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The Forum Artists-in-Residence Programme (F.A.R), inaugurated in 2005, resulted from the co-operation between two cultural organisations, Action Field Kodra, which has undertaken the implementation of the programme, and the Forum European Cultural Exchanges, that has undertaken the planning and curating. more
A significant part of Action Field Kodra for the past three years, the Forum Artists-in-Residency programme is realised in collaboration with the Forum European Cultural Exchanges, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the French Institute of Thessaloniki and the 9th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, while it is supported by Culture 2000 programme of the European Union, in the framework of the Artventure network. The Artistic Director of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art curates this year’s residency programme, that will present Greek and foreign artists. The autonomous exhibition that will result from the Kodra residence will be enriched with works by artists who participated in the workshop organised by the Macedonian Museum in the Eptapyrgion, in the framework of the 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (July 2007). This year’s residency deals once more with the exploration of the issue of boundaries, as the two previous editions.
Christos Savvidis Artistic Director DispersionThe theme of the present exhibition pursues the investigation of borders, an investigation that was also conducted in the two previous Artists-in-Residency Programmes at Action Field Kodra. The theme of limits-borders has been posed from the very beginning as an area of investigation for the meeting and collaboration between institutions and artists in Kalamaria, as well as in the Forum’s wider framework. Along with the general theoretical framework, it practically posed a question on the limits of the European dimension geographically and nationally, and also politically and culturally, which the critics and artists attempted to investigate and redefine. Within the prism of a Dispersion, the exhibition today does not look on either side of a dividing line, nor does it mark the traces of an historical dispersion that surround a distant origin of cultural borders. Neither line nor circle, the exhibition today transposes the notion of limit from an introvert notion of gathering, which is also pinpointed as locus, to a practice of dispersion, wandering, transport, and differentiation. Through this visual gathering it constitutes every unequivocal order, hierarchical form or disciplinary function, be it military, ideological, political, social, cultural or artistic.
As far as this dimension of limit as gathering, rank, discipline and order is concerned, it would be impossible not to think that the word dispersion, in a military camp, means first of all “falling out of rank”, which is rounded off with the wish “be a good citizen”, and, perhaps in a purely cultural and artistic dimension, a “citizen of the world”, a “free man”, and an “unsubdued spirit”. It means, namely, that even temporarily he is free, out of file and rank, the master of his own body and mind, exercising as a citizen his right to a point of view and attaining the possibility of free movement in any place or locus, either geographical or mental. It means the emancipation from any rank or military service, from any enforcement of discipline, from any hierarchy, and it also means the possibility of self-determination. In other words, it means the possibility of determining freely what you are, who you are, where you are going and what you are doing, how you are living, how you are thinking and acting, and all those things that since the age of the French Revolution and Enlightenment constitute, by right and deed, the notion of freedom beyond any form of power, state, nation, and authority. Dispersion, as it expresses the free movement of ideas and persons, notions and practices, cultures and works, raises, in this year’s homonymous title exhibition, questions about linguistic issues and transpositions. It has to do with ways of thinking, ways of passing, transformations and transfigurations beyond the physical limits. It opens up to wider areas of human relationships where communication isn’t measured by the “purity” of the origins, or the descent, of people, languages, and cultures, it contrives, through fusions and obvious differences, never to suffer any substantial rift and crisis and, as it also happens with languages or idioms, through similar conditions one can indeed understand “approximately” the ways and codes. In the perpetual differences of reality, the social need and cultural reality often allow small constants which have nothing to do with “qualities”, but simply constitute “possibilities”, so that individuals can communicate in some way, beyond the notion of a pure identity or difference. These limits coexist in the geographical space beyond any boundaries, being everyday effective, like language itself and the dialects spoken in wider areas. So they are expressed approximately through constant transformations and differentiations, in any place we are in, both in the everyday use of language and in cultural and artistic idioms. They are expressed along with the possibility to move like expressions, languages or idioms, freely, beyond any local authorities, hierarchical localisations, social constraints and unequivocal practices. The notion of dispersion brings us against more intricate limits, which perhaps are elusive and inconceivable. The part played by History, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, and Internationalisation, in the mind and actions of today’s artists and men of culture does not draw clear boundaries and straight lines, but oblique usages, multiple doubts, mental transgressions, and temporary constructs where poetics and politics are intermingled, constituting thus, as in any language, what overcomes the lines directing it, be them on paper or in the mind and discourse. The artist today is called to overcome, through his work, boundaries, both geographical and expressional, to overrun the limits connected with memory and the daily round, to pass between the notion of identity and difference, as if they were the Clashing Rocks. Dispersion means something that never is quite the same, nor is something quite different. It is not emigration, it is not displacement, it is not nomadism, it is not an expatriate phenomenon, it is not Diaspora, and it is not peregrination. It is the practical overcoming of these limits that hierarchically arrange meaning, as every language, literally, attains in its practice. Suffice to look up any dictionary to see to what extent words are not unequivocal, how many parallel usages they have, and into how many they can still come. Therefore, even if most of