Scanning the walkscape - A conversation with Aris Papadopoulos

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.

In this conversation, I have the chance to speak with Aris Papadopoulos. Aris is a dancer, maker and performer based in Athens. With a background in architecture Aris sees the landscape as a cultural construction and as a heavily charged field of potentiality for action, exploration, playfulness and composition. In spring 2020, Aris was a participant of the Critical Practices Program of Onassis AiR. Today, we will discuss about his research interest around the reciprocal scheme of embodying landscape versus shaping an experience that he further explored during his residency through the format of an audio-guided performative walk. On this occasion, we have also invited to this conversation his two mentors who worked closely with Aris and supported him for the development of his research, Lenio Kaklea, a dancer, choreographer and writer based in Paris, and Dimitris Theodoropoulos, an architect working in the intersection of art, architecture and spatial design.

Aris, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you very much for accepting my invitation. Perhaps you can briefly say a few things about yourself.

Thank you for inviting me for this conversation. My name is Aris Papadopoulos. I am a dancer, a performer and a dance maker. I am a bit reluctant to use the term choreographer as it refers to specific practices and since I come from an architectural background, I consider myself to be more of an interdisciplinary artist. My interest lies in the exploration of various fields and formats. I have been developing lately my own work for the first time -this is what the whole research in this program was about-, although I have been active in the performing arts for some years as a dancer and performer and I have also been creating dance work through my collaboration with Martha Passakopoulou. We are currently developing a new idea for a work together. But I am always switching in-between being performer for others, making work with our collaboration with Martha and also creating my own work.

Thank you. Well, I was actually about to ask you about your background in architecture and how did you start with dance and performance and where does dance and architecture actually meet in your your practice?

I initially imagined a career in architecture, but gradually I became less and less attracted to the built environment and I was more keen on landscape, landscape design and processes that transform spaces or places over time and in different phases or where the element of time was a decisive factor in the overall outcome or ephemeral structures. I was more interested in designing and building and doing this type of design. Then, later on, while walking and doing fieldwork for another research in the vernacular and rural landscapes of Arcadia, I gradually realized that our own body is creating something in space while walking and that has an impact in space -the body traversing the space. And that, of course, coincided with my dance studies. So, eventually, my medium of expression and understanding space shifted towards the dancing body or the moving body.

You also mentioned the notion of time. Was body for you a form of measurement in terms of time and space?

No, I mentioned time for designing practices. It is a different thing to have a finished design and apply it on a place, to conceive it elsewhere and then apply it on another place, and it is a different thing to work with the element of time, the seasons, the changes and the cycles.

I see.

In order to come up with a design that is site-specific and applied exactly to the space that you' are designing it for. In terms of the body and the moving body and in terms of dance, what I liked was that the outcome was on the spot. With dance you are dancing and you are moving and this is happening there and then. Actually it is instant and then it is gone. Unless, of course, for documentation and other formats of work.

Well, let's start from the very beginning. In terms of your residency, you were part of the Critical Practices Program, which was intended for practitioners who were experiencing a critical shift in their practice and needed time to pause and reflect. I would like to ask you what was the critical shift that you were experiencing when entering the program and how did you decide to apply for this residency?

The biggest shift or the biggest change for me was that from being mostly a performer I was introducing myself as a maker of my own work for the first time. Although I have been working and have been making work in collaboration, it was the first time that I wanted time for myself to gather my ideas, to see what I would do on my own and what choices I would make in making work and also where would I draw from -from which disciplines. So, the other ongoing personal question -it was more a need rather than a question- was this attempt to bridge those two disciplines, architecture and dance, not in a strict sense. I wanted to make use of the tools that each discipline provided that I could possibly implement within the spectrum of the performing arts. So, how could the broader understanding of space and landscape and a broader understanding of movement generated by the human body can come together? Where do those two things come together? And then, it was the critical issue of time. This program allowed for time. I could have the time to delve into those things and find out what was important to me.

Did you have a research question?

