Inside-outside - A conversation with Inés Muñozcano

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series. I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am very happy to be speaking with Inés Muñozcano. Ines is an art historian and curator based in Madrid. Her curatorial practice focuses on the historical, aesthetic, economic and virtual connections that bring together different countries, people and artistic communities. In Fall 2019, we participated together in the Critical Practices Program of Onassis AiR. In this conversation we discuss about her time in Athens and her research into the Athenian art scene that culminated in "Eros and Thanatos Real Estate", the exhibition that she curated inside an old Athenian house in the neighborhood of Kypseli. On this occasion, we also invited Mateo Revillo a longtime collaborator of Inés and one of the participating artists of the exhibition to further expand on the relationship between artist and curator.

Inés!

Hello!

Hello!

How are you?

I'm good. I'm very happy we're doing this together.

Yeah, me too. Are you in our studio?

I am in our studio.

Amazing! I can recognize the ceiling and the shelves.

Perfect! Well, I just wanted to say that this conversation is quite special for me because, Inés, you were my roommate in the attic of Onassis AiR and we shared the studio space together. For those of you who are listening to us, the Critical Practices Program was a full-time three-month encounter for art practitioners based in Athens that needed time to pause and rethink their practice. Participating as a curator myself, without a studio most of the times, it was the first time that I had a dedicated space and time for research and I was wondering, how was it for you? How was the experience during these three months for you?

I think I was the only one in this program that was not Greek and when it started I was living here for almost a year already. So, I knew the city quite well, but it really helped me to better understand the art world and the artistic community in Athens. I had, of course, my own ideas, my first impressions, my experience, but it was maybe focused on conversations and experiences shared with visual artists. Then, having Marina, who is a performer and dancer, Prodromos who is a theater director and writer, and Chrysanthi, who runs a project space, it really helped me understand better and feel that I belong in the artistic community here in a way. Because I get to understand it and there is no return point I think that you reach. Sorry, my cat is here. So, it was that on the one hand. On the other hand, what you mentioned is that curators very often just work with books and with our laptops and we spend a lot of time isolated. Of course, we have the studio visits and so on, but sometimes there are many hours of lonely work. All the programs that we had, all the workshops and lectures and so on, were not very mental. They were not very philosophical. They were very physical. We explored our voices, all our senses, actually, and it helped me. I am mixing stories here, but there is this collector in Spain that I know that she always says that if you are an art critic, you have the art critic hat on you and if you are a collector, you have the collector hat on you and if you are an artist, so on and that you cannot exchange those hats. I really disagree with this. Even more so after this experience that taught us that we can be cooks, we can be like siblings to one another.

We spent a lot of time together.

A lot of time together! I now know that we can actually give feedback to people who work in areas that are very different to ours and that we can receive that. This exchange of energies and artistic areas was very important. It is joining me for life.

It was multidisciplinary, but also quite horizontal in the way that we worked with each other to make decisions about daily things.

Yeah.

I think that you pointed out a very important aspect that also worked for me. We actually did so many activities, as you said, that involved different kinds of senses and I was wondering which one stayed with you?

There were many. For sure with Irena Tomažin.

The voice workshop?

Yeah, that was very amazing. I remember that my body was feeling different after that and my mind was different as well. We learned this song that is like gibberish, do you remember?

That's true!

I still sing this and it really stabilizes me. She's an amazing person as well. Then, I remember when Mark Leckey came and he had this very interesting closed meeting with us in the morning. I don't know how many we were. We were a small group and we were all participating. It was again very horizontal. He was asking us very honest questions like, "what's your drive?", "why are you in the art world?", "what's your passion?" So, I shared my ideas and he was like "ah, interesting, so how do you make the visitors of the exhibition engage with the artist?". I got nervous. "I don't know, by making, an immersive installation." And he was like "ah, interesting". Then, that night at 3 137, the space that Chrysanthi runs, he had a lecture and one of the first things he said was that he definitely always by all means tries to avoid the expression "immersive". I didn't take it personally, but it made me think a lot as well and I thought that he was right. I mean, there are a lot of terms that are abused, like emerging artists, for example. When I was back in Spain some years ago this was something that everyone was talking about to highlight the interest of an artist, like he is emerging whatever and I feel that it is dangerous to repeat some adjectives in some cases.

