9023096 Tipuri Psihologice Descriere Jung

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2009 Marina Kotzamani PAJ 92 (2009), pp. 4554. 45

LIVING AND WORKING IN AHENS

Ioannis Savvidis, Laertis Vassiliou,Maria-Talia Carras, and Sophia ournikiotisin conversation with Marina Kotzamani

Four young proessionals in the arts living and working in Athens are the ocus

o this conversation. Ioannis Savvidis is a visual artist particularly interestedin space, who mainly works with video, installation, and architectural design.He is based in Athens and Berlin. His recent work was shown at the rst Biennial o

Athens (2007) as well as at Art Athina (2008). Savvidis is a member o Stadtwald, agroup o urban action based in Berlin, o Osservatorio Nomade, and o the RuusCorporation. Laertis Vassiliou is an actor and a director. As an actor he has worked

with distinguished theatre directors, including Roula Pateraki, Teodoros erzopou-los, D. Mavrikios, and Robert Wilson. He has directed Mrozeks Te Emigrantsandmore recentlyOne in en, a perormance about immigrants in Greece, which wasinvited to the theatre estival Mess in Sarajevo the all o 2008. He also works inlm and television. Maria-Talia Carras and Sophia ournikiotis are art curators.Tey ounded (in 2004) and co-direct Locus Athens, a non-prot contemporary artsorganization that does not have a space as such but curates projects in various sitesin Athens, organizes talks and art lm screenings, and publishes art books and cata-logues. Recent work includes Sampling(2008), an exhibition o seven contemporaryurkish artists at the Center o Popular Art and radition in Athens.

Te city o Athens, sensitive to the populations evolving, multicultural identity,inspires and shapes the work o the participants in this conversation, all o them

reecting divergent elds in the arts. Tey are skilled in employing artistic conceptsand media to explore subjects relevant to the new global era, such as immigration andtourism, and adopt a variety o approaches, rom playul postmodern discourses tosite-specic perormance and archiving work. Tis conversation also highlights Greeceas a country o diaspora, its participants having been brought up in or lived abroadover extended periods o time in diverse countries, including Germany, Albania,and England. Tis explains their strong interest in approaching central concerns inpresent-day Greece and Athens as outsiders, rom alternative, critical perspectives.Subjects range rom the new immigrants to international relations with its Balkan

neighbors, including urkey, with whom relations have traditionally been strained.Teir work exposes sensitive issues such as racism, censorship, and nationalism.Regarding national identity, the relation between Greeces European and Easternheritage also suraces in the conversation. Unlike older generations o Greeks or


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46 PAJ 92

even current ocial state rhetoric, participants reely draw on Eastern elements inGreek culture, without eeling that this detracts rom their European identity. Ona related note, they are inclined to explore the ancient heritage in terms o popculture with nonchalance and humor. Other characteristic eatures about living in

Athens emerge in the conversation, such as the inadequacies o city planning, which

has resulted in extensive illegal building, and the necessity or small-scale projects,which allow or intimate, ace-to-ace interaction. Te conversation was taped inAthens, on April 18 and 21, 2008.

KOZAMANI: How is space relevant to the work you do? How does living inAthens engage you?

LOCUS AHENS: As the name o our organization denotes, we are interested in

the city and how it works. We ounded Locus Athens in 2004 with the aim to doexperimental projects o contemporary art that would be in situ. We place the workin a certain space and are interested in the social discourse this produces. We also tryinvolving the people associated with the particular space we choose in our projects,

who may not be the people who go to art galleries. We set up a dialogue betweenthe space, the people, and the art and are open as to what will ensue.

KOZAMANI: Have you had to deal with sensitive issues in the projects you haveundertaken?

