Contemporary art exhibition: Mishaps
The ghost of a forsaken woman from a 1960s Greek film still haunts the Municipal building of Paros. A wandering peddler walks through the alleys of Marpissa, crying out his wares—odds and ends drawn from folk tradition. A hike along the Byzantine trail of Lefkes draws on folkloric records of enchantments, offerings, and the decorative floor tiles of island churches—traced and interpreted by the photographer and folk-art researcher Zacharias Stellas. The macho toxicity of a local football radio broadcast is abruptly interrupted by a song by Eleni Foureira.
Starting from Stellas’s Paros Clumsy Drawings, the body of work that inspired this year’s Routes in Marpissa festival, the exhibition “Mishaps” explores the notion of the clumsy in open, embodied, and conceptual ways. Traditions and rituals, old and new, are lifted out of their original contexts, the field, the trail, the stadium, the celebration, and reactivated in conversation with the stakes and lived experiences of a time in which many of us feel clumsy in multiple ways. With a sideways, critical gaze toward gender stereotypes and the discourses (religious, folk, artistic, political) of both past and present, the works unfold, playfully, throughout the village, seeking our involvement.
In sun-drenched, sky- and sea-ringed places, “milky-white by their people,” as Stellas writes, the folk artisan’s refusal to faithfully reproduce human forms “reveals the yearning, to show who the believer aspires to become, to resemble the angel.” He adds: “The more experienced folk artisans become through repetition, the more they fail, unintentionally, to smooth out the mishaps in how we see their work, and they deliberately preserve the clumsiness in its details.” These visual mishaps are exactly what this exhibition seeks and encourages, at a time when we know that even those milky-white, sky-blue-ringed places aren’t always as idyllic or as ‘of the people’ as we were taught to imagine.
Language, text, performativity, and craft, as tools for building community, are some of the key themes explored by the participating artists. All works are new creations.
What is clumsiness (the imperfect, the odd, the hybrid) today, and how might we think through it in both contemporary and local contexts? Is folk clumsiness the counterpoint to the copy-paste perfection of island chic luxury? Is it clumsy for a local to turn their field into a villa with a pool in order to send their children to university? Or for someone to claim their right to lay out a towel on the beach, disrupting the aesthetic of the exclusive daybeds? Could Marpissa itself, and its festival, be a living embodiment of the clumsy, one that insists on seeing “differently” amid the touristic dystopia that characterises much of Paros and the Aegean?
How can we revisit poems, myths, rituals, folk customs, disguises, texts, landscapes, and techniques in a way that claims clumsiness as a right—at a time when society is turning its back on even hard-won efforts toward openness and inclusion, taking troubling steps backward? Might the path to visibility and justice pass through the fluidity and hybridity of tradition, through an expanded understanding of heritage?
By reclaiming the right to be clumsy, the participating artists explore how normative frameworks shape identities, behaviours, and value systems—and how the pursuit of freer expression can act as a form of empowerment.
Participants: Dimitris Ameladiotis, Antonis Antoniou – Marios Chatziprokopiou, Alkisti Efthymiou, Markella Ksilogiannopoulou, Doreida Xhogu
Curator: Despina Zefkili
Dimitris Ameladiotis, the turner, performance, 2025
In his performance “The Turner”, visual artist Dimitris Ameladiotis embodies a wandering peddler who carries the entire merchandise of the world upon his body, as he roams through the alleys and squares of Marpissa. Along the way, he narrates two folk tales—“Like Salt” and “The Shepherd and the Three Illnesses”—which explore the relationship between basic needs and core life values. The storytelling is enriched with traditional songs and rhyming verses that deepen the reflection on the sharing of responsibilities and the hierarchy of ideals in life’s struggle.
Antonis Antoniou – Marios Chatziprokopiou, Incantations/Aetheiés, 2025
What are the Aetheiés? “Wishes and prayers and folk-forged supplications,” writes Zacharias Stellas in his book «Rough-Edged Images of Paros, Vol. III» (p.15). Drawing on these singular folkloric records of charms—as well as on the votive offerings and floor decorations in churches, which Stellas collected and interpreted—the performative walk «Incantations» weaves live recitation and storytelling with the in situ creation of ephemeral forms upon the ground. We invite participants to follow us along the Byzantine path of Paros, from Lefkes to Prodromos, in the early hours after sunrise The soil, the stones, the flagstone paving, the olive groves, the dry-stone sheepfolds, the rural dwellings, the façades of the villages or the sea, the burnt trees, the half-built structures, the highway: all these disparate elements of the landscape —together with the air, the temperature, the shadows, the light— evoke multiple histories of the place. At this threshold between “Greek summer” and touristic dystopia, we articulate—guided by Stellas’s images and texts—a rough-edged spell for our present. At the end of the route, the traces left behind take form as a visual/poetic installation in Marpissa.
Alkisti Efthymiou, “Tasia’s Complaint”, video. 2025
Tasia, a married woman and the lover of the film’s protagonist, vanishes from the plot of Mia tou Klefti (1960) as if her desire were punished into silence. This work imagines her return to the Paros town hall – once the Xenia Hotel and the film’s primary setting. Original scenes from Mia tou Klefti are combined with new footage shot in the same spaces: a stopped clock, a lost bracelet, a female figure glimpsed at the edge of a balcony. The piece reactivates the memory of “illicit” female desire that fiction sought to erase, and Tasia returns to the viewer the complaint that was denied her.
Markella Ksilogiannopoulou, Topika, sound installation, 2025
For some, “clumsiness” is nothing more than a minor disruption in the flow of their daily lives. A moment that, ideally, would not have happened, as it “slows things down.” Topika approaches this discomfort as a tool for transformation.
Drawing on the logic of mashup remixes—a sonic entanglement of disparate sounds—the piece begins with something familiar: overtly masculine outbursts from football stadiums. The flow is interrupted, the familiar sound is displaced, and the work moves us into a more uncomfortable, disorienting space. The sensation of “clumsiness” is not avoided—it is invited, proposed as a form of disturbance that carries the potential for upheaval.
Doreida Xhogu, Dordolecat (The Scarecrows), installation, 2025
The collective visual project Dordolecat—which means scarecrows in Albanian—takes its inspiration from the history of Marpissa itself. From the village’s layout, designed in the 16th century as protection against pirate raids, to old agricultural practices in which solitary scarecrows stood guard over the crops, warding off threats.
Made of wood, straw, and thread, and placed side by side at the entrance of the village, the scarecrows no longer frighten off the uninvited. Instead, they welcome visitors with open hearts—waiting to be completed on site, together with the artist.