Since you mentioned Spain, if I remember correctly, you moved to Athens in 2018 and you got interested in the ways that the spaces that are left empty, the businesses that are left empty by the economic crisis and in the ways that these spaces can be reactivated in a city. From our discussions, I remember that you were interested in seeing that in Athens, because this was something that was also happening in Spain. So, I wanted to ask you about how you started working on this research question that in the end also turned into the exhibition that you curated?

First of all, in a city like Athens, there are way more abandoned buildings than in cities like Madrid, where the housing industry is insane and very aggressive. So, we have a lot of empty premises in the outskirts of the city, not that many downtown, and what happens in cities like Madrid is that the big buildings, like old factories and so on, are converted into big cultural centers, which I believe is great. Some of them, like Tabakalera for example in Madrid, that has been running for some years -I don't remember how many, but less than a decade, I think- half of it works as a "communa". It's self-organized by communities of local people, people who live in the neighborhood or in the area and they decide what is the cultural program. The other half is run by the community of Madrid, the municipality of Madrid, and of course it has more funding. It's interesting that they managed to have these two teams together under the same roof and I think it's a good way of promoting these more underground, if we want to call it, or less institutional part. What did I find in Athens? I was living in Kypseli when I moved there. I lived there for a year and I was absolutely impressed by the amount of empty, wonderful buildings that were there. It's also a neighborhood where many different communities live. It is very full of life, children playing on the squares and old people and there's this farmer's market every Friday, if I recall, that is wonderful. More than half of the stores are empty and there was no prospect for them to be open again. So, at the time I was living there, some project spaces opened, some artists moved to Kypseli, which normally means the start of gentrification. When the artists in New York moved to Brooklyn, because it was cheaper, then galleries opened there. Now Brooklyn is insanely expensive as well. In Madrid, just like in New York, artists also crossed the river and they are now in a neighborhood called Carabanchel and in other neighborhoods around, like Usera, but in Carabanchel perhaps mostly. Artists are moving there because it's cheap, they can find cool big spaces for their studios, these hype of the art world eventually brings -How do you call this anyway?- everything higher. The price of life increases in this area. Sο, I saw that Pet Projects started there at the time and also MuM Project started there at the time almost within one month and many artists were living in the area. I definitely wanted to do something, because I realized something that happens in Madrid and perhaps happened in Brooklyn as well, that the people that live in the neighborhood don't know about these spaces. They don't know about this new artistic community that is taking over the space. And that stimulates or perpetuates this stupid idea of contemporary art being just for a happy few that can understand the very conceptual and deep part. I'm very much against that. The first idea that I had was to take these stores, the frontstores, the windows from the stores that are abandoned and have installations there, so that the passers-by would see them. But eventually that became impossible because nobody would rent a place only for one month, even less -for six different stores. One situation that I found myself in over and over again was that the store belonged to someone, that someone died and many people inherited it and there was no way that they would agree on doing something with it. I really have no idea what's going to happen with all those premises. Most likely, some wealthy investor will eventually buy the whole building.

I remember all the things that you had to face during the development of the project and how stressed you were and it's interesting to discuss about it because most people would see the exhibition in the end, but don't know the back story of how we work to reach that point where you see what you see.

Yeah.

Let's discuss a bit more about the exhibition. It was called "Eros and Thanatos Real Estate" -"eros" and "thanatos" in Greek mean love and death- and it featured site-specific installations by Spanish and Greek artists in a very beautiful building, one of the modernist buildings that are still in good shape in Athens, on Kykladon street in Kypseli. Tell us about the concept and the themes that you brought together, the death and the love aspect. It's interesting for me that you added the phrase real estate in this title.

Well, real estate has to do with this gentrification process that we are suffering from, that I was talking about a minute ago. It was funny because a lot of people would come. Eventually it was a success by the fact that people that live there just came into the place. First of all, because it's a very cool building that has been closed for decades. They were excited to see it from the inside, but also they were coming in and asking if we sell houses, which was really funny. And then they would stay for the art. All the aesthetic of the exhibition was very corporate. We designed a logo with a red poppy, which is the flower of intoxication and of desire. It's a pretty interesting icon or representation of this duality between life and death. I think the main question that I had was that I wanted to do this experiment. What happens to a building or to a neighborhood when it's filled with art? What is the social power art, if there is such a thing? I believe there is. So, as you said, I was very stressed out at some point. I was very lucky and you know I came up with this idea just living in Kypseli, thinking about the things that we have in common between Spain and Greece. I was living in Poland before, so I really felt like we are cousins and that we share so many things, the abandoned buildings, the hospitality and so on. And yet, I was curious about what is the potential of these liminal spaces. What's going to happen after with them? Do we take the opportunity as all these artists are doing actually, even if not many people that live around them are approaching them, if they are being generous, having their spaces to host exhibitions and to host workshops?

