The text of appearances – container version / Day 3 – Public event

Stories and objects are gathered in the container. How can these stories and collection of objects be entangled in a collective narrative?

The third edition of the workshop series The Text of Appearances (Maria Glyka and Dimitris Rentoumis) concludes with a public event at ViZ on Saturday the 30th of November 2019. The participants of the workshop in collaboration with guest artists will present a collective storytelling session. The live storytelling will take place from 18:00 to 20:00. The space on the first floor at ViZ will remain open to the public until 22:00 as a showcase of the results of the workshop.

The research program of ‘The text of appearances’ focuses this time on how interpretations of the idea of the container can be used as points of reference for structuring new types of narratives within the workshop. The concept of the container is derived from the famous essay of Ursula K. Le Guin “The carrier bag theory of fiction” and it is perceived in the broader meaning of the acts of gathering, sharing and preserving. The shift in the paradigm of the heroism of the protagonist (as it is expressed by the text of LeGuin) is now to be found in the sharing of small contributions by all the participants that will be accumulated and contained temporarily in the locality of the project space with the prospect to become collectively comprehensible.

Participants

Νίκος Μανώλης – Nikos Manolis
Δέσποινα Ιωαννίδου – Despina Ioannidou
Κατερίνα Πατάκα – Catherine Pataka
Κατερίνα Σκόρδου – Katerina Skordou
Τριανταφυλλιά Ντουρούπη – Triantafillia Ntouroupi
Κατερίνα Οικονόμου – Katerina Ikonomou
Χρήστος Φουσέκης – Christos Fousekis
Φρόσω Παπαδοπούλου – Froso Papadopoulou
Βασίλης Μπακάλης – Vasilis Bacalis
Άννα Σαμαρά – Anna Samara
Στάθης Χαλκιάς – Stathis Chalkias
Σάββας Τσιμούρης – Savvas Tsimouris
Εύη Χαραλαμποπούλου – Evi Charalampopoulou
Ιωάννα Μίτζα – Ioanna Mitza
Έλλη Παπαδοπούλου – Ellie Papadopoulou
Ελεάννα Χερουβείμ – Eleanna Cherouveim
Αντιγόνη Μπαράτα – Antigone Barata
Ντορίνα Πολύζου – Dorina Polyzou

Guest artists

Χριστίνα Σπανού – Christina Spanou
Αλέξης Φιδετζής – Alexis Fidetzis
Βασίλης Βλασταράς – Vassilis Vlastaras

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The Text of Appearances – container version is hosted by ViZ in three different days with the collaboration of the Studio 11 and Lab 12 of Athens School of Fine Arts. The program during these days is organized as fοllows:

Day 1 (29th October / Public event):

11:30
Introductory study group with the students of ASFA of the essay “The carrier bag theory of fiction” by Ursula Κ. Le Guin.
13:00
Lecture-performance ‘Mia Marcos and his art project’ by the guest artist and storyteller Paribartana Mohanty

Day 2 (29th November / Asfa students only):

18:00
Presentations by the guest artists Vassilis Vlastaras, Christina Spanou, and Alexis Fidetzis
19:30
Workshop with the students of Athens School of Fine Arts.

Day 3 (30th November / Public event):

18:00 – 20:00
Collective storytelling by the participants of the workshop and the guest artists.
20:00 – 22:00
Showcase of objects and stories from the workshop’s container on the first floor of ViZ

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Guest artists for the Day 2 and 3 of the workshop:

Christina Spanou

Christina Spanou is a cross-disciplinary artist, set and costume designer and art educator. She was born in 1986 in Paris and grew up in Athens. She studied music at Philippos Nakas Conservatory and painting in Athens School of Fine Arts. Since October 2018 she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the same university. She is interested in gender issues, daily practices, and social interaction. She is a member of the artistic groups “The Flower Girls Collective” and “925 BOIZ”. At the moment she focuses on the “new novel (nouveau roman) idea “that we can only grasp fractions of the reality around us” and she is researching ways to use it in her artistic practice.

Within the context of “The Text of Appearances” workshop, Christina Spanou will talk about the importance of a world of things in the new novel (nouveau roman) making associations with her own studio practice of collecting found objects and also the workshop’s container of objects contributed by the participants.