Yes, of course. The initial title was "embodied landscapes and landscaped bodies". That was the first thing. It was a play of words trying to show the reciprocal nature of container and content and which one shapes which. It had to do, of course, with this previous site-specific research in the landscape of riverbanks where water from the riverbank and respectfully the riverbank determined the course of the water. So, instead of water in the urban landscape, which I was interested in, the fluidity was substituted by human movement. In my case it was my own body. My own body became the unit of measurement. I started with that trying to compare myself against the landscape. How many steps would there be; how long did it take me to cover a distance, a specific route; what were the changes of altitude along the walk; what was my orientation? And then gradually, this initial title transformed finally to a final research question, which was how to embody landscape and how to shape an experience which was a better phrasing of those notions.

What is a landscape for you?

I am interested in landscape as the combination of both manmade and natural environments and what is more important is the effect that one has over the other. So, I take landscape as it is, not in the romantic sense of a landscape. It is not about the framing of it. I see it as a field of potentiality, as a field of chance encounters, and as a way of understanding the world we live in. I think walking would be the best way to do that.

I was actually about to ask, how did you start working on this question? For me, it is really interesting that you used the plural form, "embodied landscapes or landscaped bodies" instead of the singular, because I feel that this is more open. I understand that you were researching on the multitudinousness of what a landscape could mean. How did you work around this question? How did you begin researching?

I started off with images. I work with images. First of all, I needed a case study. So, my case study was the route, the walk between my house and the residency center. So, I would joke about it and I would say that I was walking from home to my artistic home. It made sense, because it was my everyday commute to work and it was the shortest distance between my house and there. It is almost a straight line on the map.

Would you like to tell us about the two different neighborhoods and how these two are connected? What was the path that you were taking?

I live in the neighborhood of Petralona, which is a low rise kind of -and not so rich- area. The walk climbs up towards the archeological hills of Philopappou and then the last bit of the walk is right beside the Acropolis and the market. In terms of property market, it is the highest end in Athens and probably in Greece. So, it covers a long distance and actually you see many cities within this walk while traversing it. The social aspect of the route was something -the multiple cities I come across as a walker- and then there was something also kind of significant that all this walk towards the highest end was an uphill walk at the same time.

They were two completely different neighborhoods and also I would say there is a difference in the encounters with other human bodies. For example, under the Acropolis, there are a lot of tourists, while more locals would live in Petralona, right? Was that part of your interest as well?

It became. Towards the end I became more and more interested in people. I started off really clean-cut. I was looking for the spatial qualities, the measurement, the body measurements. I was interested in photographic fragments and what I could extract from that in order to build the graphic language, which then would be transcribed into movement. So, I was interested in that and later on, I realized that embodiment needs bodies. It needs people. It was only later on that I made this shift towards how I embody the landscape, but then there was a notion of me wanting to embody other users of this landscape -the everyday useres, the people that live in those neighborhoods, the people that make use of the archeological park, of the pedestrian roads, people running or doing exercise or just going for a walk or commuting. I thought that this gave color and that it would inform my own body being the performer in the final work, which was not the final work, but it was a draft of an artwork, let's say.

It is interesting that we are having this discussion and all the observations you made because we need to pin down also the timeline of when this happened. Your research took place during the lockdown. That is even more interesting for me to hear how you experienced being able to still walk outside and do this research, while the human bodies were contained within their houses.

Well, it kind of underlined the importance of this walk and it made it very clear to me that this was something, that this was at stake in those times of the lockdown. Of course, being stuck at home, urged me even more so to do the walk and to invite others, to present it for another group and actually to go forward with the idea of the walk as an actual format for both a presentation for fellow participants of the program and then later on the idea of it becoming an actual artwork or artwork in the making.

Did you always do the walk by yourself?

No. You were one of the first persons to walk with me.

That's true.

