written research

MCP 506 Final Written Element Rosina Ivanova Last Revised: May 15

The following ‘written element’ is featured as blue chapters in the book The Book of the Great Rabbit: Anythinglandia which is a compilation of practical and conceptual concerns throughout the years 2013-­‐-­‐-­‐2014, and is in support to my creative work Outlandia Now. The Full book The Book of the Great Rabbit: Anythinglandia is available at my web-­‐-­‐-­‐site in the tab of the same name.

Visit here to read the whole book: http://www.transart.org/ivanovar/

Spaces and Places, Sites: Walking through varied spatiality for performed space

This essay is written with the aim to re-­‐consider a new site for my walking, canoeing, writing and other Sisyphean1 explorations indexed in a site-­‐specific work with an initial fixed location. The aim of tracing theoretical concepts in other writers' works was to find new ways to relate the creative stories that sprang as a result of acquaintances with strangers during my intercity walks with concepts ever-­‐leaking inside and outside the initial site in artistic process as research. This way, I intend to inform the ephemerality of site-­‐specific work and to identify every idea in relation to my discoveries, which is an impossible thing to do.

Here, then one will find the record of texts and artist’s works informing the creative texts I write as a result of durational reading across sources and ideas, and my perception of the relatedness between different thoughts and different artists' works. These research and creative texts together inspire the solitary and group actions that currently make up my practice.

I explore performed and site-­‐related spaces, and their absence as a result of being re-­‐sited to some place else. I discuss the relationship between spatial and walking practices, the logic of nomadism and impermanence in site-­‐specific art within the context of contemporary art, itself the reflection of ever-­‐changing spaces and ways to perform space. That is to say that the texts

1

From Jean Marie’s evaluation text

serve as a departure.

Immigration in and to Greece happens on foot and by boat. Walking is transportation. Walking to the unknown and getting to an island, shows the potential of instability and immigration.

Walking and canoeing also implies the instability, the impermanence and the ephemerality necessary to a creative act. To move one’s body freely in space shows freedom of will and the spontaneity of the act. Walking is against capture. Walking defies the specificity of positionality.

Walking is a departure from an original fixed position. Walking is discontinued by newly arriving thoughts, while walking but walking, and talking creates the duration and the continuity in which a story is told through its smaller stories and their connectivity and ways of telling. A smaller story tied to the original story is a departure from the initial story but is also the duration spent in that displacement. It is the duration spent in the leak of the story related to some place else or to the ‘here’ that departs from the main story is a drift off the initial site and a proximity spent in leaking feelings and extreme details related to the site. Walking to nowhere and in different directions, decentralizes ideology of one thematic exploration. Walking through various spaces, shows the potential of sampling in a “continuum” of space. This points to the possibility of re-­‐ inventing one's space and context through new arrivals. However, that ability to re-­‐invent and access spaces is a privileged position, tied to capital and power, and should not be confused with the creative act of willful displacement – nomadic creative work. What the two have in common is spontaneity and embarking into the unknown, and the practicing of place in unusual ways.

What are the physical explorations of such a work and how is walking practice connected with the stories of people one meets on the way and how are their stories leaked back to my explorations?

Walking and canoeing are related to immigration because those are the two ways through which people cross borders to come to Greece.

‘[…](to tell one slef’s legends) as practices that invent spaces’, [..]

‘Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions these words operate […] by emptying out and wearing away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. Such indetermination gives them […] the function of articulating a second poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal forbidden or permitted meaning.’

Certau, Michel de 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press Berkley, p.105;p.107.

In her book For Space (Massey 2005)2 the critic Doreen Massey discusses how relationships, subject to practical explorations of space, are to be found within the conceptual entanglement in the very politics for space. In his essay For Space (Anderson 2008)3 Ben Anderson points to

2

Massey, Doreen 2005, For Space, 1 (ed.), SAGE Publications Ltd.; Also available [ONLINE] at < http://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/massey-­‐ for_space.pdf>

3 Anderson, Ben 2008.’ Doreen Massey: For Space’. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin & Gill

Massey's suggestion to ‘open up the political to the challenge of space’4. In my view this is an opening of the performative to the challenge of space and vice versa. In her opinion, the disruptiveness (performance) of formulations (spaces) opens an alternative inventiveness to view and perform new spatialities. This way to view space is similar to what de Certau saw in the possibility that performing space is to disrupt its singularity (de Certau 1984). Moreover, Massey’s view of space opens the fluidity and dynamism of spatiality by saying first that space is a sphere ‘of dynamic simultaneity’ (Anderson 2008), ‘constantly disconnected by new arrivals’ (Massey 2003)5, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore, always undetermined [and never closed])’ ‘by the construction of new relations’ (Anderson 2008) (that space is interrelated as constituted through interactions of the newly coming elements). ‘Space is always being made and is always therefore, in a sense, unfinished (except that “finishing” is not on the agenda)’ (Massey 2003). This means that, secondarily, space is the ‘sphere of multiplicity’ because ‘it is made out of numerous heterogeneous entities’ (Anderson 2008). Furthermore, space is the gathering together of multiple open-­‐ended, interconnected, trajectories to produce what Massey names as ‘sometimes happenstance’: that is re-­‐made (even if this is hidden) by provisional happenstances that may be reached or not (space is open to the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place – the way that a place is ‘elusive’ because it is made out of multiple trajectories and the negotiation of their relations that will always be re-­‐invented)(Anderson 2008). Site-­‐specificity, it follows, is found in use as a performed space of multiple “relationalities”, is always being produced, and so is subject to instability, ephemerality, and temporality revealing the acting out of a perpetually practiced place within a work of single artist. (See note on Miwon Kwon ‘relational specificity’ and Doreen Massey ‘relational spatiality’ i). This way of viewing space is also similar to what Deluze and Guatarri explained as ‘chance convergences forged by encounters and circumstances’.

Following Massey’s thought one can speculate that the spatial ‘opens up the political to the challenge of space’ and that it opens up the political to the challenge of the performative. Space ‘opens up the political’ because to think of spatiality is to engage in multiple processes of their very co-­‐existences’ (Anderson 2008).

Massey writes further that ‘everything is connected to everything else’ and that there are always connections to be made-­‐links that may never be established. Space according to her ‘is not a completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, in which every place is already linked to everywhere else.’; ‘There are always loose ends’. If you were to make a map that really had the characteristics of this space, it would be entirely possible to fall through it’ (Massey 2003). Here it is important to note the impossibility of writing everything that is related to a work of art. Once you attempt writing everything you end up writing about the impossibility to write everything and texts are ever re-­‐siting (linked and thus moved) to some place else.

However, that linking of things for Massey is not the experience of another place, it is rather the experience of a complex ‘here’ and ‘now’ evoking histories and memories that make up the very ‘present’ (Massey 2005). This is closely related to the reading of a site-­‐specific work. A site-­‐ specific work in this context is made up of events that constitute its meanings and those that re-­‐ define the process and so new readings of the site are opened up. In his book Nick Kaye quotes Pearson who believes that ‘one can view site as a performance of complex overlaying of narratives, historical and contemporary, [creates] a kind of saturated space, or scene-­‐of-­‐crime,

Valentine (eds). Key Texts in Human Geography. Edition. SAGE Publications Ltd, pp.

227-­‐235.; Also available [ONLINE] at < http://www.corwin.com/upm-­‐ data/18967_26_Hubbard_Ch_26.pdf>

4 Anderson 2008, p.228

5 Massey, Doreen 2003 Some Times of Space In Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project.

Edited by Susan May. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Publishing, 107-­‐118 [ONLINE] available at < http://www.olafureliasson.net/publications/download_texts/Some_times_of_space. pdf >

where [. . .] “everything is potentially important”’6.

Doreen Massey’s thinking for space favors new ways to practice the site (as the ‘event of place’)(in accordance with ‘elusive’ multiple trajectories) rather than sticking to the continuity and fixity of an initial claim (Massey 2005). One ends up recognizing the constructive interrelatedness and the potential of situational occurrences. Her idea however makes it seem impossible to establish finite exhaustion of a concept since ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Secondarily, the ‘interrelatedness’ and the ‘negotiation through range of means’ I relate to questions of participation in collaborative group works and as a reflection of how we experience space in the everyday. Here, the dynamics of work and ‘happenstances’ are open to change, according to the situational and specific ‘negotiations’-­‐ the conversations practiced in relation to a work/the event/the place 7.

She points out: ‘politics of place would not be simply a politics of ‘community’ but would involve processes of ‘negotiation’ that would confront the fact of difference via ‘the range of means through which accommodation, anyway always provisional, may be reached or not’ (Anderson 2008);(See original text 8). This is closely related to what Tom Finkelpearl saw as a ‘nuclei of contradiction’ when discussing the politics of intra-­‐group relations, and how a work can be driven by negotiations in a conversation within a group (Finkelpearl 2001)9. That is to say that space is no longer a singular thematic model believed to be the subject of a work, but is instead

6

Kaye, Nick 2000. Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation.Routhlege:London and N/Y

7 note to myself: This allows for the situational, complex sociocultural and perpetual in making to enter the work as constantly being re-­‐made by the stories and by the conditions in which those were made. This is the the characteristic of site-­‐specificity today, that the site has become aware of the environment ad the context and the players involved. The ‘reasons’ and the conditions of a work are not singular but somehow created in the course of actions.

8 Anderson (2008) writes: ‘Massey offers three practices that follow from opening up the political to the spatial – that is to ‘the challenge of our constitutive interrelatedness’. First, a politics of receptivity that is open to the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place – the way that a place is ‘elusive’ because it is made out of multiple trajectories. Thus a politics of place would not be simply a politics of ‘community’ but would involve processes of ‘negotiation’ that would confront the fact of difference via ‘the range of means through which accommodation, anyway always provi-­‐ sional, may be reached or not’.

9 Finkelpearl, Tom 2001. Dialogues in public Art. The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts London

directed by the material ephemerality of ‘presence’, found in physical movement, and by relational engagement with people’s ideas. The fluidity of such a migratory model for making a “work” produces possibilities for ‘the production of multiple identities, allegiances and meanings in the encounters of the aforementioned possible circumstances and a work that ever-­‐changes according to those circumstances’ [Deluze and Gattari in (Kwon 1997)(Kwon 2004))10. This way of thinking of space is a constant going back and forth between performed space (as in performance art discourse) and lived space (as in everyday life), the nomadic and the ephemeral (the re-­‐sited) in the site-­‐specific.

This understanding that space is a practiced (performed) space and that it presents to us the challenges of place as always open, under construction or constantly being made, is the constellation of multiple relationships between the ever-­‐changing trajectories that produce it.

This multiplicity means that space is the condition for the spontaneous, the improvisational and the unexpected. Consequently, ‘space is an ongoing achievement that is never finished or closed’.

Space becomes, therefore, the very ground ‘to engage with the existence of processes of coexistence.’ In the context of art, this can be a way to view interactive space being produced between humans as a relational situation of exchanges and movements through varied space.

‘Changing place’ Space is no longer a container that is made out of specific processes that constitute it. A space like Rafti island is understood as the changing atmosphere, changing temperature, changing color of bushes, changing water tides, the changing aquatic life, its temporary network of visitors and the ever changing stories about it that are in the process of being made by people via memories, experiences and imagination that also connect it to esewheres. Place is different at different social occasions.

This processional and impermanent essence of space (the opposite of static and stable) is used by ethnographers to understand how public space is performed by its temporary participants.

Using ‘observational details’ they demonstrate how that same place is performed differently at different times of the day via the different relations and ways of co-­‐existence between its participants. Place, then, is the gathering of different co-­‐existing situations of a space that are ever re-­‐performed by its temporary visitors.

‘The event of place’ But how are we in the here and now if everything is moving? Temporality seems a prerequisite for spatiality or else temporality tames spatiality. Thus relationality is an instance and a capturetaking of instantaneous happenstances that may or may not be made. Some connections and links are never established, and the absence of those also constitutes the space.

The ‘here and now’ for Massey is the very crossing of categories and spaces in social and natural orders. This encounter of diverse elements into relations, is a spatial and political challenge of our ‘constitutive interrelatedness.’ In her chapter Elusiveness of Place with the subchapters Migrant Rocks and The event of place she explains that ‘here’ is where the ‘spatial narratives meet up to form configurations, trajectories, accumulations, encounters, and those have their own temporalities. But this, in my opinion, means that those are subject to duration, connectivity and continuity. But the returns to temporalities and continuities for her, are ‘always to a place that has moved on’. They intersect and weave into one another and create what she names space-­‐time.

'Here' is an intertwining of stories which are in constant negotiation. Moreover ‘here’ is space that creates the simultaneity and connections of those stories (Massey 2005). The key, though, is that there are no portable rules because of the uniqueness of place: ‘the negotiation will always be an invention; there will be need for judgment, learning, improvisation’. In this sense, site-­‐ specificity is not only moved under certain circumstances. The whole work is made anew, for the new space where new trajectories cross to produce the specificity of that place and its newly created relations. For me and very similar to Ben Anderson, her texts raise new questions: ‘What is distinct about encounters?’ ‘What are non encounter (solitary practice maybe)?’ How are

10

Kwon, Miwon 2004, One Place After Another: site-­‐specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London.

spaces and places understood as duration spent in them? Why are spaces repeated and endured?

Do we need to disclose the constellations of space-­‐time that were never made material? How do we do that in a non-­‐material way?

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life 11de Certau was concerned with the practice of place and, similar to the idea of Doreen Massey, he recognizes that space is disconnected by new arrivals, by

‘ […] fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous from the story. Things extra and others (details and excess coming from elsewhere] insert themselves into an accepted framework, the imposed order’. One thus has the very [relation-­‐ship] between spatial practices and the constructed ones. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-­‐order’ (De Certau 1984)12.