LOCUS AHENS: Yes. For example, or Disco Coppertonewe solicited works ontourism rom contemporary Greek and oreign artists. Tey explored the subjectrom conicting perspectives, rom tourism as antasy to tourism as a product ocapitalist industry. Te works were designed or and presented in 2007 at a transitspace in Piraeus, where tourists on cruises embark. Te project compelled us to deal

with issues o nationalism and censorship in ways we had not oreseen. Te guardspolicing the space would not let us put up two works by Carolina Caycedo: a Greek-

Albanian ag and a urkish-Cypriot-Greek ag. [She is an artist who combineselements o ags rom countries in tension, creating new ags to represent them.]Teir reactions against these ags were so vehement and insulting that we decidednot to show them so as not to jeopardize the entire project. We do not only workin public space. We have also used private spaces, spaces we have ound by ringingpeoples doorbells. Setting up a work in a space is like living at a diferent placeevery time. You get to know the lie o a certain area, i only briey. Te kind o artcurating we do is personal and creative rom beginning to end.

SAVVIDIS: Isnt this mode o operating characteristically Greek? In Germany orexample, you cannot nd a space by ringing peoples doorbells; you have to go

through institutions. Its easier in Athens than elsewhere to invade a space and tobecome part o a network. Tis may have to do with the small scale that allows orpersonalized interaction.


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KOZAMANI / Living and Working in Athens 47

LOCUS AHENS: You are right about Athens; relationships between people hereeasily become personalized, human. Lets not idealize, however. Our invasions areephemeral; as soon as we leave a space we are orgotten. But the people do participatein the process o making a project happen.

VASSILIOU: Youve been talking about invading a space. Isnt there a danger ovoyeurism in what you do?

LOCUS AHENS: We certainly risk alienating people with what we do, as happenedwith the guards at Piraeus. But it is not our intention to create embarrassment orto approach the people associated with a particular space as picturesque curiosities.In Disco Coppertonethere were all sorts o reactions and all could be heard. Oddlyenough, perhaps the art people complained that the works blurred with the back-ground and became invisible, while the tourists easily spotted them and were moreresponsive to them. We dont aim at transposing a polished, nished product into

a space. Rather, space becomes an integral part o the work itsel.

SAVVIDIS: Space is a dominant element in my work too. I am interested in howsymbolism is created in the city where I live. How do modern Greeks read theirown history? Te question intrigues me partly or reasons that have to do with mybackground; I am the son o Greek immigrants and grew up in Germany. I alwayshad the sense that the Greek part o my heritage was unexplored. I ocus on howpublic memory is inscribed in space. Greece is a paradise in this respect; there is somuch material here. For example inAthenscope, through a series o maps and other

architectural designs, I question the continuity o Greek culture through the ages, amyth that has prooundly marked Greeks or generations. I present three alternativeversions o contemporary Athens that are possible had history taken diferent turns.

You see how historical memory is constructed, how stereotypes take root. Tere isgreat detail to my architectural designs so that they will be convincing.

KOZAMANI: Why do you like to work with architectural design?

SAVVIDIS: In my maps, I approach design as a set o socially meaningul signs.Tis is why design is intriguing to me. I also like the semblance o objectivity, adistancing rom the identity o the artist that design entails. Te sel is no longerat the center o the work. Tis allows or more substantial questioning. I think omysel as an artist-researcher, especially as a lot o my projects are based on histori-cal research o space.

VASSILIOU: When I think o space in relation to Athens what comes to mind isOmonia Square, the avorite hangout o immigrants in Athens. Tis is like a seeth-ing cauldron. Since 1990, when the immigrants arrived in Athens, you can hear somany oreign languages around Omonia. Tere is a multiculturalism that wasnt there

beore. It is no accident that theatres have always been at the center in a city, whereevery sort o cross-ertilizing is possible. As a director, I am interested in spaces likeOmonia, where there is a mixture o cultures. My work centers on the problemso the new immigrants in Greece; I am an immigrant mysel, o Greek-Albanian


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48 PAJ 92

Bottom: Disco Coppertone(2007) an exhibition on tourism

curated by Locus Athens at

OLP in Piraeus, a transit space

or passengers on cruises. Photo

courtesy Locus Athens.