That was at a very early stage and then there has only been a few people that walked with me. Dimitris Theodoropoulos, one of the mentors did the walk with me, of course. I did that with an ex partner. I did it with another artist who is also working with the format of collective walks. Mostly I was walking alone and I was doing the same route every day, not deviating, but sticking to the path I had walked on the very first time I did it. I think I worked more as an accumulator of images, thoughts, architectural elements, spatial qualities, insignificant details that I found interesting while experiencing over and over again the same walk and the exact same path.

Can you give us a few examples? What do you mean by insignificant details?

I would be interested in footprints on concrete, on the pavement, or I would be interested in marbles, kitchen sinks in the archeological site of Philopappou, where you would think that you would find some ancient marbles or leftovers or ruins. And then I would find those little details, those little elements in there. I was interested in traces.

It seems to me that you were collecting fragments along the way and I was wondering, what did you do with all these fragments?

There were several elements going on in parallel because I was collecting the photographic fragments, but I was also making fictional landscapes out of them, like little diagrams, or I would categorize them and making bigger groups and then writing texts on those subtitles that I would give them, such as imprint, traces, excavation, porous volume, flows and rhythms. So, I would start writing about those things and those small texts gradually became longer and longer and they made it to the final text that I used for the audio walk. So, they were part of it. Those two things were going on in parallel. But then the images and the photographs are used differently. One thing was just the categorization. The other thing was those fictional landscapes that I made, a series of fictional landscapes, like photographic narratives. And then, I would play around with them in the studio as projections. I would project the fragments on the white wall and then I would place my body over the projection and then take another photo of that. So, I created a few scores and I experimented a bit with that as a process both of understanding my relation to the fragment that was captured from a real place, but then taken and edited and then worked on in the studio. Back then, I was considering it as a performance also, as a performative action.

Before we go to the audio-guided walk, I was wondering if you could say a bit about whether you had any references. I am observing that walking as a practice has been proliferating over the years and I was wondering if you were looking into other kinds of walks? How did you decide to adopt this specific format to do this kind of research?

Yes, of course, there were references, like the readings that I did or looking into the work of other artists. I was looking into the work of Valie Export, who did not do walks exactly, but she used her body. She positioned herself against various architectural elements in the urban landscape. I looked into the work of Andrea Fraser, who had done museum tours, basically, but I was interested in the way she used the different roles she was acquiring in her work -considering herself as property of the institution, herself being a guide, as a performer, as well as a participant. This also informed and kind of created the roles or the discussion around the roles that I wanted to take over the course of the audio walk. I was also inspired a lot by Janet Cardiff's 'The Missing Voice', which is a work I haven't experienced, but it is an audio piece. You would have the audio and walk around the city and it was like a noir situation where the displacement and ambiguity and disorientation and deja vu elements were very prominent. That was something that was really interesting for me and something that I tried to incorporate in my own work.

At the very end of your residency we organized an Open Studio Day and you chose to present us this research in the form of an audio-guided walk which you titled "Scanning the Walkscape". Let's talk about that, about the title and why you chose to present it in this form? What happened during the walk?

I use the term scanning, borrowing it from the Feldenkrais somatic method, where the session sometimes starts with a quick mental scanning of one's own body lying on the floor. I was thinking that this is interesting, because while walking you are upright, you are standing and it is a completely different situation from letting gravity take over when lying. So, I was considering myself as an upright human body walking, as a scanner of the landscape.

Although during the walk you adopted different positions.The horizontal and vertical were always into play, as far as I remember.

Yes, they were. I used that. But in terms of scanning and traversing the landscape, I would say that it was the upright body scanning the walkscape. That was what the title referred to. And also, it referred to a more thorough process of exploration, which was very present in the work I did in the beginning.

Can you walk us through? What happened? I remember we were a group of 15-20 people and you had designed this guided tour that we were required to listen to while walking with you.