How did you engage with the artists? How did you work with them -those that were based here and those that were based in Madrid or in other parts of Spain?

There were three artists from Spain and three artists from Greece. In Greece, I worked with Maro Michalakakos, with Malvina Panagiotidi and with Vasilis Papageorgiou. All of them amazing and all of them made these site-specific pieces. It's interesting because each of them has a very different visual language. It was easier with them, perhaps, than with the Spanish artists, because I was able to have studio visits with them quite often and they would also come to see the venue.

You had an ongoing conversation.

It was an ongoing conversation exactly. With the Spanish artists, there is Mateo Revillo, who is waiting in the waiting room to join our conversation and I'll talk a lot about him later. He's one of my favorite artists ever. All collaborations with him are great!

He did a very ambitious project in that building.

He made a fountain and I remember explaining this to the people and then on the actual day of the opening people were like "ah, but it was an actual functioning fountain". They thought it was a metaphorical, an artistic term for a sculpture. But no, it was a proper installation with a ton of clay and it was great. Then, there was Marina Vargas as well, who is a fantastic artist quite well-known for her feminist approach, who has this series of sculptures called "Nor Angel Nor Animal", which is a title taken from Blaise Pascal, and she presented this very canonical Greco-Roman sculpture that has this pinkish and purple monstrosity coming out of it. So, it also represents the canon and the anticanon, the beauty and the ugliness, the "eros" and "thanatos" at the end of the day, because it was this beautiful woman who has something that is threatening somehow. Then, Leonor Serrano Rivas who made these wonderful pieces in Tangier and in Spain to bring them here -at the moment they are exhibited in the Alhambra in Granada, in Spain- that are textiles. I think it also linked very well with the story. It weaved, it intertwined very well with the whole story. It was presented at the beginning of the show. It was the first installation in the building. There are many links to architecture, actually. So as you mentioned, the building is this modernist building made by Proveleggios. I think there are only two buildings by him in Athens. He was a friend and student of Le Corbusier. The whole exhibition, each room, because each artist had one room, was planned as a building's room. There was the patio, there was the entrance with the peplums, the hanging fabrics made by Leonor Serrano Rivas, which I was talking about, there was a temple, there was the inside-outside space with Vasilis's piece and the cabinet of curiosities. Then, at the entrance, outside on the street, we had the logo, the puppy, in a red neon light, which, you know, reminds me of the neon that are on top of the Orthodox churches here in Athens.

Really?

Yeah. There are crosses usually blue on top of or at the entrance of the church. There is a neon, which is very funny. I mean, it's interesting because it's these classic buildings with neon on it. That was also a wink. The owner of the house is a quite recognized architect himself and one of the first quotes that I had as an inspiration for this project was by a Spanish architect called Rafael Moneo that goes like this: "the steel structures of the buildings allow us to perceive all the changes that take place in the building". The building is full of life, but we can perceive this life perhaps because the building itself does not change its form.

You also had some poetic references and inspirations for the exhibition.

Well, of course, if you think of "eros" and "thanatos", it's a very romantic duality -love and death. They cannot be without each other. If you love, if you are madly in love, you kill part of yourself. You give away your independence. There is this Spanish poet, José Cadalso, who was not very romantic in his forms. He was more epic perhaps or bellic or historical. If you read about his life, he is considered the major Spanish romantic poet. When his wife died, he literally undug her dead body from the cemetery, which is actually in downtown Madrid -I used to work next door to it. What is more romantic than that, actually being in love with the dead body, wanting to kiss the dead body? So yeah, it is poetic for sure and it's a theme that has obsessed artists, painters and writers.

Besides the practical challenges that you faced during the time that we spent together, do you feel that all the discussions that we had or the time that you spent here informed the way that enriched the project?