These relationships, according to Nick Kaye, are also to be found between spatial practices and a site-­‐specific work (Nick Kaye 2000)13. They test the stability and limits of these very places with the creative curiosity to disrupt and produce meanings that are unbounded by place. In this sense, ‘the event of place’ is to be found precisely in these ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning, through which the artwork and its place may be momentarily articulated one in the other: in its drifting and detournements from the original site-­‐inhabiting [to reside] once again in a new space. 14

How are the spaces created in this text that I am writing? How are spaces here performed within the ever-­‐changing complexity of re-­‐siting to some place else and within the here-­‐situational negotiation? These texts can be understood in terms of the articulated exchanges between the work of art and the conversations between the references that speculate and forge its very meaning, are created. The practiced space experience is expressed through the histories of its encounters with the aforementioned concepts documented or not, in between the footnotes, endnotes, references, and notes to the Self ii

15

16

The ‘here’, is where these spatial narratives meet up to form

11

Certau, Michel de 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press Berkley, p.107

12 ibid

13 Kaye, Nick 2000. Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation.Routhlege:London and N/Y

14 Nick Kaye further explains that ‘the real site-­‐specific works that we do, are the ones where we create ‘a piece of work which is a hybrid of the place, the public and the performance’.14 That is, at moments these texts depart to someplace else.

15 What are the fictional selves that continue to return to inform our sense of location, identity?

16 Can it be said that those fictional selves are means for survival?

encounters with one another and each sentence has its own temporality, duration, continuity and connectivity with other sentences.

They are constantly connected to one another but also disconnected to connect with an Other. That is, they are in a continuity that is both connected and disconnected by duration. Each paragraph is ever-­‐ shifting and can be put next to any other one. When I write, a new space opens and a new relationship is created, that takes me closer to somewhere I want to go. I do not know where I am going. The newly written paragraph becomes more specifically closer to where I am going and it pastes itself atop all previously written paragraphs. Then the conclusion can become the introduction, as a new context, and as a beginning, and this process never stops. The paragraphs are disrupted by the throw-­‐allingness of space and are like the impossibility to hold together many things at the same time.

De Certau makes a clear distinction between space and place but he also writes that place is a ‘performed space’. In his mind it is possible to disrupt the singularity of space through performing space with actions like walking through the city (See also note on Lefebvre iii ). As will be discussed later, Miwon Kwon gives an overview of site-­‐specific art, initially tied to the fixed place of its location, and then explains how site-­‐specificity is performed through its evolving spatial conceptions. However, she points out that these concepts are not to be understood as evolving one after the other, but by being ever in relational negotiation within a site-­‐specific work 17 18.

A ‘site-­‐specific work’, articulates itself through qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an ‘event’ and a position it occupies, or through its absence from that location. Relational aesthetics have been criticizing spatial theories and public art for its purely theoretical, ethical and political aspects rather than actually applying those ideas among people in lived spaces. There is small emphasis on results consequential to durational participation. These works are invested in the idea of permanence rather than nomadic feeling through situations. How can an ephemeral idea of moving through spaces initiate a durational permanence within exchanging conversations and contexts? All aforementioned issues call into question the spatial consideration of where the work of art is being made and its very absence from “where it is supposed to be” (off site, non-­‐site, lived work).

17

The possibility of a work can be understood through the trajectories of its ever-­‐ relating successful contexts. He starts from the idea that site-­‐specific work tied to its original fixed location, to concerns about the presence of the artist’s body in the work, to the site moving to the space of conceptual discourse, to the site being the relationships between the artist and the instruction or the “social” to the site. A way to see site-­‐specificity, is in my view, practicing a kind of removal from the site. One can provide a provisional understanding that the nomadic and ephemeral in specificity, which is to practice a removal from the work but the initial fixed site, is a needed index to the work (like the island and intercity walking and this text here and my creative walking stories). His concerns are closely related to presence, originality, authorship and transferability of the site-­‐specific work.

18 They move us to the idea that is encountered in long terms. This hints back to the idea of relational art, that any site is a potential place for a work, and that all relationships made count, and that the work can happen with more relaxed settings of the everyday where the audience and the artist resort to actions akin to everyday but also create common spaces (more sedentary) with audiences-­‐ a space for dialogue.

In order to describe surroundings and how people invent relations though spaces and places, many anthropologists and philosophers like de Certau (unlike Doreen Massey ) use two oppositional terms to distinguish “place ” and “space”. According to many, place is a static concept without the option of movement, whereas space is lively – it involves the process of arriving anywhere by a person and thus, it is connected with movement.

In The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau 1984)19, de Certeau investigates the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘space’ and their distinction space (espace) and place(lieu). ‘[ [A] place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are ordered in ‘relationships of coexistence’ and thus are ‘an instantaneous configuration of positions’. This ‘implies an indication of stability’. Contrary to place de Certeau’s states that ‘space is a practiced place’.

Contrary to place he refers to a space as ‘composed of intersections of mobile elements’.20iv

Place, like language, he believes, is the production of a system of specific rules that produce meaning according to their location. The ways though which a practice obtains its place [lieu] at a very specific position makes it conceptually impossible for two things to be at the same location [place] in that order of ‘place’. However, he sees the regularity and stability of place disrupted through the possibilities in ‘spatial practices’ and calls into question ‘the effect produced by the operation that orient[s] it’. Practiced place, according to him, does not reorganize fragments within a given order, but simply operates on ordering activities like walking, listening, watching.

However, the incompatibility he perceives can perform the various possibilities of a single space.

Writing, the act of talking, thinking and walking, situated in the present, change into some-­‐things else because they are transformed through its successive contexts and through the newly created meanings leaking from them being practiced.

According to him, ‘the constructed street by urban planning (place) is in the process of being transformed into space by walkers’. This makes walkers, possible participants in the construction of social space and brings practical questions such as the access to public spaces. This means that he brings into question how perpetual journeying resists the stability of place. The immense social experience of walking into the city multiplies the transient nature of spaces. De Certau ‘identifies that there is a population of passers-­‐by’, a ‘network of temporary citizens’ ‘that are approved (ordered language) by the architecture and the pedestrian traffic and that they are going ‘to nowhere’ they are in symbolic ‘dreamed of places’.21

In the same way, the act of writing and reading is the production of a performed space; the act of walking is the practice of movement through particular places. Following this though, the disruption of contextualizing and the disruption of the classic ways to write through a stability of continuity and relationships makes it possible to overcome the tradition of economic writing

19

Certau, Michel de 1984 The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press Berkley. Also available [ONLINE] < http://www.melaniecrean.com/interface2010/wp-­‐ content/uploads/2010/08/deCerteau_PracticeofEverydayLife.pdf>

20 ibid

21 The practice of the here, the spoken word resists place and even the symboli,c participates in this movement because it can never be set in order according to its fixity. The symbolic is tamed to lacking a place because representation is itself the lack of its object. From this follows that a ‘real place’ is not to be found in presence, which thought does give us conceptual liberation to do it in language-­‐ as a “meta” space…

(associated with efficiency in capitalist culture) and opens up the participation of non-­‐trained writers, migrants, bodies to participate in writing as a creative act through which they can articulate the very circumstances of their living.

Performative practices in art since1917 (Dada, Fluxus, Situationists International), the manifestations of ‘walks to nowhere’, ‘detournments’, happenings, events, and situations provides us with interesting examples of ‘relationship to site’, ‘the absence of location’, movement through ‘varied ambiences’, ‘ off site’, ‘works without logic’, ‘non spaces’ and questions about where the site of performative work is to be located.

The earliest documented explorations of non-­‐site specific art works can be found as early as the Dadaists, who operated on the streets in their multiple locations throughout Europe. Dada can be considered as the first manifestation of performance, of an off-­‐ site work, and that of a community-­‐creation oriented work. The Paris Dadaists led a series of "excursions and visits" to places that had "no reason to exist" as explained in the flyer and public invitation published in several newspapers to announce the visit (Demos 2010) 22.

‘Only areas considered not picturesque, nonhistorical-­‐or at least not conventionally historical-­‐ and unsentimental would qualify for Dadaist tours, beginning with St.Julien's abandoned courtyard, which-­‐although it was situated next to the oldest standing church in Paris-­‐existed in a state of disrepair and was then mistreated as a garbage dump by residents of the fifth arrondissement’ […] They do so most commonly, as is well understood by now, to critique the false autonomy of art, which is shown to be fully immersed within capitalist institutions, and to create spaces of sociability different from those enmeshed within a reality perceived to be domininated by commercial spectacle and its reified social relations (ibid).’

The idea of movement through sites and places, was later embarked upon by the Situationists, who ‘challenged people's passive conditioning with […][the] playful tactic of detournement.’

Dérive is a technique of ‘rapid passage through varied ambiences’. It involves playful-­‐ constructive behavior and awareness of psycho-­‐geographical effects, and claims [to be] if different from the classic notions of a journey or stroll (Debord 2014, initially written in 1985) 23.

Space cannot produce the ‘stability of its place’. ‘To walk is to be absent of place’. From this, it follows that movement without destination (arrival site) is against stability. A pedestrian walker processes multiple spaces and re-­‐formulations of linguistic and experiential and experimental spaces 24. The walker’s experience of being aware of himself performs the space through the ever-­‐changing stories that re-­‐site it as he walks with his body.

22

Demos, T.J. 2010. Dada’s Event. Communities of Sense, ed. Jaleh Mansoor et al., Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press; Also available [ONLINE] < http://www.ucl.ac.uk/art-­‐ history/about_us/academic_staff/dr_tj_demos/further_publications/Demos-­‐ DadaEvent.pdf>

23 Debord, Guy 2014 ‘Theory of the Dérives’ [originaly created 1958]in Bobsecrets.org;Situationists International Online [ONLINE] Available at: < http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm >; < http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html > [Accessed 15 February 2014].

24 note to myself: To walk means no stability but ‘to walk is to be absent of a place’) and in between the re-­‐siting of the multiplicity of experienced spaces (de Certau, 1984).

Performing Spatialities: Walking Practices

See list of Walking works25

The following material is obtained from the flyer announcing the exhibition Walking in the City: Spatial Practices in Art, from the Mid-­‐1960s to the Present curated by Melissa Brookhart Beyer and Jill Dawsey, and brought to my attention in a workshop in Berlin by Nicolás Dumit Estevéz also available here.

This exhibition leaflet is based on de Certau’s chapter Walking in the City 26. His idea of lived experience within the city is ‘inhabited by walkers’ and is here used by artists to comment on built architecture enforced by urban progress. As noted in the flyer “Walking” in this exhibition is

25

Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969) New York City Janine Antoni, In Migration Tristan Tzara, Excursions & Visites Dada / Premiere Visite (1921) Paris Francis Alÿs in The Green Line (1995) Jerusalem, The Collector, Honoré d’O, Duett (1999) Venice Tsai Ming-­‐Liang ‘Walker’ 2012 Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers – The Great Wall Walk (1988) China Guy Debord, The Naked City (1957), Paris Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance (1981) New York City Pilgrim, Peace (1992), b. in 1908-­‐1981, Peace Pigrim (adopted name) is a spiritual teacher and an activist. She walked across the United States for an entire 28 years devoting her entire life to writing for walking and encountering the strangers on her unknown routes and experiences.

Yyoi Kusama Walking Piece New York City Alex Villar, Upward Momility Valie Export, Body Configurations Kim Soja, Needle Woman Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne (1979), The Sleepers, The Shadow (1981), Address Book (1983), The Telephone Booth Grigoris Lambrakis-­‐ a person walking with the flag of Greece and a peace symbol that was later on joined by spontaneous followers on the road and was mysteriously killed shortly after, which believed to have been a political murder.

26 Certau, Michel de 1984. ‘Walking in the City’ in The Practice of Everyday Life. The University of California Press Berkley; Also available here <http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rogerbb/classes/berlin/de%20certeau.pdf>

used as substitute for other spatial practices closely related to it like standing still, loitering in the city and encountering people while walking. Their performances introduce new language and new voices to talk about their newly created spatial system-­‐ as a commentary on the existing one.

“They point to the heterogeneity of lived experience, a global unevenness, articulated locally through the stubborn insistence of the body. “

One of the works featured in this event was Yoyoi Kusama’s Walking Piece during which she walked through Manhattan under her flower parasol wearing her kimono. She points out to the state of being a stranger, an immigrant, and the status of her body, as point of difference in the city. During the walk she encounters a stranger-­‐ a homeless man. This act works by looking for a different kind attachment to the city and to a pointing to a population of people that already live there in migration mode, practicing the city as a way of living.

David Wojnarowicz photographed Brian Butterick, disguised as a phantasmagoric figure exploring somewhat promiscuous and abandoned city spaces: underneath bridges, piers, red light districts, run-­‐down apartments. He declares ‘a right to a public life for marginalized groups and their refusal to be removed from urban reality’.

Valerie Tevere’s project, A Preliminary Guide to Public and Private Space in Amsterdam, is a mapping of Amsterdam ‘based on citizens’ perceptions of private and public space’. She interviews residents to acquire their perspective on how they think of these spaces and how they practice the city as individual walkers by asking them which paths they take. She looks at how people find ways to navigate regulated public spaces.

I've selected three of the works featured in the flyer, because they resonate with the unfolding of my work, Lazarka: Bulgaria, Lovech -­‐ Greece, Porto Rafti, From one place to another, here within elsewhere where I walk in the city without the Lazrka costume but with my identification card, and encounter the police who brings me to the police station where I discover a tv with a live feed-­‐ a real time screening of the population of arrested deviants living in an under ground police cell. Through this action, I ask questions about access to public space within the migrants’ rights to the city, to their bodies and the right to my body. This work turns into another work, which is a protest against arrested spontaneity in the act of walking, and a protest against the unlawful detainment of refugees in Athens. These refugees don't have the right to identification cards and thus no rights to their own bodies. As part of the immigration process, sometimes waiting for their legal papers can take years during which time they can neither leave nor stay in the country legally. v

The Rabbit Doesn’t is another work-­‐ a phantasmagoric figure that inhabits space and the right to the city as a rabbit rather than as a stranger/immigrant. The body of the rabbit does not become a point of difference but an encounter for small talk. The rabbit acts as human walks through the city’s hidden corners and most public spaces like the metro and cafes and encounters people and reflects upon the nomadic in the conceptions that world presents to us. Identities then can be understood as stories of self-­‐realization, as fictional selves but also as our relationships within the exchanges that append and index within and with our surroundings (Kaye 2000).