Let:Athenscope(2007), aninstallation o mixed media by

Ioannis Savvidis. Detail o an

architectural study or a theme

park on the Acropolis, or

Athens B. Courtesy the artist.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/pajj.2009.31.2.45&iName=master.img-001.jpg&w=399&h=265http://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showImage?doi=10.1162/pajj.2009.31.2.45&iName=master.img-000.jpg&w=238&h=342


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descent. Te title o my recent work, One in en, reers to the current percentage oimmigrants in Greece.1 I this ten percent had a voice, they could disturb the Greekbureaucracy, which actually pushes them towards orming a ghetto and to becomingviolent. My discourse in theatre is political in the Greek etymological sense o the

word: it is about the city, the polis.

KOZAMANI: As Laertis touched on, over the last teen years Athens has beenturning into a multicultural city. Lets explore how multicultural concerns gure inyour work. I recently sawSampling, the exhibition o contemporary urkish artiststhat Locus Athens curated at the Center or Popular Art and radition, a olk artmuseum. It was striking to see a large inscription in urkish at the aade o themuseum that read in translation, Are you one o those that we could get European-ized?2 For Greeks, the question put in play the Oriental elements o Greek culture,in a context where such elements are considered quintessentially Greek. A olk-artmuseum in Greece has traditionally been taken to exclude multiculturalism bydenition. Perhaps your exhibition opens up the possibility o conceiving a Greekolk-art museum in a new way. Can you talk about your curatorial approach?

LOCUS AHENS: Te museum is housed in a landmark interwar building thatcombines modernism in original ways with Arts and Crats. Te exhibition posesyet again the problem o how you combine modernity with tradition in a newcontext. Most o the works we exhibited in Samplingrely on tradition, which inthe case o the urkish artists has a rm Oriental basis. Yet this is a tradition that

we also partake o as Greeks, requently not acknowledging its Oriental nature. We

wanted the Greek public to approach contemporary urkish as well as Greek art assimultaneously strange and amiliar.

KOZAMANI: Why did you choose to mount an exhibition o individual urkishartists as opposed to an exhibition o contemporary urkish art?

LOCUS AHENS: We didnt want the Greek audience to approach the exhibitionwith preconceptions about the nationality o the artists. We wanted them to put asideideology and politics so as to be able to appreciate the works as contemporary art. Itseems that the exhibition responded to a real need, as many people came to see it.On an individual basis, Greeks and urks get on with each other. Even though wetried to avoid the national issue, on the institutional level we had problems securingunds or the exhibition because its subject was considered sensitive, on the Greekside, as well as on the urkish side.

KOZAMANI: Are you interested in curating more projects involving artists romthe Balkans?

LOCUS AHENS: Yes. Greece is on the periphery o global culture. Why should

it ollow Western models? Besides, Western art is already ully developed. Whatcan Greece contribute to it? We want to collaborate with other countries on theperiphery, which we relate to on a more equal basis.


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KOZAMANI: Laertis, your work also poses the question o multiculturalism in aBalkan context since you are dealing with immigrants rom Eastern Europe. Terehave been numerous works on the new immigrants in Greece in recent yearsontelevision, in movies, as well as in the theatre.3 Most plays I have seen tend to benaturalist melodramas. One in en stands out: it is humorous and dynamic, making

claims on the part o the immigrants. Perhaps the reason your work is powerul isthat it is a perormance. You have chosen proessional actors rom Eastern Europewho are also immigrants in Greece doing jobs to survive. Your actors do not imitatethe lie o the immigrant; rather, they carry it in their bodies, they show it.

VASSILIOU: It is now trendy in Greece to write about immigrants. Te works areull o clichs about the poor but honest toiler. Which immigrant is clean? I chosethe perormance mode because I wanted to show the lie o the immigrant as it is.In the production actors introduce themselves by their real names. One in en is nottheatre. I didnt write a play and then choose the actors. Rather, I chose the actorsand developed the work with them.