the artists invited this year are French-speaking, they are not necessarily French, and they are not necessarily native speakers of the French language either; also, they are not unaware of the fact that in every place is usually spoken more than one language, and some of them even know the idioms and the local dialects in the places from which they come. They all live around the precarious boundaries of a European centre that stretches –and here one could say for certain that it disperses– from Brittany to Holland, and from Geneva to the Ardennes area, to meet in Brussels, which is more of a systematic and institutionalised place of dispersion than a center (as, for instance, Paris was for years). They are concerned with the overcoming of the local or national idiom and the opening up beyond every notion of dominance to a possibility to self-determination, freedom of movement, versatility of usage, critical attitude, peaceful coexistence, and creative overcoming of differences without necessarily forming a common identity, but merely a human society. Language does not constitute a common descent or origin. On the contrary, it could easily be the point where different cultures, areas, histories, eras, meanings and senses, elaborating idioms in art and experiences in life that are both connected and distant. Language is interspersed par excellence, and is expressed through the dispersion of notions, idioms, meanings, interpretations, understandings, and sensibilities. All these are pertinent as is also the historical origin of the Military Camp Kodra, which has been the military camp and base of the French Army in Thessaloniki, in an era that politically and militarily does not seem very different from our own, but the apprehension of situations and the role of things today makes everything seem so different in the eyes of a young artist. Everything seems so pertinent and distant at the same time, like the history and the reality of Thessaloniki itself, with its multicultural dimension and its marked French-speaking culture that once brought together not only social classes but also the cultural dispersion and the civic coexistence of Greeks, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Italians, Serbs, and many other minorities, nationalities, social groups, religions, guilds, trades, workforces, hopes and dreams, political reforms and governmental overthrows, manners and customs, written and unwritten laws, order and chaos, that coexisted dispersed with a common limit, which one overcame in his own way, and a standard language as instrument and usage, in any level one might be referring, in order to be able to live as more fully as he could his experiences within and without this limit and this dispersion. The cultural fusions and the experiential sensations appear to be today an instrument that seems both played out and timely. From Brussels to Yedi Koule, from Eptapyrgio to the coast of Kalamaria, and from the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art to Action Field Kodra, people are passing through a continual series of contradictions and impressions that shape language and places, learning and people. In this year’s meeting the curator’s discourse and hierarchy’s discourse was consciously set aside, leaving each artist, in connection with the other artists, to engage with his discourse and stance, removing thus the conventional border or boundary that divides a work and its interpretation, creation and knowledge, reception and comment. The collaboration began in the framework of the First Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, from the exhibition entitled Who Is Here?, housed at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (25/5–29/7), which included 28 artists from many countries and was dedicated to the memory of Pavlos Zannas, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary after he began translating Marcel Proust’s “Search For Lost Time”, in Junta’s prisons. Next came the artistic multidisciplinary and interactive workshop on the theme of “Confinement” and “Lost Time” that was hosted at Eptapyrgio or Yedi Koule (1/7–14/7), which brought together the 9th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, the Summer Academy of the National Theatre, the French Institute, the Action Field Kodra, and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, gathered 10 visual artists, 15 students of drama schools (from the National Theatre, the National Theatre of Northern Greece, and the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki), a renowned stage director, notable theatrologues, writers, archeologists, art historians, and opened for a night the doors of the Acropolis and the prison to the public, achieving thus a collective escape from any unequivocal attribution of meaning to places, works, and human life. The exhibition Dispersion is a follow-up to this perspective and collaboration, transposing to the site of Military Camp Kodra the previous meetings and collaborations, actions and escapes, questions and queries. Two parallel levels allow this transposition of the limits of language from the practical usage of a conventional communication instrument to the dimension of a substantial medium for the completion of meaning. The exhibition “Dispersion” as concept, process and presentation allows each of the seven participating artists to concentrate on his work, and at the same time transforms this concentration into a common dispersion, where every individual work completes, along with an idiom, a particular place, both in art and in the sites of the military camp and the exhibition, forming thus a series of routes, contiguities, interrelations and meetings. Scattered in the wider venue, each work, along with its autonomy, forms part of a collective emancipation and a substantial dispersion through which all places together open up the horizon and allow a long and individual ramble through the limits of contemporary creation, passing through all the parts of the place, both as exhibition venue and spectrum of possibilities of the linguistic and semantic differentiations which give to contemporary art the meaning, wealth and multiplicity that make it stand out from every other usage of language. Each artist uses his own standard to measure out afresh the limits that impose or induce his attitude towards the place of Kalamaria, Kodra, Thessaloniki, the World, through the experience of a substantial meeting between languages and histories, today’s people and happenings, experiences and differences, myths and fancies, practices and works. People are divided in the point exactly where they can unite. This limit is both a matter of opinion and mood. It is also a matter of position and culture. It is a matter of language and meaning. It is a matter of history and freedom. Poetry belongs to language, not to the nation, because it is