The third work comes out of the stories I write and collect about the Rafti Island as well as about people I encounter during my city and intercity walks-­‐ not so much to gain a perspective for navigating public space there but as an intervention of their connections to the island in my work. I pose the question about how to let their suggestions and perspectives direct the decisions in “my” work. Or else, how is it that strangers and imaginary people can direct the work?

The walker is in a constant process of performing the continuous and contingent of practiced spatiality -­‐ walking to it, getting to it, and anticipating it. The anticipation and the perpetual getting to the original site is re-­‐sited in the becoming site: the site of the process to there. This means that there is the possibility that even the site to get to, is constantly referred to, sited from

some place else and at first sight excludes the possibility of being in the present. How are those conceptual limitations of space challenged through the artists’ practices? Is it in the very presence of a body in space?

27

28

Moving though a place or a space would allow for the simultaneity of sensual experience, however those places again can be referred to as the fragmented space of ‘other spaces’ (as spaces coming from other places) like the site of hearing, the site of vision, the site of talking, the site of the background etc. 29 This means that space is in the constant process of a way of conscious reading being made across the sites of sensual experience, the site of speech, the site of walking, the site of talking, the site of writing, the site of sensing. 30 Those spaces can be considered as a walking across sites that constitute the experience of being conscious (without necessarily in their totality) of that presence at the same time, making and experiencing those connections.

Janine Antoni focuses exactly on that tension between the process of work being made and its finished product. She uses her body, as a site for experimentation with attention to body parts as tools, utilizing her mouth, hair, and eyelashes to perform everyday activities to create her work.

In her Migration (2000) video –documentation of a performative action 31she walks along the beach leaving footsteps while being followed by another pair of feet of Paul Ramirez Jonas fitting within another’s wet footsteps in the sand 32Janine Antoni explores territories of a human condition and that of the body to document the histories of her own body though the use of ephemeral everyday walking. Her action suggests a relationship between her body and the

27

This suggests to art practitioners that a possibility of being present in the work is to be found in the immediate artistic practices of the happening of the walking, the happening at the site and defying the previous conceptual limitation with the physical action.

28 Resonates also in Sophie Calle when she gives her stories to be edited by professionals.

The conceptual layer expressed in the ‘textual’ can allow room for re-­‐creation of the performed space to be re-­‐performed as a textual story, that initial performance can be written on top.

29 Maybe moving across those could bring some reconciliation within the site of re-­‐ citing and re-­‐placing their original site of creation within one another, or the very opposite -­‐of practicing the experience of a singular activity at a time.

30 This can further be downsized to the site of saying one word, one gesture, one bell ring, or the durational tying and untying of shoes bracketed in boundaries of time to be analyzed as a succession and as interconnectedness of spaces one experiences: the background noise space, the noise form trying the shoes, the noise from speaking body.

31http://finearts.illinoisstate.edu/galleries/archive_exhibits/artists/walking.sht ml

32 http://glasstire.com/2012/11/23/the-­‐ten-­‐list-­‐walk-­‐as-­‐art/capture-­‐2/

ephemerality of the everyday, and also her body’s relationship to another’s body. The two artists’ relationship mentioned above point to a whole other invisible world of bodies' communications.

Francis Alÿs (a transnational artist working in Mexico) works' major focus is the act of moving through cities, countries, locations and spaces. The nomadic aspect in his work is expressed as the act of walking through urban spaces and how this is documented becomes central to the work. His video work Railings (2004)33 depicts the artist walking through the streets of London, sliding a wooden drumstick on the enclosed fences (click here to listen as your read) of properties he passes by to create a sound that articulates a performance of boundaries within public spaces and outlines how spaces are regulated through man-­‐made urban architecture.

However his childish and playful act asks us to consider the re-­‐invention of public build borders in a creative way as a child would do: he makes a sound piece and a journey into the city unbound by its regulations, signifying its limits and making a subverted entrance for the viewer to enjoy a seemingly playful act that is nevertheless loaded with issue of anonymous borders.

Another of Alÿs’ performance was the gathering of 500 volunteers in Peru to move a sand dune a few inches to the side-­‐ problematizing his role in the organization of the piece. Also, this work is the very event of place where a seemingly impossible and absurd act takes place-­‐ people moving a sand dune. Again this act, alike the previous, activates the romanticism of fairytales and children's play. He ensnares us in both a collective absurd and the power position of artists to make people ‘move mountains’ and in this way also exposes the seductive possibility in the impossibility of creative practices 34 35. In his performances The Green Line and The Leak we see him dripping green paint from a can -­‐ a work he did at different places (São Paolo and Jerusalem (1995 and 2004) and Paris (links to video works of the walking performances) .Through these works he calls into question the different meaning that a work acquires according to its geo-­‐ location. Thus the forces that define and contextualize the understanding of a work of art are made graspable when thinking of those works in relation to one another. Finally, Alÿs work comes to re-­‐invent ‘its’ place in these public spaces allowing its own spaces to remain ethnographic backgrounds, realized in events of walking and practices which counter public space access with unexplored spaces and actions. In this sense, Francis Alÿs' spatial explorations obtain a specificity to site by producing a kind of negative space, where the ‘pedestrian’ becomes aware of one’s own performance in the city. Francis Alÿs also becomes the author, a trickster mastermind figure, that subverts actions associated with space and uses walking to problematize connections we make with spaces to reveal their hidden sociopolitical load. He doesn’t struggle to find agency within the regulated spaces – he exposes their confines and plays with them (Potts 2014); (Demos 2010; Francis Alÿs online web).

Other examples of long standing walkers are Tehching Hseih and Peace Pilgrim. Tehching Hseih announced his One Year performance 1981-­‐1982 out in the open to the readers of a single document and a single picture promising that he will not enter any enclosed area for the period of one year, including vehicles. He practically lived one year within the experiences that the outside and the streets presented to him. Though he used movement and walking to complicate his participation in open space he also problematized the relationship of the moving site (his body) with the transferability/nontransferability of mass produced art objects. He leaves us disconnected from our fictions of what may have happened to him during that time in terms of survival, strolling, access to public space for sleeping and the like because we cannot experience the work unless we do it. Even if we do it we will be subject to other specific circumstances one cannot contain in a fore-­‐seeing plan, unlike his previous one-­‐year piece from 1978 in which he lived in one cell-­‐room solitary confinement. Activist Peace Pilgrim, on the other hand, walked for

33

Railings http://www.francisalys.com/public/railingsfitz.html

34 Faith Moves Mountains http://www.francisalys.com/public/cuandolafe.html

35 Potts, Jonh 2014, ‘The Theme of Displacement in Contemporary Art’. Erea reviews.

[ONLINE] Available at: < http://erea.revues.org/2475 > [Accessed 15 February 2014].

an entire 28 years in the open across the United States, traversing state borders. She walked and slept in trenches but wrote about her attachment to the instability of the circumstances that such a journey presented to her (book available here). She faced different rules for access to space from state to state, even encountering some in which walking and strolling were prohibited. Yet she found a home in the transitory state of movement. She also found home in talking to strangers she encounters on the road, those who offer her accommodation, and even the police that picked her up for illegal walking. By walking without knowing what people and spaces may offer her, she disengaged from people's pasts and insisted on experiencing the moment of encounter as a deeply appreciated, shared interaction with her surroundings (Tehching Hseih online web and Peace Pilgrim book) 36.

The wanderer and time as public space problem

In the article The Theme of Displacement a range of artists gathered to refer to the critique of our modern capitalist society, but also to show how this is subverted by the practice of walking and how that displacement occurs in modern capitalist society through the prism of art in the very ‘spaces of its production’. John Potts refers at the beginning of the article to the theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud who views the times we live in as “altermodernity” comprising a “translation-­‐oriented modernity”. ‘Such a culture must be “polyglot”, because “the immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture” and we live in a “globalized culture busy with new syntheses” [...]. ‘The global network becomes a space of exchange, of diverse representations of the world, in which translation of ideas and representations places a crucial role in “discussions that will give rise to a new common intelligibility’ (Pott 2013)37. Contrary to this idea, site-­‐specificity has been resisting transferability and the nomadic model as a way to overthrow the power of capital but has lately re-­‐considered new ways to transfer a site-­‐specific work as a resistance for the same reasons. Such concerns open up questions of access to spaces and places, not just their possibility to transform knowledge into something else but to make visible the dead ends of current capitalist ideologies as a bodily problem. This is a problem within and for the human body affecting its spatial, temporal and creative borders. Walking to nowhere in this context then challenges political and national ideologies of ‘putting the people into a certain frame of mind’, concrete destinations, and inverts the dead ends, as well as the mythological ‘conditions of possibility’ of modern capitalism, much earlier questioned by the Frankfurt School.38 Today, in my neighborhood there is no unified public, social, or cultural space because of complex cultural and economic powers controlling our time and space. Because of the time needed to accumulate the capital needed for survival, space and time are being made obsolete and less effort and less physical movement is favored. That specific lack of movement is fairly addressed by Rebeca Solnit through her longstanding writing that resembles walking vi. The more we see the lack of movement and the more we see others and ourselves busy, the more we get used to the idea that the ways in which we live in houses and operate within limited

36

< http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/> <http://www.peacepilgrim.com/book/ppbook.pdf>

37 Potts, Jonh 2014, ‘The Theme of Displacement in Contemporary Art’. Erea reviews.

[ONLINE] Available at: < http://erea.revues.org/2475 > [Accessed 15 February 2014].

38 Time-­‐success-­‐ individuation. Time as public space problem and obstruction to making contemporary art.

movement (in containers of rooms and cars) and affected by technology, the more we think that these ways of movement and experiencing spaces are natural. People park as close as possible to the entrance door. Time and space concerns are directly co-­‐related to creative practices in art.

Art is a complex and vast subject related to many elements, players, philosophies and ways to talk, walk and move the body. The capitalist containment of time enforces extreme limitations to finding the time to make and talk and ‘to space art’. Durational walking within this context is the very making of space and time for artistic exploration. Many artists are time-­‐oriented and interactions are tamed down to quick and condensed feedback answers (as opposed to complex, meandering, disparate walks to nowhere, without points and unknown subjects of explorations), to an economy of words limiting artistic expression and creative interrelations. This condensed way of doing things is in direct conflict with how time has become a public spatial problem, which is, at heart, the great obstacle to making art, and making time for art in the contemporary world 39. I speak of an art based on exploratory practices. We are ourselves durational creatures.

Capital and attention and time and meaning in our life have been given to the things that hold the greatest results-­‐ often putting us in a position of someone not having time for meandering, talking to strangers, or just walking to nowhere. We are now, even in the art world, timed, scheduled, on the goal, success-­‐oriented and thus alienated, especially with audiences not art-­‐ related. Questions of time problematize the ability to develop long-­‐term relationships with site and/or audiences, or to create integrative spaces for socially isolated individuals that previously did not have access to art creative practices. This time problem is especially crucial when considering projects born out of developing relationships with audiences. The great challenge for the artist whose work is made through those interactions with “audience-­‐participants” is very much related to inventing space, time and capital for re-­‐occurring interactions with them.

Traces of such concerns can be found in the discussion on the evolution of conceptions for site-­‐ specificity as Kwon Suggests in her book One Place After Another, discussed later in this essay.

One may consider a walking body and its surroundings as an event of place. To adhere to chance-­‐to-­‐chance and unknown encounters is both a performance and a lived space. This opens up several sites for the work: the body as site, the relationship between a moving body and the speculations the body engages in while walking, and even the conversation between two bodies-­‐ walker and stranger (a situation as a site, a conversation as a site, a situation for contact as a site). Stability of a single space and even time, becomes obsolete during moving activities: walking, canoeing, writing, paddling, and talking. This points straight to questions between site-­‐ specificity and mobility. How one inhabits and moves through spaces -­‐ the very question of access to those spaces-­‐ is always affected by global and mass-­‐production society [in here], by ideological powers and the time [and stamina] we have to engage with those.

39

For example I cannot feedback a work within five minutes and even if i am asked to do so for an artistic research I would turn to addressing the limitations of this approach, though i understand that this spatial problem comes from the high price for survival in contemporary and the displacement of art from leisure into profession/labor, which at first place occurred for the exact reason of legitimizing time for art. However, there are many programs in arts that favor the time of the artist and allow room for the collaborative design of spaces where profound discussions and succession of relationships with an audience can be created and deeply investigated.

The Reading of site

In the book One Place After Another: site-­‐specific art and locational identity Miwon Kwon discusses site-­‐specificity in the context of public art and how its sociopolitical ambitions have been imagined in the last decades. Within the last 40 years of public art she discusses 3 distinct cases: art-­‐in-­‐public-­‐space, art-­‐as-­‐public-­‐space and Suzanne Lacy’s ‘new genre’ approach. The first two are considered ‘public’ because they are legitimate art in public outdoor locations, and they can be accessed by the public freely in city plazas, public streets, airports, parking lots and the like. Those were the 1960s and 70s modernist abstract sculptures that are enlarged replicas of works normally found in museums and galleries. Their function would be ‘an aestheticized vision of an object inserted in space and would enhance the aesthetics of the space’ as well as be little if at all concerned with the qualities of the site (here, the concerns for the site are limited to the physical architectural entity in the space and the formal qualities of the site).

The suggestion that a work is tamed to its location (site-­‐specific) is directly related to the idea of public art from the 1960s. The interpretation that to move the work or to re-­‐place it and to make it something else is discussed by Miwon Kwon through the example of the famous Tilted Arch.

According to the artist, the work created in public space acts as a commentary on that specific site reflecting and returning the gaze back to the people working close by. This work was not to be site-­‐readjusted but was conceived to re-­‐structure that specific site (the Federal Plaza) conceptually and as a critique of the very people working there. But according to those working and living around it, it was not wanted. This came to be in complete conflict with ideas of conceptually integrating the audience.

