Were you especially excited to stumble across the work of André du Colombier? What drew you in more, his words or his colors? To the alternation of red, red and white or the words un | jour | rouge? Did your eyes prize out the words from the copper on the wall or lose them […]
Category Archives: Alpha to and Omega of Our Athens Nostalgia
You didn’t make it to the Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika Gallery – Benaki Museum during the small window of their regular opening hours (Friday-Saturday, 10am-6pm). But you were lucky enough to know Polina Kosmadaki, who had curated an exhibition of Ghika’s photographs of the 1930s and who gave you a private out-of-hours tour. You would hear from […]
When walking on the Acropolis, photographing multicolored slabs of fallen marble, were you thinking about your use of language in your work? Has anyone ever described your language as ‘marmoreal’? Would you prefer the marmoreal of Derek Walcott’s description of poetry (as “natural and marmoreal…fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow”) or of descriptions […]
What drew you to The Line of Geta Brătescu? Why did you settle on these works from the series? Were you not captivated by the video of her drawing the lines in action? (You would have heard her commentary on the lines as they grew). Does this photograph mean that you stood before the vertical […]
You took this and other photographs of Andreas Ragnar Kassapis’ paintings in the Odeion on your first night in Athens. You were not sure why you took them. You took other photographs on other nights, but you lost those photographs when you were trying to clear memory space on your computer and mistakenly deleted them. […]
You were very lucky to take this photograph of a wall-text without a work. That said, you still visited several empty universities across the city – the Academy, the Lyceum and the Stoa Poikile. And, like this empty university, there was still activity on the site – a children’s party at Plato’s, an art collective’s […]
How many photographs of these iconic floor-texts did you take? Were there times when you merely took a photograph of one and then walked on past the work it was related to? Were you every tempted to steal one of the blocks with the artist’s name on it? If so, which artist would you have […]
You didn’t eat at Rasheed Araeen’s Shamiyaana–Food for Thought: Thought for Change in Kotzia Square. You did, however, visit it empty, the day after one of the meals, and wondered about what it would be like full of guests, eating and talking, ‘reflecting on possible scenarios for social change’. You were sure that it would […]
You had been walking for over an hour along the road beside the railroad track. In a few minutes, you were to find yourself in the plush café and bookstore of the Benaki Museum – Pireos Street Annexe. But at this precise moment you were looking into her eyes. Only now do you realize that […]
Did you take this map with you when you left the cats and went to visit the Acropolis? Were you tempted to draw these diagrams in the dirt alongside the ordered remains of the ancient temple? Did you perhaps glance across from the Parthenon and its stolen marbles to the Erechtheion, lamenting the missing sister […]