Exactly! I designed the audio walk. I made recordings of all of my texts and then I made a composition out of those and then I used a few recorded sounds from the urban landscape and also I recorded my breath at some point. The whole thing was framed and was timed. It was tightly timed to my walking pace and rhythm. What I did was that I sent an email to all the participants with the audio-walk and a few instructions, a general outline of what would happen during the walk and what would their role be as participants and we all gathered at my place, on the street. We all had our headphones on and we simultaneously hit play on our players and the experience of the walk began. The audio was actually the thing that united us in a way, forming a group that walks together while in silence and while listening to the audio.

What I liked in this narration is this mix of factual elements about the neighborhoods and fictional elements. First of all, I would like to ask you about your choice of this neutral voice, because it wasn't you who was narrating?

No, I was reluctant to use my own voice. I was having this idea that I wanted something more neutral. So, I used a computerized voice in an attempt to make it more of a navigator that you would use while using maps, for instance.

Ηow do you perceive your role in the walk?

I am guiding the participants as I am the only one who knows the exact route and everybody is following me, but at the same time, I am as much a participant as they are, because I am also listening to the same audio, once more. And then, I am also a performer in the sense that I am performing the previous two roles and also there are some parts where I'm doing some simple movement actions in space, like lying down, walking, running. I shift between rhythms and paces and a lot of times I stop to wait for the participants to come and then I continue.

When we talked last week you told me that this walk is not intended for doing it by yourself and you're actually keeping us together in a way.

I think it is important that I am there. It is important for me. I am not sure about the participants, but it is important for me to have this feeling and this understanding. That was very clear to me since the first time that we did the walk together -I mean, with the bigger group. Of course, it could be done if somebody had the map with a specific trajectory, but it wouldn't be the same and I think me keeping the rhythm and the pace alive -in real time- makes sense.

You are the timekeeper in a way.

I think it is interesting to work with that and see also what is happening, if people keep falling behind or keeping up.

I think it is really important because it is where the personal manages to become collective in a way. You are creating the conditions for a group of people to walk together, even though each one of us is wearing headphones or earpods, it is the moment when you realize that you are starting creating new memories, because you're not doing this alone.

Yes, that is true. I think it is the different elements shared. It is the audio that makes a collective experience. It is us walking together. It could be same stimuli, but various random thoughts bubbling up in each one's mind at the same time. It is walking in silence. Also, each participant on the walk has their own body -body type, strength capacities. So, I think consequently, each one of our bodies senses and absorbs and collects different elements, different information differently, of course. So, I would say that the collective action of walking together becomes personalized, because we are starting off doing this together, but then each one's mind goes into their own -as you said- memories or line of thinking or they make associations of their own.

I came across an article the other day and I kept this quote, which I think describes very well the way that I felt during the walk, which is "words call places into being". I felt a lot like that when we were listening to the recording, that you are creating new mental spaces. I wanted to ask you about the relationship between what we hear and what we see.

First of all, what was an element that was interesting to me and I wanted to push forward with that is the notion of thinking while walking or by walking you make thinking happen. In the audio walk I wish for the participants and myself, if I manage to do that, to reach a state, where the eyes and sight take a secondary role. There is a moment where you get so immersed in the audio that you actually see through listening and I think that is when the mind starts to make associations on a completely different level than being restricted merely to what is available and finite upon the glance. Another thing is that there are always various degrees of translation and interpretation. So, I am making an interpretation of the landscape by framing a photo or by writing about it later on or you get another interpretation when I narrate the story back to the participants. I think that this is inevitable. It is happening. I remember that we were talking about it with Dimitris and he referenced somebody arguing that even in everyday conversation through the same language you find yourself in a state of constant interpretation and translation of what the other is saying -perceiving and processing the content. I think that this is constantly happening between what I interpreted, what I jotted down on paper, what I am then later narrating to the participants and the juxtaposition of the audio and the visual is creating an interesting space for thinking to happen, for associations and for personal stories to emerge or memories.

I have to say that today we are very happy that during our conversation we are joined by your two mentors, Lenio Kaklea and Dimitris Theodoropoulos. Both of them worked very closely with you throughout the duration of your residency and I think it is time to give them the floor.