Whereas community based public practices since the1960s have been named by Suzanne Lacy “new genre public art”. They reside in the ‘intensive engagement with the people of the site, involving direct communication and interaction over an extended period of time’ (Kwon 40). The

40

Kwon, Miwon 2004, One Place After Another: site-­‐specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London.p.82

ambivalent result of the Tilted arch raised important questions about engagement with the site as a discourse rather than a succession of practical decisions coming from the people who constitute the site. As noted by Suzanne Lacy, art-­‐specific concerns ‘had little bearing on the lives of the people who constitute the actual reality of the site. In the introductory chapter Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys in her book Mapping the Terrain, she writes ‘what exists in the space between the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that may itself become the artwork’. ‘In short, the dialogue moved from knowing more and more about what art was, to wondering about what life was, the meaning of life’ 41.

In his attempt to disclose the role of social participation within the context of art, the French critic and museum curator Nicolas Bourriaud named it Relational Art. At the heart of this kind of relational aesthetics was the function of the ways in which artists, viewers, environment, and objects participate and interact. What is persuasive about relational art is that, by calling into question human relations it announces that all spaces are potential sites for artistic explorations in themselves. This way human interactions and the social circumstances fall into the assertion of independent form of spaces; independent from the institution or the very relationships with the institutions is the site in question. Miwon Kwon explains that by saying that the ‘site falls into its literal space’, this includes communication with curators and interactions with people in the everyday (Kwon 1997);(Garland 2010) 42.

In many social occasions relational performances are mundane acts. The work of Rikrit Tiravanija prepares Thai food for the exhibition’s visitors reflects and creates the situation in which art is created and observed (ibid). Another such instance is his film Chew The Fat 2008 which is a conversation between the artist and his friend in New York 43. The work is a relaxed situation in which a conversation can flow. While Relational Art seems too ordinary or unqualified to count as an artistic experience, Bourriaud’s arguments make room for an art that references the social environment and the process by which all art becomes a commodity. In that sense it is much like the multiple relationships between the spaces it inhabits, it is much like new genre's concerns of ‘where the site of importance is, and the possible entry to the work for the participants. Successions of public art such as new genre and relational athletics pose a major question for the ability to invent social space and its ability to “invite”. Also, the 'site’ of the work is reconsidered not as object or a research but as an event of interaction, or the event of ethnographic observation translated into the living world and self-­‐defying when translated into the art world.

41

Lacy, Suzanne 1994, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Bay Press: Seattle, Washinton. p.26

42 Garland, Vaughn 2011, Releasing space: relational aesthetics and the making of the artist removed from the work, [ONLINE] Available at: <http://www.vaughngarland.com/UnpublishedTexts/FINAL%2005-­‐12-­‐ 2011%20Vaughn%20Garland%20Final%20Relational%20Aesthetics%20Releasing%20 Space.pdf> [Accessed 15 February 2014].

43 Chew The Fat 2008. Film. Directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija [ONLINE] available at: < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1680695/> [Accessed 10 February 2014].

While radicalism introduces different approaches for (art/site/community) making, ‘for duration (re-­‐visiting the site) approach’ addresses ways to relate and connect to the site and how it is performed. In non-­‐art scenes (relational, everyday, experimental but outside of a gallery and museum context), work with other artists and inhabitants of a site would entail many critical tasks, but mainly that the actions and their negotiation are complex and ever changing. There is always a tension between the discursive site of artistic theory and an ideology of the artist, with that of the community not affiliated with art. Specifically, here I will refer to my engagement in the one-­‐year Public Dreaming project with the Guerrilla Optimists at Omonia Square. The project manifested as steady engagement with the public square every week. Sleep actions, napping at the square, manifestoes and meeting its inhabitants was at the heart of our project supported through the everyday exchange of dreams via emails (for one year) among group members (Jennifer Nelson, Amalia Charikiopoulou, Alexandros Georgiou and Manos Tsatiris). The actions of choice are the result of intra-­‐group negotiations about how we could develop that project on Public Dreaming. This led to somewhat more steady weekly visits to the site. In other words, the work was not preconceived but developed in the course of our actions. (See a detailed dicussion of this initiative in the Chapter Group Concerns entirely devoted to this project, observed as a case study towards the end.)

Another project that involved the engagement with the audience (but an audience that was mostly never affiliated with art prior to the project) over a less extended period of time, was Hymn to Freedom organized by Jennifer Nelson.

The Hymn To Freedom action, involved bringing together a group of immigrants, including myself, in an artist's studio in the center of Athens to work with a musician on a weekly basis -­‐to study and learn the Greek anthem. The idea was that we would learn the Greek anthem and sing it in front of the Supreme Court in Athens. For me this act was about both finding an attachment to each other and a peculiar protest concerning our belonging to this country in the minds of others.

However mainly it created a sense of interaction and community with the other participants (See detailed description of how this project evolved and specific circumstances in which it was developed herevii).

Many community and participatory-­‐oriented projects start with the concern of how one encounters and invites participants, or else how one creates an entry into the work for others that can be maintained afterward. Of course those concerns depend on the audience involved, and so when one works with people not affiliated with art, the action could be one where the public perceives the work as performing some useful task. The question about the action of course depends on many factors, and is indeed problematized by the “authorship” of the artist, how much he is willing to diffuse the work to his or her collaborators, and how willing they are to work on it. The notion of entry into a work was described by public artists and was expressed in creating shadings and spaces for seating so that it could be used by the audience. That idea of “inviting” audiences is associated with site-­‐specific works and it creates a physical and public commitment (Kaye 2000) 44. According to Kwon ‘Space as a social experience, communal scope, individual response, may insure a larger measure of support. 'In these critics’ writings of the early 1980s, physical access or entry into an art work is imagined to be equivalent to hermeneutic access for the viewer (Kwon 2004 )45 ’.

Today we see the usefulness of the piece in which Suzanne Lacy took the idea of engaging with audience, where her work was entirely based on the idea of meeting the inhabitants of the place.

A material documentation of this work, shows Lacy shaking their hands. Another project, based on engagement, was taken up by Nicolás Dumit Estevéz and María Alós to create a museum from

44

Kaye, Nick 2000. Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation.Routhlege:London and N/Y

45 Kwon, Miwon 2004, One Place After Another: site-­‐specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, London.

objects in the pockets of passers by. For his current Let’s Meet at the Bridge, art and life experience, 2011-­‐ up to the present, he goes to Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Meet the People. They participated in gatherings and celebrations bringingtogether people from both sides of a bridge in a city that was separating the inhabitants. ‘Estévez also acts as a cultural conduit, bridging people he has met with specific places in their town or inviting them to bridge their histories and memories through conversations’ (more information on his work here). Similarly, Jennifer Neslon and Dimitris Kotsaras bought products from the supermarket and created a chance map to guide them through Irish neigbourhood. The map leads them to locations where they knock on people's doors and cook with them, while engaging in conversations about [anything including] the changing demographics of their neighborhoods. As a result of this investigation they created the Limerick Cookbook which contains the histories of their encounters, including drawings of children, maps of their movement within the city, and their conceptual entanglement with the sites they visited, to document the relationships they created during their cooking experiments. That relationship becomes a very specific set of recipes ‘actually on behalf of’ 46 the ephemerality of conversation, as if the conversation becomes a tension between the intelligible matter of choreographed steps to be taken, and the unknown route they will take to reach a house according to a chance map that helps them fall through someone’s door. Someone performs the entry into the work by accommodating the [unexpected] artists in his home. The exchange and an assumed relationship is reversed: the artists bring food, the people fill in details on the situational and the sociopolitical context in which the people of the neighborhood live.

Non-­‐Site ‘Here, ‘the site is a place where the work should be but isn’t’: the site appears in the promise of its occupation by the Non-­‐Site, where a recognition of the site assumes the absence of the work, yet the work [the original site with fixed location] is a necessary index to the site [of departure].[..]

Indeed, the Non-­‐Site’s site-­‐specificity is an effect of this contradiction, in which the work and the site threaten to occupy, and be [linked] in, the same precise place. […] the Non-­‐Site’s convergence with the ‘Site’ [falls] in the implication of one in the other (Kaye, p.99)’.

The interior space of a work (inside the site -­‐outside the site) can be explained by taking into consideration the exterior circumstances of its presentation, and that very comparison of an ‘interior space’ to ‘exterior space’, one may argue, is the illusion of access. There is a fictional tension created between the ‘real space of the work ’and what is ‘outside of it. That relationship falls into confusion then a relationship between the elements is revealed to the viewer. If space is to be mapped as spatial (from single to multiple complex), temporal (from permanent to temporary concept) and social (private-­‐ public spaces) the work of Hector Zamora [would be a kind of departure from the physical site of the artist’] falls into the discursive sites of private -­‐ public spaces.

Héctor Zamora´s work 47 lies outside the conventional and institutional exhibition [but within that discursive site]. His work reinvents places, generates pressure between ‘organic and geometric’, ‘real and imaginary’, ‘outside inside’ 48. However, this way he addresses the ‘discursive site’ in which the viewer is engaged in ‘the reading of the site’ and this way his

46

47

48

Conversation with Jennifer Nelson Hector Zamora web-­‐site: http://www.lsd.com.mx/ See http://scapebiennial.org.nz/artists/hector-­‐zamora

audience is not that of the place but that same audience that follows exhibitions and has knowledge and education in that specific area. And in this way, one may argue that he literally questions access of places. Specifically, how is space conceptualized and what kind of disruptions is he installing to speculate on the function of spaces and the objects he inserts? He often uses public unconventional spaces, and a big part of his creative acts turn into a bureaucratic quest for permits. His parasitic structures filling in between buildings, grow out of their confines, and spill out of windows (See Zeppelin Swarm49) always unfitting or outfitting the space and, on other occasions completed without the sanction of the local government; what his objects acquired is a 51 52 mass-­‐produced sense, economic crisis, and the symbol of excess. 50

Vito Acconci performed his removal from the gallery in Following Piece 1969, when he followed different strangers on the streets everyday, and documented this in his notes and with a photograph of him following some-­‐one. In Seedbed his body was displaced under the floor of the gallery where the artist masturbated and the audience could hear some of his mumbling to imagine the rest of the act. Once more he removed his body from the gallery's central space and let the viewer watch a video feed of him (Claim excerpts 1971) from someplace down below the gallery space. Squatting in a corner with a crowbar, the site appears in the promise of his occupation by the Non-­‐Site (the feed)-­‐Site (his space in the corner). A recognition of the site assumes the absence of the work. Staking claim to his territory, he tries to hypnotize himself through language into an obsessive state of possessiveness: ‘The talk should drive me into a state where everything is possible.’53

Sigalit Landau54 focuses on an exploration of her own body and its relationship to territories and boundaries. Landau reflects on the theme of physical and internal boundaries and on the achievement and loss of identity. In her video Barbed Hula, 2000 video projection, a naked woman on the seaside rotates a hula hoop ring made of barbed wire around her waist. Her head is removed and cannot be seen. ‘What you see is a living female torso, of somebody, anybody.

Everywoman is hula hooping on the beach’ 55. By the act of removing her identity in the video, the

49

See http://www.lsd.com.mx/files/bienalw.pdf

50

See http://www.labor.org.mx/wp-­‐content/uploads/downloads/2011/07/Carpeta-­‐ Hector-­‐Zamora.pdf and from redcad Héctor Zamora: Panglossian Paradigm, accessed on Sunday, July 21, 2013 to Sunday, September 1, 2013 51

see also Pedro Gomez (double interactions) http://www.pedroreyes.net/07.php?szLang=en&Area=work&SubArea=07

52 See also Interactive work, Melanie Bonajo (allows the audience to leave with the piece)

53 Vito Acconci 1969. Following Piece. New York City in < http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-­‐the-­‐collections/283737 > [Accessed 17 September 2014].

54 See the following: http://www.e-­‐flux.com/announcements/unstable-­‐territory/ http://rfc.museum/past-­‐exhibitions/alone-­‐together/artwork-­‐images/sigalit-­‐landau http://www.sigalitlandau.com/downloads/KW-­‐dining%20hall.pdf

55 See http://mucsarnok.hu/new_site/dl/peter_kantor_opening_speech_sigalit_landau.pdf

conversation becomes about identity. Removing the harmless hoola hoop, the conversation becomes about playing with pain. Inserting the barbed wire hoola hoop the conversation becomes reversed -­‐ about internal pain.

Within the containment of the architecture of a room Emily Speed finds both an exploration between private and public spaces, inside-­‐outside, the interior and the façade, and an anonymity in the hiding spaces that interior space and urban architecture presents. Alike Acconci she moves from the physical body to psychological interiority, from exteriority speaking of interior transactions.

To practice the place, means to make a removal from it, but it also means to be deeply present in the concentration of practicing it. In the video The Walker, Tsai Ming-­‐Liang makes a durational slow-­‐motion walking throughout the fast moving, working and never sleeping city. The work turns into the experience, not of the slow walking as an act itself of [practicing place] but into the background noises and movement of people that practice and reveal the city's busy liveliness around the slow walking monk performer who sinks entirely into his deeply concentrated state.

MAY 10, The Story: an attempt to re-­‐write the whole story in collaboration with An Iceberg in the middle of the sea chapter, or a Project Report with a Monkey Mind

My current specific (non) site-­‐specific work is a continuation of my previous year exploration which was a lot about “inviting” and creating entry into the work and as such, all my interactions with the visitors became a subject of the work. The site specific was my home address, where people would come and in my mind that specific place is changing through the successful interpretations and actions of the visitors with the hint that they are those that accommodate me.

Iv. was oneof the people I talked to for many long hours in the house who challenged me to recreate this idea of house within his house. His vision was that ‘the containment within the room’ calls for consideration of outdoors activities, away from virtual world and technology. In his view, exploring the outdoor could put me in much more unpredictable circumstances, in his opinion very important for the making of such a possible open-­‐ended experiment. His suggestion surely put me in a position to question the entire framework for my experiment to reconsider/decentralize my sole structure and seek a whole new way to explore the meaning of art making and how I exist in spaces.

Going to live at his place is the idea of going to a place I don’t know anything about. It implies spontaneity, movement and a relationship.

So Yes, I accepted the proposition and went on my journey-­‐ to live in his house and to assume that what I find there takes new turns in the explorations through the newly added space. In a way, I created a reverse project of the previous year's idea and we revrsed roles. The location was important (the space to which he invited me) the exploration was focused on me, and my movement outdoors to a specifically chosen site I called Outlandia. The ‘here’ considers my movement inside the site and outside the initial site of exploration.