Yeah, for sure. As I said, I didn't do this project for anyone. It was a freelance project 100% and that gives you a lot of insecurity sometimes. So, just being able to discuss it on a daily basis and bring to the table how I should do this or what do you think about this was amazing. We had created a safe space and we would say "this does not work for me" or "this works for me, go in this direction". Ioanna Gerakidi recommend me this book that I have here, actually. It's called "The Agony of Eros" by Byung-Chul Han, who is a philosopher based in Berlin, and it was amazing. I read it one month before the opening and again it was a show that I was thinking of for a very long time.

This was part of the Theory Seminar that we did with Ioanna.

It was an amazing seminar. She was perfect!

Before we invite Matteo in to give his own perspective, we also did a trip together and for me, that was one of the highlights, because we actually went on the other side of the world together. We went to Indonesia and I'm back with a lot of memories from that trip that I'm still thinking about. I was reading the short text that you wrote and I wanted to quote something. You mention that all the things that we shared or we did there "brought some things inside us in order to open ourselves towards something bigger", a broader perspective. I would like to ask you what is the most memorable story for you from Indonesia and what makes you feel this way?

There are so many memories that every time I think about it, or I talk about the trip with someone, I bring a different story. I think a lot of Raed Yassin, who was our mentor for a month and who had the brilliant idea of taking us to Indonesia. A crazy, bold idea because, as I said before, we all come from different paths of life, but it was definitely an enlightening initiatory trip for all of us, which is crazy because we were eight people and again each of us is looking for something different. We were all impressed by the trip. That was a big success and I believe the success lives in how audacious and risky that was actually. To go without a plan somewhere. Being with Raed in general. Right before going to Indonesia -we went in October- the revolution in Lebanon started. Raed is from Lebanon. He was following very much the news and he was being very active on social media and so on. He was my roommate at the time, because we were both staying in the Onassis AiR house and he showed me this video that went viral on social media in Lebanon of these guys who lived in a very depressed area somewhere close to a forest and there was a big fire coming towards them. This is recorded with a cell phone. Eventually the fire hits an electric tower and the tower explodes. This means that electricity is cut for the whole village, but what people did was that they were celebrating and laughing and jumping. It's something between like shock and humor, like you have to laugh with things, even if you lost one of the few things that you have left. You just laugh at it. Then in Indonesia, I really enjoyed this show by this collective Ruang MES 56.

If I remember correctly, this is an artist collective that focuses on the medium of photography. What was particularly interesting for you in this exhibition?

It is new media, basically. It was photography and the evolution of photography. There were a lot of videos and video installations. They are a collective indeed and it was very interesting that we met so many collectives in Indonesia. We didn't meet any artist who works solo actually and these collectives join forces all the time. They do have this assembly kind of mindset and way of working. This collective, in particular, they were friends at the university and they were telling me how their professors and their teachers were very much against photography because they considered it was a medium just for design, to communicate, for advertisements and things like that. They were joyful people and you could see this through their art that was very political actually and spoke about a lot about the conflicts between Indonesia and Singapore. I remember that very well. And also of queer people. It was a collective that was growing constantly, members-wise. When they started, they were 13 boys and the time that we were in Indonesia they were 20 or 30 men working there, collaborating together. Through them, some of us went to see the screening of thee works by Yusuke Shibata, who is this Japanese artist who also approaches drama through humor. So, because of Yusuke and because of Raed Yassin and also because of Alaa Ghosheh, who was a colleague with us at Onassis, I am starting to focus a lot on this thing that I find very interesting, the tragicomedy.

Shall we let Matteo in, who has been waiting for us for a while, to say a few things about his participation in the exhibition and about your collaboration together?

Fantastic! Yes, let him in.

Hello!

Hi, Matteo!

Hi, Mateo!

Hello! Good evening.

How are you?

Absolutely fine. I'm glad to join you for this conversation.

Are you in Madrid?

Well, I was in Madrid till last week and now I'm in Paris and managed to make it through the border in these weird times we live in.

Well, I hope you're fine. We were having a discussion with Inés today about her work at Onassis AiR and one of the main research projects that Inés was doing while she was here was the exhibition "Eros & Thanatos Real Estate", that she presented last January. You were part of this exhibition.

