Lost and shared / Perdido y compartido

Perdido y compartido: acercamiento al duelo colectivo para una política transformadora fue una exposición que curé en octubre de 2021 en One Minute Space, Atenas, Grecia. La exposición colectiva fue parte de mi proyecto de investigación para el doctorado y me permitió poner en diálogo mi trabajo con el de artistas, escritores, cineastas, performers y cantantes griegxs que admiro y con quien quería colaborar desde hace tiempo. Aunque la pandemia lo hizo difícil, en diez días intensos logramos compartir mucho a través de conversaciones, proyecciones, talleres, rituales y más…

Participaron: Sphinxes, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), Eliana Otta, Christina Phoebe, Valinia Svoronou, Antigoni Bunny Tsagkaropoulou, Maria Varela, Grigoria Vryttia, Nuno Cassola, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Xanthoula Dakovanou, Fotini Gouseti, Theo Ilichenko, Oi Mouries, Christina Phoebe, Marina Miliou, Gene Ray, Marianne Tuckmann.

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Lost and shared: approaches to collective mourning towards transformative politics was an exhibition I curated in October, 2021 at One Minute Space, Athens, Greece. The collective show was part of my research project for the PhD and allowed me to put my work in dialog with greek artists, writers, film makers, performers and singers with whom I was looking forward to collaborate. Even though the pandemic made it tough, in ten intense days we managed to share a lot through conversations, screenings, workshops, rituals and more…

Collaborators: Sphinxes, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), Eliana Otta, Christina Phoebe, Valinia Svoronou, Antigoni Bunny Tsagkaropoulou, Maria Varela, Grigoria Vryttia, Nuno Cassola, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Xanthoula Dakovanou, Fotini Gouseti, Theo Ilichenko, Oi Mouries, Christina Phoebe, Marina Miliou, Gene Ray, Marianne Tuckmann.Valinia Svoronou, Antigoni Bunny Tsagkaropoulou, Maria Varela, Grigoria Vryttia, Nuno Cassola, Marios Chatziprokopiou, Xanthoula Dakovanou, Fotini Gouseti, Theo Ilichenko, Oi Mouries, Christina Phoebe, Marina Miliou, Gene Ray, Marianne Tuckmann.

Curatorial text:

This exhibition began when I asked Nadja Geer, founder of OMS, to make an individual show with audio pieces I was working on while waiting for the pandemic’s situation to improve and organize again encounters around body exercises, intimacy, personal stories and attentive listening. The audio pieces combine fragments of interviews I made between 2017 and 2020, learning about the Athenian context from people trying to defy the forces that boycott solidarity networks and the growth of counterhegemonic subjectivities and practices. Facing the impossibility of gathering such people as originally planned, I decided to make them “converse” through sound editing. But while editing, I imagined them as part of a bigger conversation. How would it be fruitful to make these voices be heard?

The audio pieces then, should belong to a collective, not individual, exhibition. Since they aim to create connections which didn’t exist, to offer themselves as gestures toward exchange, nothing seemed better for them to exist than a dialogic environment, where others could share their invitations to think together, hear, affect and be affected. Thus, this became a collective show, where artists, poets, researches, performers, could explore the creation of devices, texts and actions as possible rituals, rehearsals and instigators for and of collective mourning. This exhibition wishes to inquire with others about the connections between capitalism and depression, about the possibility of depression being an unresolved process of mourning, and about losses produced during political, economic and sanitary crises. This exhibition asks: how can art help to create collective processes of mourning? Can mourning help transforming subjectivities and communities? How can loss shape new understandings of the political and economic?

The opening up of questions around grieve, uncertainty and trauma demanded a welcoming space, which would host the visitors through carefully crafted pieces, offering their vulnerability as connecting threads for the temporary web which would sustain diverse encounters. Apart from the sense of hearing, the sense of touch appeared as an ideal path toward subtle, sensible relations, like those proposed by Grigoria Vryttia’s work, where ubiquitous handmade objects pay homage to grandmothers of past times, evoking the freedom of camping and the precarity of homelessness, while inviting us to make visible our need for shelter through its traslucid hospitality. Also engaged with tasks classically understood as feminine, Maria Varela created a pattern out of traditional tapestry’s female figures, gathered in a ritualistic dance responding to the constant femicides in Greece. The #γυναικοκτονία hashtag fed an algorithm which would have led to an infinite number of embroidered elements, had not the artist stopped it, overwhelmed by the increasing cases since we started talking about her participation in the exhibition. Antigoni Bunny Tsakgaropoulou alludes to another kind of threats in her video, resisting imposed notions of happiness to bodies and subjectivities rendered out of place by the patriarchal ruling orders. However, the elements that transform them in a protective, shelter like creature, watch us all from above, as a reminder that there are always unimagined ways to be, waiting to be tried out for other worlds to exist. And even from further away seem to have fallen Valinia Svoronou’s handmade meteorites. These humble cosmic debris point into expanded understandings of time and space, into the long duration of the historical processes we may lose out of sight, accustomed to nowadays immediacy, fastness and creation of crises’ narratives as shocking novelty. Daring to pause, take a deep breath and go back in time, Christina Phoebe revisited her personal archive of the collective intensities of 2012’s Syntagma Square, which made her perform a series of gestures in the public space as immediate reactions to that convulse scenario. And bringing us back to contemporary conflicts regarding what is public and the citizens’ rights to act upon that, Sphinxes expand the exhibitions’ limits, guiding us to recently closed squats, marking them as spaces of contested memories, still capable of activating narratives and actions. Meanwhile, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis) evoke urban atmospheres where their fragmented bodies’ absence signal queer disappearances, losses and collective grieves hauntingly claiming for justice.

This exhibition zooms in and out, diffuses borders between private and public, intimate and social, individual and collective, trying to weave pain with dreams, uncertainty with desire, vulnerable, fragile threads into reinforced, mobilizing social tissues. Here and there, among the loud, vibrant, pre-pandemic bars and kafeneios, we can hear voices trying to make sense out of daily struggles, of shifting political convictions, of postponed and renewed needs. Luckily, they found their place next to other voices and gestures, which although sharing doubts and anxieties, nonetheless insist in existing. And even in a context that would prefer them resigned to accept what surrounds them as the only possible reality, they reach out, find each other and invite you to join.

e.o

Athens, October, 2021

You can read the exhibition’s leaflet with detailed information about the works and activities in English and Greek here:

Lost_and Shared_leaflet Download

Las piezas sonoras que mostré fueron editadas a partir de entrevistas hechas en Atenas en el proceso del doctorado, como una manera de hacer conversar a las personas entrevistas, ya que esto fue imposible como planeado debido a Covid. Las conversaciones son todas en inglés y pueden escucharse acá:

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The audio pieces I showed were edited from interviews I have made in Athens in the process of the PhD, as a way of putting people to converse, since it was impossible to gather them as planned due to Covid. The conversations are all in English and can be heard here:

When talking about depression Leonidas, Anna P., Orestis, Eleni, Ilias, Panagiotis, Anna A., Stella and Antonis said…