For sure.

Lenio and Dimitris thank you so much for joining us.

Kalispera!

Kalispera!

You're welcome.

Kalispera! Thank you for inviting us.

Would you like to briefly introduce yourselves?

I am Lenio Kaklea and I am a dancer and choreographer based in Paris and I make work that is informed by different artistic currents and sciences, such as sociology, ethnology, psychoanalysis, feminism and I make work in the intersections of dance, critical theory and visual arts.

I am Dimitris Theodoropoulos. I am an architect by education and I mostly work in the field of architecture and artistic research that is also bordering between the field of art and architecture, in this blurry areas, in-between.

How did you start this collaboration? Aris, I am interested to hear from you because Dimitris and Lenio have two very different practices that you kind of merged into your own practice. How did you connect?

Initially, because there were two disciplines that I wanted to join together, I thought that I should have somebody to talk to for each one. That was the initial thought. So, I was thinking that with Dimitris we would discuss about space, landscape, architecture, the connections in between and how I could use those architectural or spatial elements to turn that into a graphic language. With Lenio it was about the moving body and also a way for me to enrich in tools that I could use for embodiment or performance making or dance making. In the end, the capacities of both Lenio and Dimitris exceeded the initial kind of restricted role that I gave them and we were talking about all sorts of things. Also, Dimitris was proposing movement-oriented tasks, or Lenio would come up with references like Mike Kelley's work that had to do with architectural models. I think the most interesting thing were our conversations.

I would like to hear from Lenio and Dimitris. Aris said before that he was basically working with you on two different questions. The first one was 'how do I embody a landscape' and the other one was 'how do you shape an experience'. I'm interested to hear from you both how you worked together towards this research.

When Aris reached out to me he had a clear plan. He had already written part of his text and I can't remember if he was already creating an audio walk, but he was definitely creating a walk. He had already actually walked the path that he chose from his home to the studio several times and taking photos of this path and he had both experienced personal things that he decided that he wanted to share, but also had -let's call it- scientific research or had collected information about the urban space and the historical background of the path he was going through. So, when he reached out, most of the elements were there. I think the critical question that Aris had and that I also have in my work and I think this was why the collaboration was successful, was how these scientific or objective material can be embodied or how do they affect subjectivity. How do they affect the construction of the identity, personally the one of Aris, who is the first one to walk the path and secondly the ones that will join him for this walk? So, our collaboration, our discussions, actually -I think most of them- were researching and opening up questions around that. Why to propose this walk? To whom is he proposing this walk? How is this work affecting him? How is the body vulnerable in this path? How can Aris as as a young man expose fragility, intimacy and the political elements that are part of who he is? I did propose tasks or I did propose ways to structure a bit his experimentation with the urban space and I remember also trying together to develop more things that he had tried already once in order to create the final materials. I think the question choreographically was once you have tried something once out, out of intuition or with the energy of the first time, how can you develop material further? Also, I think what was interesting to me and I felt it was interesting for Aris too, was that we also had the time to discuss, to reflect upon how these first intuitive artistic choices are actually products of circumstances and constructed through the multiple references that he has and so how can we push these references further.

Dimitris from your perspective that you have followed the walk from its initial stages to the very end of the presentation, how did you work with Aris along this way and what do you observe during the process that Aris followed?