Absolutely, I participated. This was, if I remember well, last January, and the exhibition was gathering three Greek artists and three Spanish ones. I was the lucky one from Spain to make it to the exhibition. It was very nice to see it from the inside and also by knowing Inés from before. Actually, when I started exhibiting work, Inés was already there. At my very first exhibition, she was working in the gallery I was working with already as a curator or assistant curator. Since then, we've kept in touch with many projects and the last one we worked together was right after being at Onassis AiR. Actually right before. It was in September, four months before [Eros & Thanatos]. She curated a show that I was having at Xavier Fiol Gallery in Madrid. I've worked before with Inés and I do like her input in curating shows because it comes with a much more horizontal approach. She is very creative. She is an excellent writer. So, that makes it easier in the sense that you don't feel you're getting squeezed by a curator that is between you and the galleries, but that you're actually working together with another cultural worker that does writing as you do painting and that makes it frankly very valuable, I would say.

But it also creates this space of trust between an artist and a curator having this long-standing relationship between artists and curators that is not just a one-off. So, you continue working together and developing a body of work, sometimes with the same people, every now and then and this relationship is also somehow growing for both of you.

Absolutely! I would say we have a personal relationship that is positive and helps build projects, but we also work somehow the same way. When Inés told me about her show in Athens with Onassis AiR, I felt that it was also part of my ongoing discussion with my own work. So, both things come together. The fact that we're close to each other, but also the fact that we have parallel interests, if not very close ones.

How did you start working together?

When I had this idea, at the very beginning of it actually, before I started looking for funding and for a venue and anything, I called Mateo and I told him. We catch up quite often. We call each other and send each other some texts and some things that are going on with our practices. So, I called him and I explained what I had in mind. He gave me some feedback and he gave me the original idea that he had, the primary idea for his piece that eventually became something different, but still rooted in that idea. And then time passed, we had the exhibition in Madrid in between actually that was called "Fountains". How should I put it in English, Matteo? What do you think?

It's true that it would be tricky, but it was like "sources".

Sources, right!

Fountains as sources. In Spanish, it holds both meanings, so it goes smoothly.

But then eventually you made a fountain, which was a source as well in the exhibition here in Athens. So, it was a long-term project. The place where the exhibition took place was very old and it had been empty for so long that it was a lot of work to fix it. In the meantime, Mateo was painting his massive paintings and then destroying them, breaking them. So it was this process of fixing something that is broken and then creating something to be broken. These two parallel things going on. Mateo's works are always big.

Totally! I am jumping in. Feeling what you are going to say, I'm going to say it myself. It's more courageous. There was a lot of work, but it is some sort of challenge in my work sometimes, because it was one ton of material to move around. But I think putting those sort of constraints in the work also constrains the production of an exhibition and of the life that goes around it. So somehow, by having to work for two weeks straight, having very tight schedules, going there every morning and every afternoon and continuing to install and make my own work, since we were just doing everything at the same time makes art be a place of living. That is something that I value a lot and that I might force somehow by putting these very tremendous physical conditions to work, to move one ton or to put paintings on the ceiling or things of that sort. That is just one way to also make the place alive and be organic somehow. And so, the relations that you have there, the work that you do with the others, is grounded in the work, not in just being together in a space. There is something more real about relations when they're made on duty.

The whole exhibition focused a lot on the connections between Spanish and Athens based artists or Greek artists in general and I was wondering whether you also saw these connections coming up while you were here and from the stories that you were collecting while being here.

Absolutely! Well, on a first level, I was already prepared for that connection since I was coming for a project that was focused already on that. But to be true, I had never been in Athens before and when I arrived, it was very fun for me. My family comes from southern Spain right next to the sea and there is this very little city that noone knows about, San Pedro del Pinatar. Athens is just like San Pedro del Pinatar became the capital. It's really the Mediterranean. It's a city that is a port. There are orange trees in the streets. The houses receive a lot of light. It was just like being back home, but being analphabet, not being able to read, but that made it a very sensitive experience for me. Very sensual. So, I did see the connections. I mean, rather than seeing the connections, I was unable not to live in parallel with that similarity that there is with Spain or my background. And also, I felt very close. Coming from Spain one should feel solidarity towards Athens because there has been for the last two or three decades, if not before, I guess, both countries reflect the way the city lives the crisis and rebuilds the city from the inside, almost like a devouring entity.

You told me a joke before. Can you repeat that, so that everybody listens to it?