What looks like an iceberg in the middle of the Aegean sea or maybe a mirage, or a photoshoped reality, is actually an ‘open space’ on the tip of the Rafti Island and beyond Outlandia is an open space in the Agean sea located 35 km south east of Athens, in the city of Porto Rafti city whose administration depends on [is hinged to] one of the Athenian Districts.

We are in the atmosphere, the aquatic life, from the sand to the moon. The Elephant Rock together with the Lovers’ Cave beach his private Garden and the Rafti Island make up Outlandia site. Where? There. No people live in Outlandia with the exception of a temporary inhabitant at the Lovers’ Cave beach, the occasional inhabitants that visit and that is where my new collaborator works and lives and all those make it ideal to spend time in solitary loitering and even more to turn it into an interactive approach for exploring space.56

About x, y, z meters beneath in time, it can take up to x, y, z ideas in the air and examine both how I invent performative spaces there (some imagined), want is the nature of these transient spaces and who else does the rabbit become? There are many political edges for I do this.

I started collaborating with my adviser Jean Marie in August 2013 and the 1st ‘lead’ we had was that I intend to move a bed and sleep at the beach, which turned into the concern of ‘how to explore the space’. The intention to move the bed was because of the need to stay in the space and have a place to write and sleep. As a result of discussing it with my collaborator we came to the conclusion that I don’t need a bed to ‘exist’ there and as a result of discussing it with my adviser, we decided that it would insert itself as frame that does not fit the ephemeral feeling of situations I attempt to document… The 2nd important concern was how to re-­‐create the site and think in terms of interactive space but also be my private space, my escape vehicle, my 9 moths planning on escapism and isolation, and the possibly upcoming of 1 month of isolation.

I started scheming how to explore the space, how to get there, canoeing and straying from the Outlandia site for intercity walking on my walking journeys without destination(s).

During this time I also spent many days sitting in the 40 square meters room and outdoors writing about it and telling it.

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Whereas my 1st project year living life was limited to living and writing in a 75 square meter house in Athens, and inviting a few visitors to talk with on my couch, in 2013, I moved into a 40 square meters house in the city of Porto Rafti. However, in the latter the square meters of the house are not important anymore because I was out in the open. The action, the experimentations occurred in the space between the island and the coast. I started scheming about how to explore the space, how to get there, canoeing and straying from the Outlandia site for intercity walks on my walking journeys without destinations.

I kept a stream of writing logs as a result of my daily concerns long duration walking and travels with the canoe. And somewhere bordering and fusing between private actions and public appearances, I considered my public manifestations with the group Guerrilla Optimists to be a parallel project to that of Outlandia. There were always elements exchanging between the sites, but I always returned to discussions and explorations within and around Outlandia. Within all that walking and moving from one place to another I referred to the works as invisible works, walking stories, site for chance encounters, walks without destination(s), walks to nowhere.

Because it was very important to me that I don’t create a very certain thematic, a framework from which to work, and say ‘this is what this project is about’. I would embrace the possibility to change, adjust, survive in its looseness, decentralize the idea, and in this way practice the unhinging from the site. By questioning the ideological frame in which it is, I can begin to understand its power and control.

This work is based a lot on what people tell me as the material of the work. In a way, everything in the project was based on their creative input about what are directional and non directional decisions are for my work-­‐ that is, I do not know what will happen even if I want to and the heart of all that marching’ and streaming energy is driven by the creative nature found everywhere in peoples' suggestions about directionality and non directionality, hinging, unhinging, staying, moving, waiting, exploring spaces, ‘getting lost’ ‘going nowhere’ This often puts in question the negotiation that occurs between the Self and the Other.

It was important to me ‘not to direct the people’ (which is a kind of direction) into a specific project that is about xyz – i.e. ‘putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind’. So, I decided to undergo through that state myself. That is, by talking to people about what the islands is, what could it be, what happens, what can happen, why a canoe etc. I also create a situation for contact.

I felt I was re-­‐directed constantly because the combination of people’s suggestions and their visions of it (including my interpretations) cannot be predetermined in advance and even decentralizing my own self. I would keep on attempting to tell the story of what has happened and create a kind of continuity in jumping from story to idea to story but the main story can never be fully told. I re-­‐attempted to tell the main story but there is never time to finish it. Then I approached putting the one story in the other, making the detail ‘the central’ of an experience and the central the detail, and putting the one story next to the other.

It was very important that I didn’t direct the people into a certain frame of mind so there was a continuous friction between intention and chance circumstances. Non-­‐directing would mean non-­‐shaping a meaning, which rationally would mean no language (or everchanging language).

And yet I attempted to re-­‐tell the story multiple times and write stories about it in various ways (free writing and more controlled strategies, and writing from speaking while walking).

In order to explain the departure from the initial site Outlandia, going back and forth and jumping and walking across sites (The sites around it and outside of it (like the collaboration with the Guerrilla Optimists, my intercity walks and my public performances outside Outlandia)..

So Miwon Kwon said that site specificity implies a fixed relationship with the original site, with grounding through the site, and the kind of relationship between the site and the work. She also explained that those site-­‐specific and therefore unmovable works were initially made as a result of the intention of artists to create a work that resists the transferability of capitalist goods.

Many of the works imply an inseparable relationship to the site in the kind of physical, experiential and phenomenological relationship of the body to the site but she also explained how later on that very ‘transferability’ of a site-­‐specific work was practiced by artists as a resistance to the same issues. Its predecessors saw it communicated in the unmovable work and its successors saw, moving the work from the original/fixed site, as a new adaptation for the work and its permeability and adaption into the new site being a challenge that opens new venues in the artistic world and considers relationships with all kinds of sites, and this way, be less confined and marginalized by its own specificity. That allowed for specificity to be re-­‐ invented as site transferred ‘under certain circumstances’ and those circumstances make the work alive and redefined in the new compromise of its being moved. This is mainly important because the work is communicated in reasons for their circumstance, to the new people related to that new site and so they function as an ‘entrances’ into the work but complicated enough as frames for the work.

When I walk

When I walk I am moving When I walk I feel freedom act in my body When I walk I make time to explore the creativity in the act When I walk I practice space and a removal from it When I walk I think of my left and right foot When I walk I think of how I feel my feet on the ground When I walk I feel one flowing narrative When I walk I am forming a narrative that is not a capture When I walk I feel inseparable from the physical surrounding When I walk I listen When I walk I feel the continuity and the connections between all the pieces scattered coming from and going to some place else When I walk I think of the invisible line I leave behind me When I walk I don’t know where I am going When I walk I connect stories When I walk I think about my knee cups When I walk I get thirsty When I walk I think of the continuity in the act When I walk I create the continuity in telling seemingly discontinued stories When I walk I perform the nomadic of human thought

When I walk I decentralize one theme When I walk I free myself from the conceptual confines of the original and destination location When I walk I practice departure from the initial site When I walk I begin to understand the ideological confines of my own original structure When I walk I tell stories When I walk I meet strangers who are chance encounters When I walk and meet strangers that tell me their stories When I walk and strangers tell me their stories I connect theirs with mine When I walk I consider their story When I walk i implicate their story in my story When I walk I complicate their story When I walk I think of their story as a direction chance encounter When I walk and consider many stories in many directions and thus a non direction When I walk I consider conversations as chance encounters When I walk I re-­‐organize When I walk I don’t control my thoughts When I walk I let my thought flee to tell the situation When I walk I hinge and unhinge myself from the main story When I walk I pass through vegetation, architecture, sand, rocks and sounds When I walk I “see” sounds When I walk I enjoy the activity of walking within and through my body When I walk I develop a story conceptually When I walk I learn about the neighborhood When I walk I am walking towards the next story but I don’t know what that is

When I walk I don’t feel confinement Wen I walk I don’t have to organize because the fleeing thought is complete When I walk the pieces are falling together

When I walk I have the full right to my body to walk on the ground and earth When I walk I don’t transform the space, the act of practicing the space transforms me

Osman: ‘Paying out’ your freedom, May 13

Provisional conclusion: a return to all the people that told me stories about the island

I grabbed a bag with tomatoes and started walking with my rolling snail on a string towards Lovers’ Cave beach to meet with Sami and return to the 1st person who ever told me a story about the Island. Ivan had invited him for a pic knick in the dark and had prepped to cook for us.

In a way he created a situation for contact between Sami and myself. Sami’s story was how he and his brother stole a water bike and rowed during the night to the island. That night he further elaborated on the light around the island created by the light house… Didn’t you find holes there?, he asked. I said-­‐ yes, I found many holes. So I shared with him that I was writing a book about the island (I hadn’t seen him for a year since I started the project), through what people tell

me and for my walking and canoeing experiences. And so he said, yes, writing through and about people is how books happen. You have to experience it, but also to invent the situations for “it” to come out. We must further talk about that. I can’t wait to meet him again and ponder on his words. I told him how walking also made me think a lot about both legs. Sami also explained how the hands and the mouth of humans are probably the most developed areas and that the legs are not really the most stable part of the body. The mouth he said and the hands are well trained because we use them often in the everyday.

Osman was also there. Osman was the 1st person I talked to on the beach about the island and one of the 1st strangers I shared with that I would like to “get there”. Osman is an a way the temporary but also a permanent inhabitant of the Lovers’ Cave beach because he lives inside a tiny wooden construction that is turned into a bar in the summer. He guards the place and sleeps inside both: during the winter and summer. So in a way he is the keeper of the beach who secures the bar and cleans the beach every morning and so he sees the island every morning. But that night we didn’t talk about making a raft and going to the island as much as we talked about walking. Maybe he said something about walking or I said something about walking. Maybe Ivan said something about walking because I had spoken before on several occasions, how migrants walk for many days to cross borders and at first it seemed odd to him. On other nights, Ivan and I talked extensively about how migrants cross borders by long walking and by boats and how that is related to my 43 km long walking experiment and so he noted how the few people walking intercity are the migrants and I explained how walking is used for transportation and, in my view, that walking within the borders of the same country shows the potential of immigration.

Osman was talking a lot about how people from his country Pakistan would walk days and sometimes 9 months through mountains, and through snow to come to Greece. People die during the exhausting walking but he din’t loose any immediate friend. He explained that his trip was quite different and that it took him only 7 days to come because he was smuggled in Greece with a speedboat through Turkey. Then once he arrived here together with another 40, people they were placed in an underground room in a house secluded from central spaces where the police coulden’t find them. They let you go out of that room only if you pay the money, he said. And so I asked what happened if you didn’t pay the money? He said, ‘well they beat you up but they don’t let you go’. And so I wondered: did he have the money on himself? He further explained that he stayed in that room locked with the others only for two days because it was a way of doing things, that there was an arrangement with people in Pakistan and his father would pay from the other side, once Osman was in Greece. They communicated on the phone-­‐ Osman confirmed that he was here and so his father sent the money to ‘pay out’ Osman’s freedom. I was there only two days, but there are others that stay there for months until they pay for their freedom. He talked about the impossibility to get a residence permit, or a Greek passport. He said that he had to wait for about 7 years to start the process and explained how difficult that was for him to go to Petrou Rali [see what is Petrou Rali in the last story Why I am not Leaving Greece, in The Book of the Great Rabbit: Anythinglandia] and deal with the bureaucracy there. He explained that he couldn’t go back to Pakistan because he hadn’t obtained the needed documents to do so and so he couldn’t see his family. It’s been four years since he came to Greece. He talked a lot about the position of the woman in Pakistan and how only men work there and the woman stays at home. We talked about what are the consequences if a woman is caught having sex with a man before marriage.

He explained how things are with the deviant places like brothels. Ivan asked him about how people in Pakistan make vacations and there was not much Osman mentioned on that but explained that one can rent a hotel and this way have fun.

I knew Osman from going to the beach and also knew that he has a special relationship with the island because he sees the island everyday. I had no idea about Osman’s border crossing story because I never asked.

The Old spy was the 1st person I met, that told me in extensive detail specific things about the island-­‐ where and when to find the rabbits. Mitaka was the 1st person who told me there are rabbits fucking on the island and so shared that Sami has a story about the island. And the stranger I met in the water-­‐ was the 1st person who explained to me that once I go behind, the island drastically changes its shape and that there is a place to park – a tiny beach. That day, (the first time I. and I went on the island) I started going to the island in the canoe without knowing whether there is a way to have access to it because, I had observed it with my yellow binoculars and saw only inclined rocks that cannot be accessed. With the binoculars I could not see what was behind the island because there isn’t a point from the land that gives you visual access to what is the exact shape of rocks behind the island. One can however see not from Lover’s Cave

beah that the island is alsmost completery flat-­‐ cut straight through at his back side. That tiny beach he knew on the Rafti island, he explained, was a perfect and easy place to park. But when I got there, I realized that there are dangerous rocks near by the coast and I must be careful when I park my canoe vehicle there, to avoid the tide, because the tide can take me and slap me and the canoe against the rocks. So, in a way, there are specific hours favorable for approaching the tiny beach in a shallow canoe. I know those hours well, and enjoy both canoeing in smooth waters and when there are waves. These two experiences and other tides variations are very different but they are all connected.

Surprisingly enough Alex (a Guerrila Optimist collaborator) had a very profound relationship with the island (what a coincidence! He doesn’t even live near by, what is the possibility to collaborate with someone on a project in Athens for the central Omonia square and not to know him and that person to also have visited the Rafti Island (35 km outside Athens) and to have a profound relationship to that specific place!). He told me he used to go there with his brother and father in his childhood by canoeing and that the island for him was that spontaneous and childish exploration linked to physical experiments with the body, that we lack nowadays. About that same experience and connection to childhood we talk about a lot with Jean-­‐Marie…

Visit video Tying and Untying My shoes for some time now, here <watch video>57

Advisor Meeting May 13 (forth meeting with Studio Adviser)

Dear Jean-­‐ Marie, I really understand what you said about the tying and untying shoelaces, learning and the accomplishment that a child feels when the bow is looped for 1st time, in the difficult way. I still remember the fist time i did that-­‐ I remember the smell of the room and the textile of my gradfathers' jacket. We were in the atrium of my kinder garden where my locker was, sitting on a wooden bench. My shoelaces were then, as they are now, so long that I had to master double loops. That trick I learned from my mother while practicing on ribbons and perfected gift-­‐

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< https://vimeo.com/89497864 >

wrapping the duration of which may involve hours of doing so.