KOZAMANI: I also ound it interesting that you insist on diference. We hearthe actors speak in their own languages at times, there is even a quarrel conductedin two oreign languages. You make un o the insistence o Greek employers to callthem by Greek names. At the same time, you remind Greeks o their own emigrantbackground. In a moving scene, the actors quote verses rom traditional Greek olkand pop songs about immigrants to express their own alienation. So while you insiston diference you also explore what Greeks have in common with immigrants.

VASSILIOU: As immigrants, we want to be integrated into Greek society but notto be assimilated. We want to keep our distinct identities. I reer to Greek emigra-tion with conciliatory intent. Remembering helps us live peaceully with each other.Greece currently has a very absolute stance towards immigrants: either you are Greekor you are nothing. I should say, however, that while the state is nationalist andracist towards immigrants, on a personal level, the people are warm and receptive.Greek amilies in my neighborhood have urnished the houses o my relatives andhave helped them get papers. In the culture o ordinary people as opposed to highculture, there has always been multiculturalism in Greece. Tere are old Greek popsongs with Muslim names, such as Mustaa and Hanoum.

KOZAMANI: Ioannis, how has the experience o living and working in twocountries, in Greece and Germany, come across in your work?

SAVVIDIS: I wouldnt have been able to doAthenscopehad I not also been German.I wouldnt have as clear and detached a perception o the history o Athens as anideological construct. In the two cities that I know well, Berlin and Athens, therehave been major turning points in historical development. In Berlin there was the

belle poque, Nazism, and the new ace o post-war Germany. o go urther backin time, in Athens there was antiquity, Byzantium, the Ottoman rule, the modernperiod. Germany and Greece have diferent perceptions o history, though. Whereas


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Germany has dealt with its responsibility or World War II and with its guilt, Greececontinues to live in a lie. It does not acknowledge responsibility or its historicalmistakes and always plays the victim.

KOZAMANI: So youve been saying that living in two cultures nurtures a critical

look towards history in your work. In the errace, a work rom 1996 that I admirea lot, you combine reerences rom Berlin and Athens, as well as rom your ownimmigrant background.4 Can you talk about this work?

SAVVIDIS: erracewas a wooden Greek-style terrace painted in the national colorso white and blue that I had set up in a dead zone o the Berlin Wall, inaccessibleon oot. Te work reerred to my identity as the son o immigrants and to Greeceas a utopia, or as an internalized space. Te skeletal, incomplete structure o theterrace also reerred to Berlin as a city in transition at that time. Moreover, it alsoevoked contemporary Athens as a city o gaping, incomplete buildings: the ancient

ruins and also the haphazard, improvisational style o houses built transgressivelyoutside, but also occasionally inside, the city plan.

KOZAMANI: Yes, these are the temporary houses, always under the threat oa demolition that never happens. Indeed, besides the complex multicultural reer-ences, another striking element oerrace is its emphasis on the temporary. Tiscomes through not only when we consider Berlin in the nineties, and Athens andthe immigrants situation, but also in that the work, set up in an inaccessible zone othe Wall, could only be viewed by passengers traveling through the area by train.

SAVVIDIS: In retrospect, the erracewas also temporary in that it was destroyedby strangers who transgressed into the dead zone. I was crying when I saw my ter-race in ruins; this work was a orm o psychoanalysis or me. Te temporary hasprooundly marked me personally and it comes across in my art. My parents alwaysperceived o their situation in Germany as temporary. Our home in Germany waspacked with boxes o kitchen appliances that my parents wanted to take to Greece

with them. Tose boxes were the rst monuments to time that I ever saw. Whenwe nally opened them, years later, the appliances had become cult objects. Mychoice to settle in Athens had to do with a need to clear up who I am, to deal withtemporariness.

KOZAMANI: Laertis, like Ioannis, you have an immigrant background and youexplore immigrant identity in your work. Is the temporary important to you?

