. But having liked a proper image of the statue posted by someone I follow a few hours earlier made me feel as if I had seen him myself. I quote from Lefcadio Hearn’s Of A Mirror And A Bell (Kwaidan 1904): “Now there are queer old Japanese beliefs in the magical efficacy of a certain mental operation implied, though not described, by the verb nazoraëru. The word itself cannot be adequately rendered by any English word. Common meanings of nazoraëru, according to dictionaries, are ‘to imitate’, ‘to compare’, ‘to liken’; but the esoteric meaning is to substitute, in imagination, one object or action for another, so as to bring about some magical or miraculous result.” Dora Economou, April 2019
“It’s the time of year the Municipality trim the tops of the city trees and collect the branches in neat bundles on the side walks. These bundles make me think of a scene from Around the World In 80 Days when Passepartout jumps into the fire and rescues the Indian Princess whom they are about to burn alive together with her diseased husband. I must admit I’ve never read any of Vern’s books (I believe it’s one of these things you either do in good time or you don’t). But I’m familiar with the stories through animated and feature films. However, the other day I downloaded a pdf of the book and leafed through it. I found a lot of interesting references that somehow connect to my recent visits to the V&A, the Louvre, the British Museum, etc. (and great titles such as the title of chapter 14: In Which Phileas Fogg Descends The Whole Length Of The Beautiful Valley Of The Ganges Without Ever Thinking Of Seeing It). The Greek word “pussi” refers to an accumulation of dry pine needles. The word has a second meaning: thick fog, I’m familiar with because of the popular album based on Nikos Kavdias’ poems.” Dora Economou, March 2019 A spatial work. Representing something. Its form is drawn from the physical world. Something direct is put in place in order for the indirect to emerge. A rendition, an abduction, a transfiguration? Cracking sounds, also.
Representation (2019) hand-rolled ceramic pine needles, fired at different temperatures and spread out on the gallery floor to be walked on
Liberty, Equality, Faternity (2019)