Q&A with Alkmini Gkousiari

On the Artist

Where are you currently based?

So I’m based in Glasgow at the moment. I came to the UK five years ago and I did my foundation at Kingston University in London. Then I moved to Manchester and did two years of my fine art degree, then I did another two years of my degree at Glasgow School of Art, but I’ve been here almost three years now.

What’s led you to being an artist?

Well I think it’s interesting because both of my parents showed me ways to look around me and at the world, but in a very different way. My mum is a print maker so I learn from her how to look at the world with a very poetic way. My dad is a beekeeper and a farmer, and very poetic himself, so he showed me how to look around me in similar ways, but more to do with nature and folklore. Together that’s slowly built up my interest in making. I feel like I was exposed to art through my mum and growing up in Athens. My dad lives in the countryside four hours outside of Athens; his way of life and that side of my family is very different. Putting them together gave me the perspective that led me to make work, but also I always wanted more.

At state school in Greece you never really get pushed to be creative. When I came to the UK I was really overwhelmed, because I didn’t know how to write about what I made and I was exposed to so much. I think for a lot of Greek people the UK is the future, it’s the promised land of work and really good education and the West. I was quite pushed in moving up north, I felt more warmth there the higher up I went. In Glasgow I really felt part of an artist community, more than I did in London and Manchester. 

How would you describe your practice?

A lot of the time I start with one medium, for example drawing, and from there I build on layers of how I want my work to develop to the final outcome. I use a lot of film and drawing and plaster and clay, and I work a lot with installation. I collaborate with other artists and try not to use the gallery space as much, I usually work either outside or in spaces that are not a white cube gallery.

“My mum is a print maker so I learn from her how to look at the world with a very poetic way. My dad is a beekeeper and a farmer, and very poetic himself... but more to do with nature and folklore”

I like working with spaces that have their own character, and that sometimes overpower me and my perspective and my work and there’s a bit of a fight. A lot of performance work I’ve done happens with me visiting a site and responding to it in terms of the landscape and the feeling that a place gives you, but also the history of the place and what’s underneath. A couple of years ago, I collaborated with some other artists and the Woodlands Trust here in Scotland. We did an exhibition outdoors, a guided tour with performances on the way as everyone did a walk. Or there have been times when I’ve had an idea for a piece, but it always changes when I am at the place the work is going to be at. I always want to be within it.  

What are your inspirations?

I’m interested in mythologies, Ancient Greek and also world ones. I’m particularly interested in stories around creation and evolution from different religions and cultures. I’ve been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home within the book there’s a dictionary, and recipes, and songs, so within the book she builds a whole civilisation. I aspire to do something like that with my work. Laure Prouvost and her stories are an inspiration, they’re not really myths I guess as there’s a lot of reality with her writing and films. I like Want Tea? which is about her grandpa who disappears trying to dig a tunnel to Africa from the garden shed.

There’s also a Greek choreographer called Dimitris Papaioannou who directed the Olympic Games. He had all these incredible costumes and moving images going through the history of Greece, but he’s done some great theatrical dance performances like The Great Tamer and Still Life that I love. I feel like he talks a lot about the things you have in you as a Greek person: a lot about history and the heaviness of that, and the greatness that you come from, but also how that is not really real at all. There’s an Armenian director that I really love, called Sergei Parajanov, who did The Colour of Pomegranates and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. A lot of his work was censored during the Soviet Union, but I love his visuals and Orthodox symbolism.

On Athens

How do you know Athens?

I find it quite hard to answer. For me Athens was a city that I wanted to escape from, and I didn’t feel like I could relate to people who wanted to be there - at the age that I was at the time. Now I feel as equally separated from Athens as I feel from the UK. Being away for this long has given me fresh eyes to how I see the city, if I was still living there I wouldn’t have noticed all these things about it. 

Have you seen it change?

I haven’t lived in Greece for five years now, but when I go back and visit there are certain areas where I see loads of galleries opening, a lot of Brits and Germans, a lot of artists living in areas that I don’t remember being that way. I guess that’s gentrification, but it’s really interesting slowly seeing it every year. It’s funny because with Athens the way it looks visually doesn’t really change, because it’s a place where you can’t dig and rebuild. Things get stacked on top of each other in Athens rather than, for example a city like Manchester which is also changing so fast, but visually as well.

I feel like Athens is changing internally rather than externally. There are things that worry me, but there are things that are exciting in the art scene. It is opening up to other cultures and ways of being. It has a long way to go, but it is slowly changing for better - for artists, but also for queer communities and people of colour - it’s getting there.

What are some of the contrasts in the city?

“ I feel like [Dimitris Papaioannou] talks a lot about the things you have in you as a Greek person: a lot about history and the heaviness of that, and the greatness that you come from, but also how that is not really real at all”

I feel like Athens has an ugliness, but within it there is beauty. It’s very anarchic. Athens was a village originally and really quickly became a big city. After the divide between Turkey and Greece in 1922 a lot of refugees moved to Athens because it was the closest port which made it expand quickly. In Greece there are no rules of how big or where you’re going to build something, which affected its reconstruction after WWII. A lot of people from the cities moved to Athens and built up land and added on buildings, so with that and having ancient elements hidden within new buildings, it creates layers. This gives it a depth in time which it doesn’t really have because it is such a new state, it’s only been a country for about two hundred years really.

How is Athens a city of migration?

It’s definitely a city that for a lot of refugees is a door to Europe, to wealthier countries that hold promise. With the political situation, I feel a lot of people get stuck with Athens. With the way that the city is it allows people to nest in it in a way. Greece, and particularly Athens, was built by refugees from Turkey; my family comes from Izmir and had to run away to Greece when that happened. A lot of people have that heritage, it’s something that you carry with you, the feeling of migration.

Also, Athens is a place that pushes you to go as well as allowing you to nest. A lot of Greek people left Greece to find work and find a better life. I left because I felt like I couldn’t find what I wanted there, and historically it has had quite a lot of authoritarian regimes that made people leave but then return. I’ve been reading this book by Theodor Kallifatides, he is Greek but migrated to Sweden. He was born during WWII and grew up in Athens and his parents were communists so he always had to move around the country. He wrote about feeling like a foreigner when you’re in Greece.  I’m a foreigner in the UK and I very much feel like that, but I also feel like a foreigner in a bittersweet way, not really a negative way, when I go back to Athens.

If you had to describe Athens’ spirit in a few adjectives what would they be?

Fluorescent, passage, and bittersweet. It is a city that has been a passage for me and might become one again; I think it changes its form for a lot of people. Fluorescent because it is full of smells, good and bad, I always get this when I arrive at the airport and everything around me smells so much. It’s smelly and messy, and beautiful, and full of history and emotion, and coming and going.

Any upcoming projects to promote?

I graduated the summer that just passed which meant that everything was cut suddenly with my work. I went through a period where I was writing a lot but I wasn’t really making anything physical. I finally managed to get a studio and have a space to think and make. I’m also working for Generator Project, a non-profit arts organisation in Dundee which does an exhibition every year where they select artists from the different art schools in Scotland. I’m starting slowly thinking about making a piece there, an installation for a performance, hopefully physical and hopefully there.