VASSILIOU: Tere is an important diference between old and new immigrants.Old immigrants, o the generation o Ioanniss parents, conceived o their situation inthe host country as temporary because they aspired to return to their home country.For the new immigrants there is no going back. Tey come to Athens to stay and

this makes them more demanding. Whats diferent rom immigration in the past isthat the new immigrants are now altering the character o the host country.


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KOZAMANI: Is this why the title o your work reers to a percentage, One inen, to denote that you are dealing with the current problems one in every teninhabitants in Greece is acing?

VASSILIOU: Yes, my production is o the here and now. One o the three actors

in my work is Bulgarian. Bulgaria joined the European Union since my productionopened, and the problems we present no longer apply to him. In 2015, immigrantsin Greece will constitute twenty-ve percent o the population and the situationin this country will be entirely diferent. What I understand by temporary is theactual. My production is in ux, dating as the actuality o immigrants in Greecechanges. One in en got excellent reviews in the press; I even think it was overrated.Te enthusiastic reception was not due to the act that its a timeless masterpiecebut rather to its good sense o political timing: it said the right things at the righttime.

KOZAMANI: Te temporary is also important to the work o Locus Athens, ina diferent way. You dont have a permanent space where you show work. Is this achoice or you or a necessity?

LOCUS AHENS: Both. Te cost o maintaining a gallery space in Athens isconsiderable. Moreover, exhibiting at galleries has little impact in Athens, as peoplehave little grounding in contemporary art. Having a permanent space also limits

what you can explore, channeling your options into becoming more institutionalor more commercial. Institutions tend to malunction in Greece and people are

suspicious o them. It is easier or us to persuade people to give us their spaces whenwe go to them as individuals rather than as representatives o institutions. On anindividual basis, people are also more open to seeing things. You get the right peopleat the right placethis is how things happen in Athens. On the down side, it ismore dicult or us to nd unding rom institutions when we approach them asindividuals. We dont exclude moving to a permanent space in the uture. Flexibilityis the key to how we see things.

KOZAMANI: We are living in a city where antiquity is present everywhere.Establishing a direct connection to ancient Greece has been the most importantideological project o the nineteenth-century Greek state and has been weighingheavily on us, even incapacitating modern artistic expression. Ioannis has alreadyspoken about howAthenscopedeals with historical continuity. Is Greek antiquity orhistory important to the rest o you?

LOCUS AHENS: Our only project relevant to antiquity was Nothing Really Mat-ters, which we did in 2006 with Los Super Elegantes, a group o visual artists whoalso do music perormances.5 Te group did a video, giving ree rein to their ownstereotypes and antasies about Athens. Images have a banal and at, postcard-type

quality. Te video recontextualizes antiquities in a lighthearted, ironic way. TeAcropolis gures in the video as a visit to a nightclub named Acropolis, while atTeseion one o the group members picks up a poppy and they all leave.


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KOZAMANI: How did you show the work? What were the reactions o the Greekpublic to it?

LOCUS AHENS: Te video was part o a perormance at a stylish hotel in Athens,which included a music perormance by the Super Elegantes and simultaneous

swimming in the pool. In a city like Athens, where liestyle is all-important, theperormance encouraged a viewing o antiquity in new terms. Athenian audiencesdidnt ully understand the work though. Te liestyle crowd was enthusiastic aboutthe perormance but only ocused on the orm and missed the deeper implicationso the work. As or the critics and the art sophisticates, they generally expect eventsto be serious and have diculty in seeing that something light may have depth.

SAVVIDIS: We need humor, especially when it comes to dealing with heavy-handedsubjects like antiquity. I have a work similar to Nothing Really Matters, where I haverecontextualized the symbolism associated with the Marathon run. Contrary to what

those with high-own ideas about antiquity would think, the actual course o therun between Marathon and Athens is a banal journey, in one o the ugliest areaso the Balkans. I videotaped the course rom a car and collaborated with musiciansto set it to electronic music, sensitive to the rhythm that the succession o imagesproduced. I showed the work at the oyer o a club in Berlin. Only at a place likethis could the work unold its ull potential.