It really spoke to me, when you said in which tying and untying is related to learning and childhood and in my view is also related to the physicality of things and being ‘present’ on the site of exploration. I think about that on several occasions. It is indeed connected with the lack of physical experience and technology, and with the lack of the hands dexterity of children today due to technology trends operating and ruling our lives. In this context, technology controls the movements of our bodies and even our bodies’ abilities and potential to develop, like the example you gave with the use of iphone by children. As you noted, the hands of children are limited to the movement of sliding the screens In a way, I see the lack of patience and the need to play outside with sand and stones and wooden sticks and dress up in wild costumes, play with arrows, weeds and costumes...All the invention, the discoveries, and the messiness in climbing up a tree and searching for something mysterious that may or may not live in the water are fading away…displaced by computer games and ipads. Since I got my rolling snail toy and I keep on finding toys on the streets while walking, I ‘ve been thinking a lot about the ephemerality, the invention and the constant transformation of things in children’s games. What many of those games have in common, is the Sisyphean act that you pointed out at many times -­‐as the sun has, when it rolls on the island’s contour skin (like Sisyphus’ stone); the rowing with the paddle has it, as walking has it, the weaving of flower trails has it. I think a lot about rolling objects we played with when we were small: towers from cards that fall down and how we build them up again, making sand castles with walls and towers that change and transform-­‐ every minute they become something else...

Sincerely yours,

Ro ko ko

This chapter is dedicated to Monkey mind We talked about how the time after May 15 (the time that the book will be almost finished) I have the chance to explore those games and return to my initial proposal’s aspect about finding ways to collaborate with Ivan (among the initially indented) and the -­‐unfolding (unintended) aspects: exploring the space, finding a way to relate what I am doing with people (intended); exploring paths that practice what the journeying presents in the course of action which turned out to be in the walking, in the canoeing, in and in the getting to the island (unintended-­‐ found sites). The more I write about the more I am flooded with a lengthy unedited stream of writing logs …

How is that the initially intended and non-­‐intended actions unfold?

In order to explore the space, I walked and canoed a lot. I canoed because I was given the canoe for the project as an obvious everyday way to reach it, even though I would secretly intend to get there by swimming and by raft of some sort.

The idea was that, while I walk it could be possible to talk with people met by chance encounter about what this is as an artistic work, what is the island, what could it be, and be decentralized-­‐ directed and thus informed by people’s creative ideas. In that way the ‘work of art’ can be considered in the living life with people who haven’t been acquainted up close with art but most importantly I can acquaint myself with seeing through the prism of life and how a work happens naturally in its literal space of the everyday but is threatened to be erased.

This is how I started with the idea of Outlandia around the island. I retell the story of ‘getting to it’ by using the peoples’ reflections on the idea and what they knew about the island and used the stories about what they see in their life (not only in the work) that becomes the work. A key word from their stories would be the central site of exploration in my story and in my view, a

departure from the island. In short and to repeat, My idea was the idea of going to the island, and exploring the space around it but also finding ways to relate the work to people and collaborate with the very person that invited me to live there.

The story I re-­‐tell about ‘getting’ to the Island (chance circumstance) makes a situation for encounter with strangers but it was also important for my bodily contact with the physicality of the space and the physicality of movement. It was in a way a resistance to the lack of contact with outdoor space and the lack of time to explore long durations due to the ways in which I work, create capital for survival.

As a result of journeying to the island, walking, and canoeing I became very aware of my two hands and legs.

While walking I discovered the bougainvillea plants that was important because they were available both within the Garden (inside Outlandia) and outside Outlandia and third, they were important because they seem to be used by people as their fences or on top of their fences-­‐ and thus were used as some kind of private boundary. Also, the bougainvillea flower was a material that was readily available and free and was well known by all people so it was another possible situation for engaging in a small talk with strangers. As well, in many occasions I asked people to open their doors or to share the flowers leaking on the outside of their fence with me-­‐ one more way to learn something more about Porto Rafti and the island and ways of living and seeing life as well as seeing the creativity in making a flower chain intended to reach the island. This way the bougainvillea flower had the potential to be turned into a conversation about secluded action of collecting it and walking and be turned into interactions and vice versa.

Discovering that common thing between the Garden and the Outside world that I can use/collect as material in durational work, An element that I discovered in walking while exploring the spaces around but, one that is also used as a reason to walk. So, it is the idea of the bougainvillea in the walking and the walking in the bougainvillea.

Kept on weaving the flowers into a long line but then I observed that instead of making my intended line reaching the island I started making flower garlands [closed circles] for necks and giving those to people. So the knitting of one 36 meters long line turned into a line that was getting longer and shorter, longer and shorter, until one day it disappeared. Then I started talking about and how turning the flowers into an invitation and into the practice of walking into connecting sites (the beach with the island, the city with the idea of going to an island). I started my intercity walks without destinations as a way to extend a public invitation for people who may want to come to Lovers’ Cave beach and near the Island, created to connect and experience the 43km route from the Athens Photo Festival at Technopolis (in the center of Athens) and Outlandia (in the town of Porto Rafti). My performative action would be to weave chains for 7 days (no relation to Christian rituals) in the varous sites (this way finding a way to stay less in the gallery and more in Outlandia) and would distribute those to people in the several galleries of Technopolis as an invitation, together with the story about what I knew at that point about the island, telling them that I invite them to connect the garland rings in one common line in the water. Ideally this would be a situation for having strangers meet with strangers. I dug deeper and discovered an invented relationship of walking with an old Bulgarian ritual Lazarka [which is about walking, encountering strangers and letting flower chains in the water-­‐ but this is my adaptation of the ritual]. The original ritual is on Lazarus day, some time before Easter according to which small girls in the Bulgarian villages collect eggs for dying. They walk from their house with a basket and knock on people’s doors, perform something of their mastery and then return with the collected eggs to the house. Prior to starting to walk, the girls are dressed up in specific handmade clothes and adorned with red on their cheaks, with coins and flower chains. At the end of the original ritual I would go with my grandmother and throw the flowers in the river and watch it floating in all directions and get restless in the water for as long as it leaves our sight.

Every time I imagined that I am that flower ring-­‐ traveling free, and floating to some unknown place else(see Lazarka book)58

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I am guessing that this ritual as once talked with a stranger is a way to get the small girls think about marriage and fertility and show her beauty and tricks to the

After practicing for the long walk that would connect the Gazi site with the space around the island I went on walking that distance of 43 km walk between the two. The ways in which I exist in those spaces is through actions [the Sisyphean actions in the duration]. I created a stream writing story about 43 km of walking tittled Almost the Whole Story <visit story >59 and a video telling the same story titled Outlandia Now: encounter with the police <watch video> 60and further, created the chapter The Arrested [as in motion] walker in The Book of the Great Rabbit:Anythinglandia elaborating on the idea of how the detainment by the police during my walk is the capture of the spontaneity in the action.

After that, I continued walking and canoeing with an additional element – a bell tied to my body and to the canoe paddle, which permeated in both my exploration at Outlandia and my collaborative project with the Guerilla Optimist. As a result of shifting between the two sites, walking and canoeing, between solitary wandering and talking to people, I though a lot about ‘movement between the so-­‐ called sites here, but in the everyday, I absorb them as lived spaces ’. I continued writing stories as a result of going to the island with other people, as a result of making new acquaintances and as a result of canoeing alone and with others. This way, I could use elements from experience and what people tell me but also through writing, I can depart to other places. Through writing I could put the one [chapter/element] in the other [story/site].

After the walk I returned to the bigger picture (and how is this related to a bigger picture? – the physicality of experience, and immigration) I discovered how walking is related to the potential of immigration, to the encounters with strangers, to physical experience and to the idea of using walking as both an exploration of the site and as a departure from the initial site and its potential to invent encounters).

I kept on collecting flowers and tied a bell (to the body and to the canoe and the paddle)(the bell I see as my co-­‐traveler, as attached to my body while walking and as a device signaling my location in the water from far away, a sound that can be used to record walking). How is it that getting to the island and talking about it with others creates a consciousness of the island and a situation for exploration? Working on storytelling through encounters with people and the “here” concepts related -­‐ I try to re-­‐ tell and re-­‐write the story over and over again.

The way in which the bell is in the walking, the walking in the bell, the bell in the canoe, the bell in the island… The bell in Outlandia and the Bell in the collaboration with the Guerrillas (very different from that of how it is used in Outlandia; See information on that in chapter Group Concerns)…. the bell is an element that was transferred into all sites. The idea of using personal actions for communication, like that stream writing and the bell was like the idea of writing the stories in the book. There are other texts I kept logs of, that are more irregular and written in a stream of fast typing. After collecting and selecting some of those freely written texts and stories, I matched them with a corresponding image from my physical experiments and walks, to create an Album. That album uses the stories from the book and some that were not featured inside, so as to start telling the story all over again….

The book was that attempt to tell the whole story through its smaller departing stories, but it has started to leak out again, out of the book ….and to the island. I am leaving, I am going there now…

others of the village so that she can be liked for marriage and known for her special character exhibited during the performance she gives in every house> 59 < http://www.transart.org/ivanovar/files/2012/06/The-­‐Walk-­‐Almost-­‐the-­‐Whole-­‐ Story-­‐reduced-­‐.pdf > 60 < https://vimeo.com/80687535 >

The researching ideas of places, spaces, and sites and the practice of walking This idea of de Certau, that to tell one’s legend is to invent space and his idea that to the very drifts and leaks of meanings are the creation of space, are related to the (out of place) idea of Miwon Kwon to observe a site as various departures from the original site in different contexts.

These spatial consideration are also related to the ideas of spaces in Doreen Massey’s work which who writes that telling a story is the very ‘here’ -­‐ is the very creation of space that is constantly re-­‐ negotiated through the multiple trajectories of elsewhere that produce it.

Space according to her is always open, under construction, never finished and linked to some place else. That space is negotiated through what she calls the provisional happenstances that may or may not be met. This way of viewing of space I see as important in collaborative work (materials and ideas coming from various people that clush together) and complex personal work based on multiple subjects and context. Thes two types of spaces in artistic practice are not preconceived but they happen in the course of action. In my case, space is invented due to chance circumstances and the provisional experience with peoples’ stories and my endurance in the physicality of acts.

That people’s stories (but written by me) and intentions in a way is what directs my explorations: Ivan invited me (inspired me to the physicality of things, the present and canoeing), that the Spy told me about the rabbits in on the island (which further excited me about going to the island and question what rabbits do? the idea of being a rabbit inspired me to make up methodology for rabbitness as a way to explain the negotiation of the various sites I walk across) (See chapters Rabbitness and Rabbitography and the Rabbitness in the Outlandia)

Group Concerns

GUERRILLA OPTIMISTS: Case Study The exchanges between group and solo In this text, I reveal some concerns from my engagement with the Guerrilla Optimists group (est.2006 in Athens). Specifically I will refer to my engagement in the last one-­‐year 2012-­‐2013 and ongoing Public Dreaming project in Omonia Square. The project manifested as steady engagement at the most central public square in the city of Athens (Greece) every week. Sleep actions, napping at the square, manifestoes and meeting its inhabitants were actions at the heart of our project and these were supported through the everyday exchange of dreams via emails among group members (Jennifer Nelson, Amalia Charikiopoulou, Alexandros Georgiou and Manos Tsatiris). The actions of choice are the result of intra-­‐group negotiations about how we could develop a project on Public Dreaming and this resulted in somewhat more steady weekly visits to the site. We started with sleeping over at each other's homes (slumber parties) in order to create the space for discussions. Those developed into an idea of public sleeping and into a relationship for our experimentations with Omonia Square as a specific site. This demanded live engagement in public space, constant reinvention as well as extensive writings of manifestoes, statements, every day dreams and complex forging of promotional materials like flyers, a newspaper and a handbook, press releases and the like (the opposite of advertising). Even though those promotional materials were disseminated through known professional channels

and to artistic audiences locally, the true ‘audience of our actions were the people at Omonia square’. 61

The idea for making a book arose after one year of writing and sharing dreams on a daily basis, including sounds created out of our slumber parties, with the aim to communicate how those are related to our public actions in Omonia Square. The book was barely half-­‐way when we were invited to create documentation of the project for “Bozar”, for the exhibition No Country for Young Men: Contemporary Greek Art in Times of Crisis. Given that the transferability of the work was unthinkable, unless as a sound streamed live or performed some place else, and that an institution's regulations would limit the nature of our exploration, we found the ‘right circumstances under which a work can be documented’ without being streamed or performed (Kwon 2008)

The idea of a newspaper is the result of the feeling that all the ephemeral actions of the same group since 2004 constitute extensive work and must see the light of document, despite the fact that Optimists engage in invisible ephemeral actions: the work was substantial and the voices in it could reach audiences in other sites. It was a question of whether we should or should not ‘appear’ in a museum. In questions such as this I try to escape the limitations of this idea, and so we saw the possibility of being present in a museum as an opportunity to make new acquaintances and share our creative materials with other participating artists, get acquainted with each others' work and participate in an exhibition that was addressing times of economic crisis for Greece. The Guerrillas have been talking about other kinds of social, spiritual and experiential crises due to forces operating within an economy of corruption and isolation.

A series of non-­‐traditional actions, events and human concerns were introduced to those spaces and we further questioned our abilities to operate in more connected ways with the local communities, as difficult as this can be without funding or much free time on our hands for such explorations.