scattered like language rather than being concentrated like every normative dimension or identity. Language is the active limit between poetry and nation because it continually revises and reestablishes both, with courage and dare, beyond any dividing line, beyond any closed circle, beyond any map or dictionary, as it also does with everyday conventions and expediencies, in order to initiate the dimension of the world and to touch the width of the horizon. This is the wager of this meeting and creative hospitality that aims both at a greater opening up to the world and a memory of history beyond any biases and dominant ideologies. Through the logic of coexistence and free movement, “Dispersion” simply seeks a taste of the world beside us –as it is offered by the artists because, in their eyes, it offers itself– in the attention with which they look around them and in the lucidity with which they experience every day their role. Making sense (or not) of what happens around us, they manage to treat with responsibility and keenness the joys and dramas overwhelming us. Their aim is not to depict “politically correct” views, but to animate above all the human contradictions that oppose easy answers, stilted language, conventional functions, predetermined views or preconceptions. Foreigners and hosts come together to complete with Dispersion the meaning of creative hospitality, cooperation and collectivity as conscious and indivisible monads and individuals. They paint, draw, photograph, observe, note, describe, mark, surmise, erase, juxtapose, construct, imagine, project, compose, approach, query, worlds, personalities, characters, moments, memories, images, dramas, tragedies, feelings, emotions, aphasias, wonderments and silences. Through their actions they manage to arrive at the extent that their works can be, even partially, linguistic elements or parts of language, expressions or structures of meaning, gestures or voices on the limits of the signifiant, and this limit is the heart of language and the heart of culture, the beginning of poetry and the completion of thought. So dispersion here means an approach between the Universe and the Dictionary, where life and art, interspersed and dispersed, are never exactly the same, are never quite different, but they activate meaning and they are vitally activated through this continuous transformation and transposition. The works in the exhibition are the outcome of this conscience and life attitude from the artists in the aggregate. The discussions previously conducted brought the artists’ courses and perspective to the point where the limit has ceased to be an obstacle or a boundary, and merely is a passage –a passage like an emergency exit in an age of mass destruction, like a poetic license in an age of globalised centralisation, like a reckless gesture in an age of systematic surveillance mechanisms, like a simple feeling of presence in an age of multiple transgressions of power, like an act of conscientious objection in an age of coercive fundamentalism. All these are happening and continue to be happening with the awareness of dispersion, namely with the awareness that no one can ever impose to another a “concentration” different from the one dictated by his own free and individual stance and position. Dispersion, to remember the rural origins of our society, is like the way that goats move about, never forming a herd. They are not rebellious with wolves and sheep, and they are not rebellious with plains and mountains either, they just follow their inclination and needs, they play and run about, being neither tame nor untamed, neither domesticated nor wild animals, they follow their path and life, beyond any boundaries and limits, from the edge of the cliff to the hedge, and from the holm oak to the spring. The same could be said for the boats at sea, the distances dividing them, the routes they go along, the meetings they identify, the adventures and ports, although all these have been marvelously described by literature. Dispersion is here like when every sky and every hour spread about when they count as events, not as time or place. When even the moment seems a conventional notion compared with the time of a brushstroke, the duration of the lens aperture, the reverberation of a word in our mind or the reverberation of a meaning in the essence of poetry, in the passion of a kiss or in the urgency of a gesture. The programme at Action Field Kodra is a programme of creative hospitality. This is not enough for insisting that language is a limit that not only is not insurmountable, but, on the contrary, through the dispersion characterising it, such meetings and conjunctions give meaning and reveal meaning where the dictionary is still inadequate. It is inadequate because history and society that cultivate language have, in some cases or eras, forgotten the meaning of hospitality and the dimension of creativity. At any rate, “creative hospitality” in all Western languages does not denote something particularly metaphysical, a thing that it means in Greek. It denotes, in the most direct and comprehensible way, the invitation of artists to stay and work in a place, be it a specialised institution, or any form of local authority, or the members of a community who consider essential the presence of artists and men of culture among them, and who also consider essential the experience of the age’s sensibility and the bringing about of new works, new meanings, and new forms as a possibility for the advancement and prosperity of society itself and its members, for becoming a part of the world and, at the same time, for learning through the eyes of other people who friendly send back pictures and images that often seem entirely unlike the ones he carries in his mind or he would like to be told about. This is creative hospitality, and its meaning is completed when, indeed, this exchange of pictures, images, meanings, impressions, and models breaks the unequivocal dimension of certainty that fosters identity in order to find through dispersion the wealth and breadth of human culture and imagination, as well as the myriad ways devised by man for living, coming closer to the world and the others inhabiting it, and living with them. Let us wish that Kodra may proceed with this prospect of critical thinking that gives hopes for a better and more substantial future to the young –as well to any man, of any age, era or descent– allowing us the possibility to communicate more freely and directly and to orientate ourselves towards the world and the paths it allows, which go farther than any limit or boundary. Denys Zacharopoulos Art historian, Curator Artistic Director of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art |
Artist-in-Residency program: Isabelle ArthuisGuillaume DurandErwan MaheoXavier Noiret-ThomeRobert SuermondtChristina CalbariGiorgos Sourmelis |
