Contemporary art exhibition: “Summer is the opposite of history*”

This year, the festival “Routes in Marpissa” turns 10 and we are all invited to “Three days of celebration”. The exhibition “Summer is the opposite of history” was based on the concept of celebration, starting from what can a contemporary island festival be and how important traditional rituals are.

A family, local, national celebration may be a repetition of stereotypical rituals, where euphoria and the adoption of specific roles are perceived as self-evident, but it may also be a reason for a critical re-evaluation of motifs, rituals, ideologies associated with tradition and a uncovering of stereotypes, repressions, power relations. Or to trigger a new juxtaposition between words, images, historical documents and legacies of history (of art). Bringing together the works of four artists who visited Marpissa, literally and through bibliographic and other references, and created new works or revisited older ones, the exhibition reflects on what the expression “contemporary past” means. It challenges what we have inherited, but it also leaves itself to methexis.
This is what we do every summer, isn’t it? The sound of the tsampouna, the inside of a Cycladic cave, traditional dances, Marpissa of the old travellers, Seferis’s words are some of the starting points of the research of the artists who created their own narrative on their own local and personal references. The craving for summer carelessness, the nostalgia for island “authenticity” and the archetypal landscape, the sun and the stone, the “traditional” and the personal rituals of holidays instinctively return every summer obscuring the conflicts and the history that some of the biggest disasters have occurred this time of the year, from the black summer of 1974 in Cyprus to the fires.

In this particular summer circumstance, the relativity of summer time has the power to eliminate history (collective and personal), creating a timeless repetition of images and senses and that is the focus of this exhibition. Where the sound of the tsampouna inside a Parian cave lures us into an intellectual route. A lesson of a Hydriot dance poses the question of how a tradition in a specific historical-social context can be passed down from generation to generation by seeking the mechanisms of disenchantment and re-enchantment. A reading, regarding the relativity of summer time with references from George Seferis, explores: “How big should an event be in order to make it ours?” in front of the statue of a young resistance hero from Paros. The forgotten music player of a car and a video clip obsessively repeat sounds and phrases in a desperate attempt to celebrate and enjoy in the hypnotic environment of a resort island, while Yiannis Ritsos’s “Marpessa” meets the writings of other existing and non-existing poets and other people in the pages and margins of an artist’s book. One of the malfunctions occurring in the case of damage to the parietal lobe is the failure to focus visual attention.

* The phrase is borrowed from Thomas Tsalapatis’s text “Things that bones owe to rocks” written especially for the exhibition.

Artists: Natalie Yiaxi, Anthie Daoutaki, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Thomas Tsalapatis
Curated by Despina Zefkili

Artists and Works

Natalie Yiaxi

“Oh Car, Mobile Kingdom of Fleeting Thoughts”, 2016, sound installation

“Music video clip for the song {(Monotonous)*(Déjà vu)*(15gusto)}*”, 2017, *sound piece from the ongoing project Nice Contradiction Does Summer Sadness Again Bitches! (2013-)

“Snatching” (2019) One of a kind artist’s book

Natalie Yiaxi’s practice focuses on the plasticity of the language and the possibilities of translating it into other media. She will present three works in the exhibition.

Oh Car, Mobile Kingdom of Fleeting Thoughts, 2016, sound installation 20:00, sticker (dimensions variable)
In the car, the private self moves along the public space as if in a protective bubble. This mobile interstitial space, fosters an in-between state of mind, unleashes a prosodic and fluid internal discourse, induces a state of profound reflection, silliness, sadness, jouissance -and the whole cuisine of emotion. This succession of sonic pregnant moments, which occurred during and in-between routes and destinations, blurs the boundaries between life and performance.

“Music video clip for the song {(Monotonous)*(Déjà vu)*(15gusto)}*”, 2017, *sound piece from the ongoing project Nice Contradiction Does Summer Sadness Again Bitches! (2013-)

Nice Contradiction is an alter ego of Natalie Yiaxi. She is an introverted performer, constantly looking for ways to record and ‘songify’ her internal discourse. Her DIY songs, attempt to align the ephemeral and the metaphysical, while she finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the Cyprus Summer. Unbearable temperatures, suffocating dust, humidity and sweat. Trashiness and the rise of cheap all-inclusive tourism. The ‘carefree living’ imposed by the ‘island- resort’ notion. The propensity for catastrophe, since the most disastrous events of the country have occurred in this season, and the ‘black summer’ of ’74 as they call it in the news, which entails the abrupt awakening from the sirens in memory of the coup d’état  and invasion. These elements make up for a strange, summer landscape full of contradictions and conflicts . The ongoing project ‘Nice Contradiction Does Summer Sadness Again Bitches’ started in the summer of 2013 and grows by one song, every summer.

This video is the ‘official’ music video clip of the 2017 song.

Snatching (2019)
One of a kind artist’s book, 16Χ27cm

An artist’s book, which records an organic, intuitive research around Marpissa. A tiny piece of information, leads to an online treasure hunt in archives, books and digital newspapers. Mythology and coincidences create connections between women, who otherwise are centuries and geographies apart.  This work is a book of books and being as such, ‘it also includes previous works by Yiaxi; it revives Sibyl Selassie (a fictional character created by N.Y in 2010) through a collection of unpublished poems but also a new ‘prophecy’, while it incorporates the bookwork  ‘[ ]’ , (2011), which can also be found at Tate Library Special Collections.

Anthie Daoutaki

“Circling the swan”, 2019, video

“Imagine someone who goes to a wind ensemble concert, not because they like music, but because they are looking for brass.” Brecht’s catchphrase characterizes the practice of Anthie Daoutaki, where her self-observation, often through documents of other subjects, creates peculiar types of diaries. In the video “Circling the swan” the artist starts from the fact that the customs that have survived to this day are derivatives of a time when relations were organised around the community and the collective experience and their ritual practices, parts of a more magical worldview. Thus, she looks back at her relationship with the traditional dances from her island, Hydra, through her contact with the experiential knowledge of the older generation.

Yiannis Papadopoulos

“Parietal tune”, 2019, sound study and reproduction, road signs. In cooperation with Fanouris Petropoulos. Technical guidance Yiannis Mourtzopoulos

The practice of Yiannis Papadopoulos uses tools that come from the heritage of conceptual art, plastic and performing arts and manual work. In the context of the exhibition, he collaborated with Fanouris Petropoulos and they recorded the behaviour of the tsampouna inside a cave of Marpissa. An attempt is made to study the cavity of a cave and the cavity in the human skull that hosts the parietal lobe, which is responsible for the occurence of intentional movements, the use of objects and the synthesis of information. The artist highlights on the existing signage of the festival’s Routes his own route that leads to the point of the sound reproduction.

Thomas Tsalapatis

“Things that bones owe to rocks”, 2019, reading

Thomas Tsalapatis is a poet; he has written texts for the theatre and has dealt with vignette, political commentary, the theory of novel and poetry, the younger generation of poets, the city, the fluidity, and the use of history. Basic characteristics of his work are the absurd, the use of everyday language and elements of pop culture, identity in relation to memory. Next to the statue of the young hero Nicolas Stellas who was hanged by the German conquerors in Marpissa in 1944, he reads “Things that bones owe to rocks”, a text that levitates between the poetic and experiential speech written especially for the exhibition, for the relativity of summer time and the possibility of escaping from the everyday life and the history that summer offers.