In addition to our actions, other special events had been organized in the city by Jennifer, Toby and Alex over the years, offering not only critical insights and challenging disruptions in the ways in which we think and make art, but also in the very link with doing this in public space out on the streets. (For selected actions since 2004 See Guerrilla Optimists Newspaper pages here:

<See newspaper pager here>62

The purpose of sharing dreams was to speculate on the inability to distinguish between reality and dream. I discovered that violence has invaded my dream space and was somehow permitted and dissolved into our dreams. Can they own our dreams? Then, dreams did not turn out to be fairytales -­‐they were filled with worries, fights, violence, uncomfortable leftovers, sexual material, fears and fears of something else. This to me showed the lack of common space for re-­‐ considering those in our city. Jennifer referred to a trauma in the collective unconscious.

Somehow through ‘re-­‐calibrating the acoustics’ of the dead square one could heal then a collective unconscious… Whether that was the unconscious of the city or the people living in it is still negotiable. For Alex the square needed healing. And for me – I was trying to concentrate on the situation as an opportunity for contact with them. I was trying to ‘get my body there’ which was a tremendous effort as it was for the other members given that we would have to cross 30-­‐ 40 km distances to meet at the square for the weekly occasions in the center of the city. It could be said that our presence would produce the occasional questions of statements and ways to

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conversation with Jennifer

< http://www.transart.org/ivanovar/2014/03/20/the-­‐dreamers-­‐handbook-­‐and-­‐in-­‐ between/ >

challenge the ways in which we all think about what is our relationship to this space and people, to art, how we exist in performance life, how we do not record, what we record and how we approach. Mainly how we let each other be challenged by one another and how we navigate contradicting views within a group.

There were constantly elements from other personal projects, excitements and biases infiltrating the politics of our organization and elements flowing in and out. The challenge for me was not to separate my personal work from that project but to let it infiltrate me and fluidly let elements come and go and affect the practices of my walking, island site and non site explorations. I would use elements and aspirations from their wanderings and unconsciously what we were talking about was inhibiting the group and changing the course of actions. It took time to decipher everyone’s intentions and motivations for participation as the activities over time were changing and they would require new ways of modalities to speak and ponder upon how an action would be done. With the impact of Alex much of our groups activities turned to doing instead of scheming on planning and on how to be done or recording it. Jennifer’s [impacts] would be manifestoes and that would keep urgent issues moistly and sound and into the unknown for a long time now.

The exchanges that happen within the group reside in many layers. Our communication would occur within the daily dream texts, ‘getting into each others’ heads and occasionally we would not be able to recognize who was the original creator of the text in question. Another way to communicate would be through the ‘reports of what happened’ after our actions and whom we met at the Square and what we learned about this person-­‐ however this strategy was not used regularly. Ideas, images and flying elements from the dreams exchange was affecting all of us and exposing states of mind to one another. There was no censorship. Many concerns were freely exposed and stripping down to identity questions of the things the self is willing to censor to the group-­‐if anyone ever did that. I was pushing for trespassing and smuggling of non dream experiences of daydreaming and conversations and questions that may or may not have happened, like conversations with strangers I meet in the metro and how they react to the sound of the bell attached to my body. The line between what was presented as my dream and what was ‘real’ was gone presenting new ways to re-­‐consider my personal work for transart-­‐ to consider my experiential walks experiment with the writing of fictional stories as if they had happened and keep on re-­‐contextualizing the work and considerations for new actions. What’s ‘real’ and ‘reality that I experience’ I also re-­‐framed for myself in that being a Rabbit does not make me any less real. The use of the bell was also an element that entered both the group project and my transart project. The ways in which it was used in the one was helping me differentiate how it was used in the other. In my walks, the bell is the sound following me everywhere I go, signaling of my presence in the space. The sound of the bell attached on my body or on the paddle of the canoe was my co-­‐traveler and ringing the bell intentionally was a celebration of imagining walking and travel. The bell would ring when I moved as a result of the movement, and the ring of the bell when I am not moving, reminds it is time to go out on the street. With the Guerrillas the bell was more of a discipline to which we would attend every week. We would sit down at Omonia Square in a triangular formation to ring the bells. The re-­‐ doing of that allowed us to see this action extended in time, re-­‐think it without changing it but through practicing it at different occasions in the same site. The bell ringing with two other people was much about making music and conversing through the sounds of the bells and occasionally re-­‐inventing on conversations after the ringing with passers by about ‘why is it that we are ringing the bells’. For many passers by, this was a religious act of some sort, they would come to explain. For me, this was an entrance into the context of the bigger work on Public Dreaming. For Alex this was sound therapy for the hurt spirit of the square. For Jennifer this was a practice in experimenting with new ways to approach one another. There was a constant tension coming from Alex that we must think of it in the same way. My understanding was that it is previous because we found the commonality in the very act of ringing the bell and the symbolic reasons of each one of us did not matter as context as much as it mattered that we have the bells as the context bringing us at Omonia Square (neglected space) every Tueasdays and that we were there actually doing it-­‐ carrying for and giving the time for this invisible action. The development

of the bell action was in the sole importance in the act of doing it and not that much an act of re-­‐ imagining it through its successful meanings. This made its textual explanation somewhat obsolete, and to be sited fully only through experiencing it.

‘Non of us “own” these ideas. They are (un)consciously collaborative’63

Omonia Bells J+R, Collaborative text The last page in The Dreamers Handbook To visit the book with visuals here: <The Dreamers Handbook up close >64

Since September 29, 2013, A, R, and J have been ringing bells for one hour, nearly every week in Omonia Square. We arrive from our various lives, spend time reconnecting to each other and the square, and then begin. We sit on the ground, or on a piece of cardboard when the concrete is too cold, facing each other in a triangle- about 2 meters apart. Some days it is hard to concentrate, but when we finally settle into the action- made with small, multi-toned but inexpensive bells that penetrate the sound field of Omonia- we notice change in ourselves and the people around us. The bells, miraculously, can be heard above the circling traffic. Their specific frequency sends vibrations across the cement. Passersby pause. Some sit nearby and listen. A few come to speak to us. Who are you calling to? I know what you are doing. Some draw spiritual connections, some just enjoy the strange intervention. Drivers stare out their window as they pass. We are focused. We are dressed casually. We are not on drugs. We are greeted by the dealers, the users and the man who sweeps the square.

We have noticed many details about the square in our time there. Small moments of beauty: the bird shit accumulates on the glass wall until it looks like a painting, the light on the pavement in the morning shines across the dark lines, the pigeons are free in the sky above and cast shadows on us as they move, if you are low to the ground it is quiet. The gesture, of course, evokes the symbolic nature of bells- but for us it is active. After ringing the bells we are all calmer and happier, in an alert but trance-like state. We chose Omonia Square for flying and dreaming because its problems seem so obvious. We can activate a painful awareness of this absurd landscape by juxtaposing our own vulnerability with such a harsh place. We did not expect that we would come to Omonia Square to heal ourselves. But of course we do. Engagement- rather than avoidance, in dreams and awake, is a way to celebrate life. Despite the long geographical distances that separate us, the frequent strikes that

63

Lacy, Suzanne 1994, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Bay Press: Seattle, Washinton

64 < http://issuu.com/rosinaivanova/docs/the_20dreamers_20handbook__20march_>

block our movement in the city, we believe that our interactions catalyze important space where we can further our inquiries and discussions on how to invent our peaceful vibrations that are in real contact with our surroundings, the people there and between each other. We all come from different cultures, different backgrounds and pasts and there is something very specie sprouting from our dreams (as in sleep), bell sound exchanges, our new encounters with Omonia inhabitants and mainly ideas that spring from our disagreements as artists. We invent, we challenge one another for and during our actions, because we see in in group practices, the potential to shake and re-­‐construct both the problematic setting of Omonia and our assumptions as people. We have to continue communicating through actions, manifestations, bell sounds, everyday dreams’ exchanges for the sake of optimism and find new ways to navigate from and to each other, through the harsh setting in which we wake up. We wake up in loud Athens congested with sirens, cars, buses, people, dispersing in the concrete. We wake up with all our different feelings, concerns and others coming from the stories of the strangers we meet at Omonia square. We travel to Omonia to meet, to sit down and start ‘ringing’. It is our attempt to put together a way to catalyze the co-­‐presence of our interactions in urban public space and to observe how the spatial configurations support to co-­‐create concrete behaviors in public spaces.

It has come to our attention, that one place is constructed by the multiplicity of the situations coexisting in a space. Places are not mere settings but they are reorganized and co-­‐produced through lived experiences. Observing Omonia square, has made us create dynamic views of how public spaces are constructed and performed by its inhabitants-­‐ it changes from morning to afternoon-­‐ just like our ringing explorations evolve into something else every time; and our bells produce different sounds in different areas of the square. We have a devotion to the same act but it changes through our experiences and new observations of Omonia Square. Each one of us incorporates his understanding of the space and the situation into combined modes of situation and this is very much what this book is about. We make use of the potential of the ‘open space’ the ‘open access’ and the activities performed in that space to examine what the dimensions of the situations are. What is ‘open public space’ in different social occasions? We become acquainted with the community found at Omonia and of the community we create among each other as a group, so as to challenge our own preliminary assumptions of the space and the nature of our interactions. Here Omonia (space) is the “Other”.

The ‘bell sounds’ we exchange with each other is another way to become acquainted and communicate with one another, the space and learn about the people there. We are sending intriguing bell calls to each other and those present there, so as to slip into the possibility for new and unexpected ways in which we may spontaneously re-­‐organize a situation. We simply create an occasion for contact. In the midst of individuation, fragmentation, public and city crisis, we are optimistic that our actions leave traces in the bodies of the living people.

Omonia Square at 22:00 Friday, May 17

Edited by Jennifer Nelson and Frida Pashalis

There were at least 4 other sleeping bodies on the stairs when we came. We placed Amalia's blanket on the ground. We felt the vibrations of the subway vent. I was tired but I knew I couldn't sleep. The Square was alive. Cars were circulating, sounds were coming from all

around. A massive group of bikers populated the roads around the Square. We were waving at them. They were waving back at us and smiling. We learned that they meet every * at * and then they go around the city's roads, trying to make space for their circling activities.

Spiros and Marie-­‐Rose passed by our square blanket, smoothly approaching us with not a real question but a gesture of intent to interact. What's different, is that we said we are trying to dream and fly in our dreams and Rose said: Yeah I want to get to another place too. It felt friendly, honest, natural and beyond safe to have their presence.

They opened their hearts and shared their struggles with us. They are both in a program for detoxification and explained their involvement there. I saw their intent for the future. She told me about a book: Love, Life and Hope had the format of verses and said everything that there is to be told about life! She shared her fears. We talked about death.

Spiros was helping her go through that and was himself going through the program. She had her purse filled with various books, notebooks, and more notebooks. She shared them openly with us. I felt and understood everything else she said. She said on several occasions that she wanted to travel. In one of her notebooks I saw her budget estimate to travel to Nafplio, a kind of dream she wrote in her little book.

I talked with Spiros for more than an hour and learned that you can read about a person's personality from his wrinkles, specifically to find out and see how young his soul is; That people are like colors, but there are so many colors that you cannot judge who they really are. He shared all about 'being himself' and 'being stable'.

He told me about the changing nature of people, that we are all in transit. He told me about presenting who you really are, about his home, about another 2 kinds of people: the ones that make pictures with their mind and the others that act on pictures and change the physical setting around them. We talked about the intent of people and their Dark Beast inside. He said on several occasions how important and what a special person Marie-­‐Rose is. His eyes were honest.

Marie-­‐Rose and Amalia were talking at that time next to us about things that filled their eyes with tears. It was as if Rose was transitioning into a new space in her dreams. Her tears that were full of pain were also vessels for her spiritual growth and a way for claiming her future. Rose started drawing. I trusted her. Her last words were: 'I want to have that which people are jealous of'.

The Square calmed down slowly and we all went our ways.

I want to thank Amalia for her all-­‐day support, for caring, for helping me with my luggage, for carrying it with me, for being honest, for the rides around the city with her blue dreamy vehicle, for the green beans, and for her demonstrative and tender sensitivity. For seeing the good in the bad I see.

IN AND THROUGH SPACE: THE SITUATION CONSTRUCTED BETWEEN TWO BODIES TALKING Encounters as sites, encounters as lived spaces

Today’s “performance ” art offers to “site-­‐specific” and has developed an understanding of site beyond its location, as the place of the work in relation to spatial and

ethnographic practices and theories. The argument that performed space can reside within an ethnographic perspective that includes the research processes of fieldwork as well as the artist bringing ethnographic material into the artistic world. These understandings do not present the sites in terms of sole spatiality, but in relation to the cultural and performative practices that produce extensions of the physical space.

Practically, that those sites happen when I meet people on the way while walking, or else, that they happen in the specific site location of the conversation in question. I did not approach the conversations as documentation for relational art-­‐I did not tell my self-­‐ go out, walk and talk with strangers, come back and record. Prior to assuming that a conversation is a site, I was trying to incorporate interactive strategy into my walks and around the Island. Instead of trying to invite people to come at that specific location around the Island, I realized that the interactive element is already happening while I am on the move: in the elevator, on the street, in the water, in the store…

The reason for not recording those with sound was because I do not encounter the conversation as a work before a conversation occurs. I am not aware of documentation so that I can completely experience the site as it happens in its spontaneity and doing it was far more important. I would record it afterwards with a text story remnant of the lived situation. This allows me to re-­‐create the encounter in a new space and the significant moments, in relation to this investigation, and also, allows for the possibility that the stranger can add to the reinvention of that conversation. Instead of having on our hands a recording of our conversation, a re-­‐writing of it stresses the inventive element and care to how we tell stories and what kind of stories we re-­‐tell. Such texts allow for the re-­‐visiting of the site of the story, forging and adding post reflective thoughts to their broader context of the complex cultural conditions that produce the sociopolitical conditions of the locations in question.

So, we have the first, the site of walking, the second site – the moment of encounter, the third site-­‐ the moment of exchange, the forth site the textual recording of the lived story and the possible 5th site -­‐ the adding to and the re-­‐writing of that artist’s text by the stranger. Raising the stakes of the moment-­‐ of encounter and not the text. What are the needs for performance (experience) in question, taking into consideration the function/state and the possibilities consequential to participation…

What do we want it to do? Would this be a deeper understanding of the histories forming the changes of the location in question, would this be the consciousness that a deeper understanding has the potential to participate in social space created? The answer of this cannot be answered solely by the artist, but one becomes a co-­‐creator within the field of the questions that arise as important to address at that moment within the specific cultural conditions and personal reflections of the storyteller and the storytelling.

