‘‘What does Athens mean to you?’’ Announcing our 'Spirit' Finalists
RUYA MAPS is pleased to share the three artists who are the finalists in our open call: Alkmini Gkousiari, Iliodora Margellos and Melina Fakitsa Mosland. Each artist has been awarded a micro-commission to create a new work in response to the theme ‘Spirit’ through which we have been exploring Athens. Spirit is an essential component, it allows us to thrive and persist during changing times. As our curatorial statement for this edition of Creative Cities states, spirit allows us to transcend the physical and seek connections, this is present throughout Athens whether through its Ancient and Byzantine heritage, through its mythology, art and architecture or through nature, in particular the sea that frames it.
Each of the selected artists has a different relationship to the city; Alkmini Gkousiari holds the perspective of someone who has moved away and considers themselves a visitor, Iliodora Margellos has returned to the place of her childhood with her own family, and Melina Fakitsa Mosland has stayed in the neighbourhood where she grew up. Below you can find insights on each of their relationships with the city; reading them reveals an Athens that is stubborn, vibrant, chaotic, a city that inspires you and leaves you wanting,
Alkmini Gkousiari
‘‘As I have left Athens and been living in Scotland for the past 5 years, the city has taken on an almost mythological role in my mind. By visiting once a year, I experience the city with overwhelming feelings of otherness, of land, of belonging, of confused identity.
Being Greek and growing up in Athens has instilled in me a sensitivity to spirit and place. Athens’ ground has a heaviness, it makes the feet of its people walk on the one hand heavily and on the other with almost a kind of levitation. The city especially in recent years has been infused with pain and conflict, but still stands, like a sphinx, with stubbornness. Stubbornness of a deteriorating legacy, a forgotten greatness. My city hurts me, my country breaks my heart, but also surprises me and amazes me every time I visit now as a ξενιτεμένη κόρη, a visitor and not a resident. With buildings potent with its wars, dictatorships, uprisings, resurrections and crucifixions, Athens feels like a big Μαγούλα (magoula) with its hills filled with layers of emotion and history. Of a tension that makes people’s feet dance and move fast in its winding roads, that smell of dry earth and piss and pine trees.
I breath in the dusty air / I fill my nostrils / Now that I am here / On dry days,
I will press my head on the ground, try to rub in what is left of this place. Try and preserve something that doesn’t exactly feel mine, and celebrate it. A fluorescent, musty, sweaty smell and many departures that never feel quite enough. I try not to extend my look, like a hungry dog. There are so many words that describe a feeling of a moment in my mother tongue, when I try to describe my city in words it loses feeling. Athens is sensory, it tricks you with its charms and hides the bad; actually, it depends if you want to look at its raw flesh. A wave of buildings pulsating in the piercing sun, Athens will always be a city of migration - a painful, bitter sweet passage, a place for the ξενιτεμένους.’’
Alkmini is a Greek artist currently living and working in Glasgow. She works with a variety of mediums and always tend to work with spaces outside of the white cube, collaborating with artists, landscapes and communities.
Her visual and written work occupies a purely mythological space. With theatricality, the subject is always something not quite of our global human society, but rather of an intangible realm outside of common time. Her work is an attempt to excavate buried narrative material and bring it into the tangible present. Her visual and conceptual research concentrates on mythologies and oral histories, not only the ones that she grew up with in Greece but also new and old ones from around the globe.
Her website can be viewed here.
Iliodora Margellos
‘‘My strong but rocky relationship with my hometown:
I was not born in Athens, neither were my biological parents, nor was my first child. However, Athens is now my forever home and my work grows from the duality between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the city I live in.
Athens inspires my work; its history, its vibrance, its traumas and its sense of belonging have always been attractive to me. I find people in Athens incredibly fragile, yet incredibly strong.
My relationship to Athens is translated into my work as a visual testimony of the surviving traditions of embroidery and weaving, first introduced to me by my Greek grandmother. My work is stimulated by a healing energy of time spent honoring the past through a contemporary lens. In my work, I pay homage to the experience of living in Athens, where past meets present both visually and spiritually.’’
Iliodora was born in Minneapolis, USA in 1985. She graduated from Yale University in 2006 with a BA in Art. Iliodora alternates between structures, materials and scale, thus vacillating between figuration and abstraction as a form of investigation, even though she probes the same questions regarding the complexity of human feelings and interaction.
Iliodora venerates the importance of tradition throughout time and means to bring awareness to the long-lasting tradition of the media she uses and displays in her work. Her work has been exhibited in various international art spaces and fairs. She currently lives and works in Athens, Greece.
Her website can be viewed here.
Melina Fakitsa Mosland
‘‘Athens is my hometown. I grew up in Pangrati, a neighborhood 10 minutes from the city centre. As every Athenian, I will tell you that Athens is a city you love and hate. For me Athens will always be a city of contrasts which is something that interests me a lot in my latest project. It combines the old with the new and the east with the west .It is surrounded by mountains, and sea, and holds the biggest port in Greece. Personally I think it is difficult to find a city as complex as Athens.
Here different historic timelines exist at the same time. It is full of archaeological monuments and the remains of economic crisis combined with Byzantine churches and a desperate attempt to be a ‘’European’’ city. With the absence of urban planning, Athens gives you the sense that it’s a DIY city where nobody follows the system. You can see a huge apartment building of the 70s next to a tiny shack with a lemon tree garden full of cats and dreamy pedestrian streets with hidden open air cinemas behind busy avenues. Athens is huge and chaotic, with cities inside the city within an hour’s distance from each other. It is an architectural disaster with traces of corruption and selfishness, but also hidden beauty that gives you the drive to always want to explore it.
A terrible city that for some weird reason manages through it’s madness to give you a hopeful and promising feeling that everything is going to be okay anyway.’’
Melina is a Greek-Norwegian visual artist based in Athens. Her work is constructed around the themes of nature, the human body and the feeling of uncanny. She works in a variety of media often sculpture, drawing and more recently installation and photography while mixing contemporary art practices with traditional.
She holds an integrated Masters degree from the Athens School of Fine Arts, she exhibited her first solo project in 2019 at Taf the Art Foundation and was part of Platform Nord / Nordic Festival for Young Contemporary Art in Kristiansand. She has participated in numerous exhibitions among them ‘’A field guide to getting lost vol 2 ‘’ at Cinema Anesis, ‘’Graduand exhibition of ASFA’’ at StoArt of National Bank Insurance and ‘’Contemporary Mosaics‘’ of Felios collection.
Her website can be viewed here.