Alexis Fidetzis

Alexis Fidetzis was born in Athens, were he currently resides and works. He studied painting in the Athens School of Fine Arts (BFA) and the Munich Kunstakademie while during his graduate studies in New York City (Pratt Institute, MFA) he explored research-based artistic practices focusing on matters of art and geopolitics. He is the recipient of several awards and scholarships, including a scholarship from the A.S. Onassis Foundation, the American College of Greece Scholarship for studies in the US, and the first Art-works fellowship for young Greek artists funded by the Stavros Niarchos foundation. His works have been shown in museums, galleries and festivals in Greece (Athens Biennale 5-6, Yeni Jami/New Mosque, Thessaloniki, Mykonos Archeological Museum, etal) Germany (Hosek Contemporary, Berlin and AdBK, Munich), France (galerie Vanessa Quang, Paris), Switzerland (Kunstraum Riehen, Deuxpiece, Basel) and the United States (the Pierogi boiler room, DeKalb Gallery, Pratt Institute Brooklyn, the Nolitan, NYC)

As part of his involvement in The text of Appearances – Container version, Alexis Fidetzis will be presenting a part of an artwork based on a photograph taken by a French soldier during the First World War. The photograph will become an instigator to discuss the narrative of narratives, meaning how through narration, parts of the past become history, and through this process, a version of the past curates contemporary identity

Vassilis Vlastaras

Vassilis Vlastaras is a visual artist, Associate Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the head of Studio 11 ASFA. He lives and works in Athens, Greece. He creates large-scale site-specific installations and he experiments with various media in painting, drawing, photography, video, real-time video, and sound performances and computer interactive installations. His artistic practice examines the relationship between artwork and urban space, the notion of the ephemeral, and the interrelation between spatial movement, material, and sound. Currently, his work investigates the personal and social implications of loss, oblivion, history, memory and the subsequent acts of remembrance/ memorialization and the relationships between the appetite for life and the frenzy of death. He has taken part in many exhibition projects, solo and group shows in Greece and abroad.

Vassilis Vlastaras will talk about his long-lasting project Condensation Cube in relation to the notions of conceptual writing and the role of the artist as a collector of innumerable different voices recorded online and in the press. His accumulation of voices in crisis are condensed in a series of book publications that transcend to a collective story of national proportions, a monumental textual extract of Greek bitterness.

Guest artist for the Day 1 of the workshop

Paribartana Mohanty

Paribartana Mohanty (b. 1982, Odisha) obtained his Master (2006) in History of Art from National Museum Institute, New Delhi, and Bachelors (2004) in Fine Art (Printmaking) from Dhauli College of Art and Craft, Bhubaneswar. Recently, he worked at the Onassis International Residency program in Athens. He participated in the SOMA Summer Program 2018 focusing on the question of ‘Sustainability’ in Mexico City, supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation (2018) and attended an intensive studio residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York supported by Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation (2016). Paribartana worked as one of the curators for Kochi Students’ Biennale, as part of Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016. He was a recipient of Visiting Artist Fellowship at South Asia Institute, Harvard University, Boston (2016), Tokyo Wonder Site International Creator Residency (2014), FICA Emerging Artist Award (2011), and City as Studio 1, Sarai-CSDS Media Lab Associate Fellowship for Contemporary Art and Media Practices (2010). Paribartana did his 2nd solo exhibition Trees are Stranger Than Aliens in the Movies in the September 2018 at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi. He has presented his performance-lecture at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (JNU), Sharjah, March Meeting 2018, InC gathering of artists, Dhalao and Sarai Reader CSDS, New Delhi, Kochi Muziris Biennale symposia On the Future of Art Education in India, Taj Ske residency 2015 in Bangalore among many others. He has exhibited in many group exhibitions, film festivals, seminars, and symposiums.

At Day 1 of the Text of Appearances – container version Paribartana Mohanty presented his lecture-performance ‘Mia Marcos and his art project’. ‘Mia Marcos and his Art Project’ is a story of a wealthy antique collector and his slave named Dybbuk. Mia Marcos collected old and personal objects somewhere in the Gulf region. Objects contain stories. Stories contain other stories. These stories are about memories. Memories of places, people and time. Dybbuk, the slave carried those objects on his back, carried those stories and memories. In his Art Project, Mia Marcos eventually became sick and Dybbuk emancipated from his slave identity.

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*The Text of Appearances

The “Text of Appearances”, which draws its title from John Berger, is an ongoing series of workshops and presentations initiated and organized by Dimitris Rentoumis (dimitrisrentoumis.com) and Maria Glyka (www.mariaglyka.com). It is researching the use of text in visual arts especially in relation to group dynamics where different artistic practices have the possibility to interact with each other and eventually grow into wider narratives. By taking into consideration aspects of language in visual arts with open conversations, exercises and in situ presentations, the workshop examines variants of text (such as storytelling or poetic speech) either as parallel paths or as inherent elements to the artistic process. The “Text of Appearances” started with the collaboration of studio 11 of Athens School of Fine Arts and since then it is developing with the participation and assistance of an energetic and diverse group of ASFA students.