We could have the aim to ‘reach’ a state (site) as a result of an activity. This draws again to the experiential site, but a question more to: the activity shared as a site has the potential to create a community of conversations-­‐ these stories disrupt the alienation consequential to social isolation due to immigration and economic crisis forced displacement.

The here site work is not always sited within the walking line but it is the displacement of the body and the duration spent in that displacement. That is -­‐when the site of the work is within the segments of the body – the experience of the work becomes contingent upon encounter with the duration measured by the awareness of the walker’s/writer’s/speaker’s r own duration and participation65.66

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where the pedestrian is in the constant process of being aware of

However, self-­‐contradictory, this journey is important for the unknown tracks being taken. It is not so much important to be explained, however, the more textualized, the more drifting occurs-­‐ the unstable and the more loose its context and relationships become. (Same drifting can occur when thinking)

Paddling and walking for example, do that drifting as well as text does, however, the difference is, that while in action the brain and the body have a completely different experience of drifting and multiple spaces constituted of varied ideas. In that, while paddling what the mind creates is drifting that re-­‐tells the pieces scattered over the borderlands and re-­‐tells the same story again in completely different manner. In that, new relationships and new ways to invent on drifting are created. There appears to be a profound “synchronicity” and concentration between though and bodily parts and consciousness of the physical movement.

The logic of nomadism and impermanence

The more we walk into the logic of nomadism, the more the ungrounded transience gives us ‘the feeling of being at home’. Home is ‘here’ and is always negotiating through “elsewheres”. How are we assuming home in the provisional here?; how is that the feeling of fleeing situations, chance encounters, make us participate in homelessness? When one has found home in a provisional space –it is the permanence in the impermanence.

It has occurred to me that the inability of the human mind to organize multiplicity and navigate the body through physicality is assumed to be the result of capitalist creation of the experience of disorientation and fragmentation. This alarming disjunction points between the body and ground, water atmosphere, even between the body and the (built environment), and the lack of time to re-­‐invent on how those affect our body. The ‘breakdown of spatial experience’ in both the perceptual and cognitive, is lost, disoriented, alienated it, is the feeling ‘out of place’, and consequently unable to make coherent meaning of our relation to our physical surroundings-­‐it is

her performance in the city

66 “The Non-­‐Site’s ‘mapping’ emerges, finally, in the restlessness of this relationship; in the possibility of the Non-­‐Site’s convergence with the ‘Site’, in the implication of one in the other, and so in the Here, ‘the site is a place where the work should be but isn’t’ (Bear and Sharp 1996: 249–50): the site appears in the promise of its occupation by the Non-­‐Site, where a recognition of the site assumes the absence of the work, yet the work is a necessary index to the site. Indeed, the Non-­‐Site’s site-­‐ specificity is an effect of this contradiction, in which the work and the site threaten to occupy, and be defined in, the same precise place.” from Kaye, Nick 2000. Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation.Routhlege:London and N/Y

the cultural symptom of late capitalism's political and social reality 67. The impermanent feeling of ephemerality of creative works has been associated with the choice to experience impermanence, to experience nomadism as a practical decision in one’s work and it has been wrongly confused with the forced instability caused by forced immigration.

These concerns are at the very heart of postmodern heterotypologies of disorientation – the inability of oneself to map the self in the world of transitional capitalism. Unwillingly one is put into disorientation.

Now –here-­‐ so many things were mentioned – and gaps are left open-­‐ exactly because of that un-­‐ mapping. The challenge here is to distinguish between the variations of transitionality, ephemerality and instability and the variations of un-­‐mapping. That is, how the first can be practiced as freedom of will and the other as a political instability and a political problem. In that every citizen is required to perform the stability of legitimization with identity cards and income and the other is….

Am I walking through or am I moved through the architecture of space – the physical structure ?

And are people-­‐device oriented and reduced to few experiential walks in front of the computer in the year of 2014?; Can we see this in another way? Or is it again about inducing irresistibility of the goods of God68 Capitalism and God bank account and God car and God travel abroad.

‘Qualities of permanence, continuity, certainty and groundedness (physical and otherwise) are thought to be artistically retrograde, thus politically suspect, in this context. By contrast, qualities of uncertainty, instability, ambiguity and impermanence are taken as desired attributes of a vanguard, politically progressive, artistic practice’ [and wrongly accused for[of] not being able to progress on continual local relationship] ”(ibid).

We need to closely understand why it is that impermanence, movement are not vanguard (discourse) instances but are related to conjunction of the body with its material surrounding as the body accessing public space, revealing both the dead ends of the state power [by showing the limited access and instability advertised by media]. To be out is something unknown, unstable, where anything can happen to you. It reveals some kind of ‘a fear society’ whose feelings of safety and well-­‐spent time are tied to God credit card. Deluze and Guattari saw in the ‘displacement of fixed bound place identity with the fluidity in a migratory model, producing multiple allegiances and meanings, identities based on non rational convergences forged by chance encounters and circumstances’ (in Kwon, repeated for a 3rd time), I have found those three in manifest walking on the streets and encountering strangers and in canoeing to a fixed site.

What I am proposing is not ‘Moving’ beyond the inherited conception of site-­‐specific art as a grounded, fixed (even if ephemeral) for the forthcoming of nomadic practice, rather in the interplay of the two, or else, there is a departure of the initially fixed site and returns to it for the site is no longer where is supposed to be but there is the need to refer back to the site and the grounding site is a necessary index to the work. That is, the work is not a necessary index to the site, but it is the movement and the negotiations between the sites and the spaces in which I walk (the removal from the site) that supposes the possibility to forge ever-­‐changing conditions of a work created through the conversations on my way. What brings the permanent by practicing the impermanent of that act (repetition). The impermanence is the possibility that the work is conditioned by human relations and physical presence (irregular –which disrupts repetition and

67

http://www.google.gr/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=wrong+place+kwon&ie=UTF -­‐8&oe=UTF-­‐8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=791pU9TYDIrc8ge-­‐24HICw

68 inspired by Toby Short from his statement on mageia in the Guerrilla Optimist Newspaper

repetition that is irregular). If we suppose that this is a nomadic work, because of the wandering, roaming, drifting, bodily concerns, thought and conversation, then it could be argued that is based on chances that may or may not have the provisional ability to create local longstanding relationships.

Endnotes

Miwon Kwon ‘relational specificity’ and Doreen Massey ‘relational spatiality’. i

Whereas Miwon Kwon writes: “[ ] addressing the uneven conditions of adjacentcies and distances between one thing, one person, one place [space], one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalences via one thing[space] after another (Kwon 1997, p.166) “. What Miwon Kwon writes is a kind of ‘relational specificity’ I trace it to Massey’s relational spatiality’ that she names ‘relational politics’. For Massey space is made through its relations. ‘Space becomes, therefore, the very ground of the political because to think spatially is to engage with its processes of coexistence. In this sense it creates a type of relational spatialities (politics) based on ‘the negotiation of relations, configurations’. So if one follows Kwon the interconnectedness of the possible reconfigurations of one thing [space] next to the other [space] will open up the negotiation of interrelations of spaces (sites), but according to Massey, they will also ever discontinue and re-organizes their relatedness through the adding of the new arrivals.

The interconnectedness of the possible reconfigurations of one thing[space/site/text] next to the other[space] constantly discontinues and re-organize their relatedness. Temporality is a prerequisite for spatiality or else temporality is taming spatiality and so relationality is an instance and a capture taking instantaneous fixed points of positionality providing provisional instances to unhinge that positionality and perform it as constellation of meanings as openings, entrances to other spaces. ii

Lefabvre proposed analysis of lived spaces and discusses our ‘right to the city’ within the context that the organization of space is a materialized product within modes of production and labor but it is our right to transform the city through our movement in it. As the Marxists followed his line of thought and saw the structure of mobility as producing money, generating a model of production and the labor process. The Frankfurt School claims that the consciousness of that reveal the possibilities that synthesis of transformation of space and time. iii

Caron, Emmanuel and Richaud, Lisa 2014, ‘Behaviour in Open Public Spaces. A Tentative Combination of Spatial Analysis and Interactionism.’ [ONLINE] Available at: < http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/criticalissues/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/richaudsppaper.pdf. > [Accessed 15 February 2014]. iv

In their essay ‘Behavior in Open Public Spaces. A Tentative Combination of Spatial Analysis and Interactionism.’ Emmanuel Caron and Lisa Richaud discuss the ‘understanding of social norms underpinning behaviors in open spaces’. Using the in situ ethnographic research, they ‘try to demonstrate how “observing details” can be a relevant method to understand how public space is being constructed and performed. By “open public space”, we refer to portions of the built environment which are physically open to anyone and which are not explicitly and/or immediately perceivably devoted to a particular type of activity. They create a re-visitation of the site and observe it in terms of people’s movement and changes of their positions at different times of the day to explore how these different definitions of the situation are performed and coexist with one another. The two, engage with public spaces and the way to study those .’[O]bserving details’ are relevant to how space is being constructed. Through

public places and through a spatial analysis they draw patters and discover behavioral and public norms. They discuss notions on public spaces, in situ ethnographic research, and how those evolve. The conceptual construction of place may be too tied to its mono historic image.

One can ‘incorporate the culture into the definition of situation’ making evident how the same space can be caught in different social occasions (time). Multiple social realities occur in the same place which makes it impossible to grasp place as a single event. Sitting at a square then, as a performative work, would be a question of how we form, think, experience, predefine and re-define the concept of social spaces?

For more on spatial theorists, writers on space in social theory see Lefabvre, ‘right to the city’, David Harvey and Edward Soja who worked on the idea that space is the production of the social relationships Harvey connects our right to the city with individual rights and collective power that is inactively neglected and thus we neglect our human rights. v

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Solnit, Rebeca 2006. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Reprint Edition. Penguin Books: London / NY. This book by Rebecca Solnit draws on intimate moments from her journey. It explores inventive ways of thinking and writing about the unknown through the practice of walking, wandering and getting lost in one’s thought. Often, her stream like thought explorations fuse with internal questions, practices of other artists and ways of seeing. She uses long illustrative sentences falling apart as she continuously takes the reader to a new point and looses connection with what was previously talked about. This way of writing about distance and walking makes connections with both physical and conceptual aspects of the physicality surrounding her, giving the reader a journey through her observations. Her book is constant weaving through unknown ways into her mind. Her very distinctive way of writing creates connections between concepts and elements seemingly dispersed and in a first stage of their shaping. Her writing appears unfinished or in process though her book is carefully structured and elaborated. In her book, we can capture moments with performance and essays, with sculptures, yet at the same moment permitting a creative human mind at all times to make connections and travel. I see her work as an allusion being made between creative existence and the inherent inventiveness of wandering/walking minds; as metaphor for duration in art practice and the durability of the artistic mind to question conceptions as the artist-writer breathes and walks into the unknown.

‘The Hymn To Freedom’ action, involved the bringing together of a group of immigrants in an artist studio in the center of Athen, including myself, to work with a piano musician on a weekly bases.The idea was that we will learn the Greek anthem and we will sing it in front of the Supreme Court in Athens. For me this act was both finding an attachment to each other and a peculiar protest concerning our belonging to this country in the minds of others but mainly the interaction with the other participants, that created a sense of community. Jennifer (the initiator of this work) had planned a way to show this at the Kafeneion pop up urban-exhibition space (an alternative gallery space organized by Paul Zografakis, which was perfect for this kind of experimentation because it was a real apartment for rent on the level of the side walk he obtained for free and was more of a ‘walk- in&drink a coffee with us’ space). The idea was that “walk in and drink coffee” would create a space to meet with the local passer by. For the night of the final performance, which was quite peculiar, we (all the participants) shared a very tiny room (almost a box space, somewhere on the back of this place where none of the people that were in the main exhibition room to see the whole program could not see us) and so we were very close to each other, compressed in this back space for nearly two hours. When I say very close, it means that we were all rubbing onto each other and speaking in each others faces and this made us feel closer than ever before. After staying in this tiny room (at the back in the hidden room of the Kafeneion where the rest of the people at the Kafeneion could not see us) after the 2 hours we would walk through the main exhibition space where others were performing that night, and out to the street facing the Supreme Court. On that sidewalk, there, we would sing the practiced anthem together- all lined up. vii

My role in this project was as an assistant to Jennifer (this was 7 years ago) and for me it was not so much about the piano or the statement as much as it was a blessing because of

the tiny community of people from all over the world that formed during the weekly singing. My contribution to the project was very demanding in that I had to communicate with people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Africa and other places to take their statements on why they were here, how they felt here, and what the nature of their belonging here- in Athens, was. Of course the challenge of that was to initiate a conversation in a language (since we rarely shared one and could not understand what the other was saying as well as the tension that I had to record that and the responsibility that their statements were passing though me, and be aware of my biases in this type of communication and not to put something in their statement they didn’t mean) I did not know any of their mother tongues nor did they know English or Greek, or Bulgarian, but still we could speak. Here are some statements that were produced as a result of these conversations and were then slipped into peoples’ hands at Kafeneion, to those who were not part of the making of this experiment but saw us singing, lined up, the “hymn to freedom” anthem. I think that the printed statements on the slips were making more sense to their original authors for having and seeing that their voices were present, out in the open and that they counted and revealed something that we all kept inside us for a very long time, because no one ever asked…

Newspaper Also, we are assembling a Guerrilla Optimists Newspaper (with Toby Short and Jennifer Nelson the main designers and Alexandros Georgiou printing liaison). The newspaper documents all the actions of the Guerrilla Optimists in Athens for the last 7 years and more.

Thank you note and acknowledgements

I want to thank Juliya Vazharova, Nikos Doulkas, Ivan Ivanov,Jennifer Nelson, Jean-Marie Casbarian and Michael Bowndige, in particular since without their invaluable support this book would not have been realized

Editing: Jennifer Nelson and Frida Pashalis Photos and cover: Rosina Ivanova

rosina_ivanova@yahoo.com