KOZAMANI: What about you, Laertis? Is antiquity important at all to you, giventhat you ocus on the present? In One in en your actors pose like models on a run-

way, carrying glossy pictures o the antiquities which they introduce with a slogano the ministry o tourism: Live your myth in Greece. Tis seems like anotherrecontextualizing o antiquity that has anities to the work o Ioannis and Locus

Athens that we just discussed as an element o humor. Do you agree?

VASSILIOU: Yes, there is a lot o irony in these scenes. I wanted to show whatLive your Myth in Greece means to the immigrants. It means getting entangled inthe Greek bureaucracy, getting beaten up by the police or prostituting yoursel ora ew extra Euros. When I rst came to Athens, I went to see the Acropolis, whichI may never have seen had socialism not collapsed. It was moving to be walking ina city where Socrates once lived. But I have a class problem with antiquity as theexpression o an aristocratic culture. When we admire the Acropolis our mind doesnot go to all the slave labor that went into building it or to workers accidents. Tereare no plays about such subjects in the Greek canon.

KOZAMANI: Doesnt rojan Women present Athenian imperialism critically, romthe point o view o the slaves? I mention this play because I know you are involvedin a production o the play at the National Teatre o Albania to be staged by theGreek director akis Teodoropoulos.6

VASSILIOU: In act, the play is also important to me in another way. I am currentlyworking on another improvisational perormance about immigrants, entitled ProjectIlion. Tis is based on stories o immigrant women living in Athens. Ilion, as you


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know, is the name o roy, but also o Liossia, a present-day immigrant neighbor-hood in Athens. Te word project reers to the design, the project o Greek societyto bring women rom the Balkans here to work as barmaids, prostitutes, strippers,servants, or nannies. In a leading position in the Balkans in the present day, Greekssack Balkan cities and carry away the women, evoking the ancient Greeks in the

rojan Women. odays Hecuba is a prima ballerina o the Bolshoi, currently work-ing in Athens as a stripper. I was taught about Greek antiquity at school in Albania,but never elt a responsibility to carry it, the way Greeks do. Antiquity belongs tomuseums. I am interested in the present.

NOES

1. One in en was produced by and opened at Tetro tou Neou Kosmou in the season20072008.

2. Tis was a work by the urkish artist Ozlem Gunyol. For a photograph o the work,

set up at a space, see the catalogue o Sampling, Athens: Locus Athens, 2008, p. 35.

3. Laertis Vassiliou has acted in several V series and lms about immigrants: E AgapeErthe apo Makria (Love Came rom Far Away), directed by M. Manousakis or Antennachannel; Ston Helio tou Egeou (Under the Aegean Sun), directed by V. Douros, Antennachannel; Mirupashim, eature lm, directed by G. Korras and Ch. Voupouras; Omeros(Hostage), directed by K. Giannaris. For examples o recent plays on immigrants see VassilisKatsikonouris, o Gala(Te Milk), Athens: Kedros, 2006; Yiannis siros,Axirista Pigounia(Unshaved Chins), unpublished, produced at Porta Teater in 2006, directed by V. Papa-georgiou; Yiannis Mavritsakis; o yfo Semio (Blind Spot), Athens: Neeli, 2008, an excellent

new play on the subject o immigrants.

4. Te erracewas presented in 1996 in Berlin, as part o the exhibition Kunststationen,Art on the Railway, curated by Herta Schonewol, Pro. Dr. Dieter Schnebel, and RonaldMunzer.

5. Nothing Really Mattersby Los Super Elegantes was presented at the Roo Garden oAthens Imperial, Classical Hotels in June 2006.

6. Euripides rojan Women, directed by akis Teodoropoulos or the National Teatreo Albania, premiered on July 17, 2008 at the ancient theatre o Vouthrotos in Albania and

will orm part o the National Teatres 20082009 season.

9023096 Tipuri Psihologice Descriere Jung

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