Yes, it's a joke. Actually, it's not a joke. I would even write an article about it, if I were a good writer. We had this joke actually or saying or motto during the preparation of the exhibition, that was "what they call performance up North is called surviving down South". That was actually the way we're living it with a lot of theatricality where practical things, were actually also a representation of things, were something that was being represented. Just because you didn't really know how things were going to turn up. So actually, whatever representation you were making was alive. Inés was actually doing artistic work. She was not only writing, but also preparing this video that was going to be projected from one of the windows of the building to the facade right in front and suddenly working with this idea of reflected spaces and a temple like experience of a street and a house and an interior. So, it was joyful.

That's great. I really liked the part where you said that the cities rebuild themselves from within and I think that's something that I also saw your work.

Well, thanks for the space to talk about it, because I think it's a piece that had something quite elegant in the sense that it had two meanings. It was in this very dark space underground, almost just a tiny window into an almost derelict room and I made a fountain just for a start. This fountain resembled somehow a little bit a tomb. One ton of clay was laid on the floor and two paintings were on both sides of this plinth made out of clay and there was a beautiful mechanism that would pump water up and down, but making a very weak noise, like really a frail fountain. So somehow it was some sort of death. But the fountain is also something else. The fountain can be a well, somewhere where water falls, but it can also be somewhere where the water rises and life can gather around again. The sound of water in Spain is very related to gypsy music, to flamenco and to their chants. Actually, there's a well known soul song that is called "Like Water" and the singer just makes the sound of water. They always sing by the fountain. So, a fountain is also something that gathers life around, that calls for you, for expectation, for life to come back, but is also silent. It was nice, since it was a silent piece for feeling comfort and for saying goodbye to an old time for that space. It was also a space to just feel warm and hear the sound and the chants, the singing of a fountain. So, there were those two things and there was this expression of effort in the work. Just seeing the material and the craftiness of the entire work would help to count the hours and if not the hours, at least the strength and the patience put into something intensely to make it happen. People in the South do work with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of creativity. But it's a very resourceful way to come up with a project. So actually, I decided to make a fountain and had this small idea of how we would proceed. One shouldn't have an idea of how it should end anyway and it ended up being an actual fountain. Just to tell the end of the story, the fountain, like anything else, erodes. So, the fountain after one week and a half working just dried out and the bricks, the clay laid on the floor broke from everywhere and the water evaporated and that was the end of a system, like the end of a neighborhood that devours itself and ends up being gentrified anyway, it gets dried up.

Inés, did you know before Mateo arrived what you were jumping into in terms of this particular work?

No, I had an idea, but you can never actually expect what it's going to be like. Timewise, as Matteo said before, it was life. It was like home, being there, creating, working. That was what we would do all the time. I am used to this working with Mateo. I imagined it, I pictured it, but it was even better. And then, what happened when the water dried and the plinth cracked. It was like a beautiful piece of land art that we could have indoors.

I think I could go on and on asking questions and also sharing the same kind of feeling since we're both young curators in our field. I'm also thinking that it's so different when you ask someone to participate in your project and then this becomes real and then you have to deinstall it and basically have nothing. It was all so ephemeral. But we're running out of time, so I wanted to say thank you both for participating and I have a last question. Looking back, I think it's been six months since we concluded the program and the program was about all the shifts that we were going through in our practice. How do we shift?

Is this question only for me or is Mateo answering as well?

He can help.

So, how do we shift? I don't know. I think we need to take the time. We have to put our mind on taking the time and actually look around and see what is going on because otherwise we don't shift. We continue with the flow, but we are not conscious about the changes that we are experimenting with. You said before that the exhibition was ephemeral and as you know, this was a big concern that I had regarding the show. It's been six months since we finished the residency at Onassis AiR, but somehow it stays with me forever. When I was doing the reading for this exhibition, I wrote this quote about love. When you fall in love, you may be aware that that feeling will change, that it will stop being what it is at that particular moment, but that feeling at that moment feels eternal. That helped me go through with the fact that the exhibition was going to end and how could I help having a positive impact in the neighborhood of Kypseli in Athens, but I couldn't. As long as the show was there, if it was good, it felt eternal. This feeling with eternity I take with me to the Onassis AiR experience as well.

Me too!

It's going to be with us forever.

Yes, I guess we let ourselves be exposed in many different ways and that creates all this openness that you were talking about before and it leads to a transformation. Well, I want to thank you both!

Thank you so much. It was lovely!

Thank you very much!

Thank you, Mateo!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.