Rethinking Crisis
Five Schools of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and an Interuniversity-Interdepartmental Postgraduate Program participate in the Isola San Servolo Project of the international exhibition OPEN in Venice.
OPENOPEN - international contemporary art exhibition takes place every year in central locations around the islands Lido and San Servolo in Venice. It coincides with the city's internationally acclaimed events, the Biennale and Mostra film festival. The exhibition was established in 1998 by Paolo de Grandis (Arte Communications) and was endorsed by Pierre Restany. Since then, OPEN has collaborated with over 500 artists and 160 curators, coming from 70 countries. Among them are artists of international acclaim, such as: Keith Haring, Niki de Saint Phalle, Chen Zhen, Richard Long, Yue Minjun, Arman, Louise Bourgeois, Christo, Marc Quinn, Lois Weinberger, Marisa Merz, Sandro Chia, Orlan, as well as significant Greek artists, such as Theodoros, Costas Varotsos, Aimilia Papafilippou and Danae Stratou. Internationally acclaimed curators that have collaborated with OPEN are: Pierre Restany, Lorànd Hegyi, Italo Calvino, Achille Bonito Oliva, Beral Madraand Alanna Heiss. This year, OPEN pays tribute to Yoko Ono.
Christos Savvidis has been appointed commissioner of the Greek participations in 2009. In spite of the current dismal situation, the Greek participation in 2012 is dynamic and generous, with seven artists in the main program and six Schools of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in the exhibition’s special section. Rethinking CrisisThe Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Schools whose curriculum largely includes creative artistic production, that is the Schools of the Faculty of Fine Arts (Visual and Applied Arts, Drama, Music Studies and Film Studies), the School of Architecture and the Interuniversity Postgraduate Program «Museology» of the Faculty of Engineering, respond to the crisis creating a joint artistic project. Students and teachers from the aforementioned Schools participate in the international contemporary art exhibition OPEN in Venice, parallel to the city’s Architecture Biennale and Film Festival. They reflect extensively upon the current multifaceted crisis and on the island of San Servolo, between Venice and Lido, where every year a university is hosted; they pose their questions, under the general title «Rethinking Crisis».
It is a collaborative work that includes music, sound, film, theater, architecture and visual art interventions which, departing from the financial crisis in Greece and the wider crisis in Europe and modern society, critically address the concepts of rejection and incarceration, miasma and catharsis. This was decided in relation also to the location, where the work is installed, the island of San Servolo, which had functioned, among others, as a place for the isolation and treatment for Hansen’s disease and later on madness, meaning as a place for the isolation of the infected and of the organically and socially ill. It is the first time that a number of Schools from our university function collectively, attempting to creatively address the crisis around us, which tends to suppress the young and creative forces of a space dynamic by definition, such as the university. Students and teachers collaboratively reflected upon the subject, based on texts that were distributed and on discussions that took place. The whole endeavor is described through an explanatory text that connects the present crisis and the location’s past, and through an art work which includes all the forms of art that are the subject of the aforementioned schools. In collaboration with the university’s Rectorate, we are planning to expand this collective initiative in Thessaloniki and in the university, where it will function as an ongoing platform for similar projects. Thessaloniki, 17 July 2012 What is there to rethink in relation to the crisis? How does one reflect upon the storm?
Everyday, we are experiencing its many versions. Financial and political, political and social, the phenomenon described by such short a word unfolds its multiple aspects and forces us to daily renegotiations. The until recently self-evident are no longer secure, the basics are not ensured, our needs are redefined and the perspective of planning remains suspended. Little everyday failures succeed one another, the increase of burdens causing multiple damages becomes unbearable and the depreciation of our expectations is amplified. In the personal and public sphere, the changes are many and the deteriorations multiple. There is nothing romantic in poverty, nothing spectacularly tragic in the loss of values and daily compromises. Democracy seems to be crumbling, the rhetorics of hatred tend to become increasingly stronger and socially legitimate. In the midst of crisis, does it help to reflect upon it? Maybe not. But do we have anything better than the alertness of the mind?
Circumstances change and transform. So does society, culture, values, the meaning of words. In the mass media and promoted within the public opinion, one detects the example of the Greek financial crisis, haunting and isolated. It becomes the starting point for discussions and hypothesis of interpretations, an obstacle to avoid or dodge. The case of the Greek crisis is promoted as something isolated, out of context. Analogies with other countries and references to a predominant system are either not recognized or bypassed or downgraded. Similarly distorted are the Greek particularities, historic, idiosyncratic and willingly victimizing, reducing the Greek case to solitary example, convenient for internal consumption. However, are things like that or are they only like that, for both sides? Often, when one attempts to answer this question, the answers come out wrong, the words North and South sound like racial discriminations. Our everyday vocabulary has incorporated terms from the medical terminology: crisis, recovery, cure. We desire the removal of the evil, the arrival of the cure, the recovery of the patient. The financial crisis is presented as an illness that has suddenly broken out, while it has long been hatched, the symptoms visible on the ill bodies. The present condition is not perceived systemically and structurally, in depth political analysis is not attempted. Rather, social, even anthropological analysis is suggested. Greece, the little patient. Perceiving the state as an organism, the financial system and the European Union as organs, Greece is like a body, an ill body inhabited by millions of people. In anticipation of recovery, San Servolo generously offers its long history as a convent, hospital, lobotomy asylum, sanitarium, university and space for cultural events, as the basis for creation, symbolisms, comparisons – reflection, ultimately. The changes of its use map the transformations of the concept of conformity within society, according to the social circumstances of each time and place. The convent gives its place to the need to remove infectious patients and later on to the marginalization of madness, as defined by Foucault: «madness is detected on the social horizon of poverty, incapacity for labor, impossibility of becoming part of the group, at a time when it starts becoming interwoven with the problems arising from the city. The new senses attributed to poverty, the significance given to the obligation of labor and all the moral values connected to it, largely define man’s experience from madness and influence its meaning.» The latest use of San Servolo, with the establishment of the International University and the founding of the Museum of Madness, realizes the dominant tendency of the 20th century, the transformation of any issue to an object of research towards understanding and renegotiation. Countless times, San Servolo has functioned as a social waste depository, in times when all illness was considered inherent – bodily expression of the miasma of the soul. Specifically, the Plague was the expression of Divine Retribution and the ill were guilty and had to be isolated and removed from society. Therapy was also perceived as punishment, the patient had to pay in order to be purified, the illness of the body was seen only as the confirmation of an unhealthy soul. The patient was guilty, condemned to find redemption only through punishment. Throughout the island’s history, we see the need to overcome a threat that leads to methods purely ritualistic, clearly symbolic. In Venice, the city across San Servolo, expulsion, purification, expiation, atonement and catharsis are bound together. Paradoxically, the practice of removal as a solution for the survival of the whole and the achievement of purification through painstaking therapy are phrases that, if isolated from their historicity, could be used to describe completely distinct realities: on the one hand the previous uses of San Servolo, on the other the rhetorics referring to the crisis, currently under way in Greece, the european south and the weak north. Exile to oblivion becomes the only means for society’s cure and expulsion a method of purification and exorcism of the evil. The university of Thessaloniki will be there, rational and dynamic creative presence, addressing a response to the crisis. Morfi Dimitriou (artist - museologist) Christina Ploutoglou (historian - museologist) Stergios Galikas (architect - museologist) Matoula Scaltsa (art historian - museologist) Thessaloniki, 9.07.2012 Performance in LidoPerformances in San ServoloAn Award to George GerontidisThe Documentary |
San Servolo island, Venice, Italy 
visual communication Beetroot Design Group (www.beetroot.gr)
|