From the very first moment when Aris proposed me to do this walk together -I would prefer to say it so rather than mentoring- there was always the idea that there is a path that I take from home to work and I want to work on that path, which includes a lot of different elements in the city with all this layering of cities within the city. There was always the body. The initial question was how you embody the landscape and how the landscape is a body of something as a body itself. There was always the question of the body and the body then became the tool. What Aris said already before, that his body itself was a tool and actually the walking body, because it could also be a crawling body or a mechanical body, on a bicycle for example-, there was always this basic feature of the body in the landscape that started from a very broad research at the beginning and gave a result that is a work in progress, as we said. That is one aspect of this body, which is the audio, which is also the way that he chose to contaminate the other bodies. There is this inner voice in the other bodies walking in the landscape and receiving what elements had gone through the interpretation of his own body to transmit it to the others. So, I would say that there was this initial broad question of a body on the landscape doing a very everyday thing, which is "I am walking from home to work". Then it gets narrowed down to a way that all these elements can be distilled and passed to a more collective experience of what was offered as a walk at the end of the research. For me, it was also very interesting that this process happened during the lockdown. It felt so urgent as a need. All of us, we were deprived of this routine of going from home to work, because then you had to work remotely from home. So, this everyday routine that is mostly boring can have all these small openings of seeing something else. That was what Aris was offering as an experience distilled and shared with the rest of the participants. It coincided exactly with the time that there was a lockdown and his research was going on during this lockdown. I remember telling to Aris that I couldn't imagine something else that somebody could research during that time, as if this was the correct thing to do now, because this is the basic question that we were facing back then.

I wanted to go back to what you said about the body being a tool and ask you, what is the role of the landscape in this equation and what is the relationship between the body and the landscape?

That is an interesting thing. First, the landscape does not exist by its own. It exists because there is an observant body and a tool that is measuring it. There is land, there are masses and volumes around there, but they don't make sense if we don't look at them through something. And of course, we look at them through our bodies. So, there is this tool and then this tool is shared. From the participant's side, by offering your body to an experience that is guided -not exactly guided, because there is this distant thing of the audio. For me the audio was also very interesting because you don't really feel that you are guided by something, but you feel that you have internalized what is guiding you. So that was also interesting for me, how we were fifteen people collectively walking on this landscape, but not really connected to each other apart from the fact that we were sharing the same audio walk and being silent more or less at the same time. The richness of the different levels of an experience passed through and then enriched.

That is why I found functional the choice of this neutral, mechanized voice of the narrator, because it is a voice that we are kind of used to through navigation systems software and it didn't make me empathize with the voice I was listening to. I was just absorbing the information. There weren't any feelings, in a way. It was more open for my own interpretation.

A bit more open for me as well, if I might say so.

Of course, please join us Aris. You have been silent for a bit.

No, I was thinking that a different voice, a third voice, also creates a distance for myself while doing it. It would be completely different to be hearing my own voice. So, there is a certain distance. We are kind of apart. So, each time I could listen to it again as if it is the first time.

What was that performative element for you Dimitris and Lenio in the walk? I was telling Aris before that he took on a lot of roles during the walk. The first time that we did it together I wasn't sure which is that role. In the end, he is all of that together, but I am wondering what is the element that allows us to say that this is a performative audio-guided walk?

For me, it is not very clear and it is good that it is so, because it is blurring the fact that there is a performer, that is also the initiator of this walk and is also the one who somehow passes over these condensed material, which is the audio walk, but then the participants also feel performing inside this piece.

That's my point.

So, there is another contamination of the performer towards the participants in becoming performers themselves. The performative aspect is shared somehow in different levels and different qualities.

I was about to say that I didn't experience the walk, but the way you describe the circulation of observer and observed is definitely what makes it a performance and then in terms of how Aris made the choice of certain operations that I found interesting, because they reveal levels of alienation or levels of the distance we have within us, actually, as subjects.The fact that he wrote a text that both infuses the personal and the historical and then this voice is performed by software, as you said, but then he is physically there in order to listen to it and you are listening to the same voice. These different levels of to whom belongs this story, who makes this tour, who is legitimate to propose and observe an objective, to propose a narrative or an interpretation of the landscape and of the space and the fact that Aris is playing both roles of having written it and also listening to and reacting to it. I think these different levels of spectatorship, but also involvement, of exposition, how he is exposed and how he proposes us to expose ourselves in this public and visible to others walk. I think these are elements that were interesting that they were addressed.

Thank you! Aris, I was wondering now that your residency has ended, if there is any continuation of this research. Are you planning to follow up on it? What's next for you?

I think that I am looking forward to a creation and production period. There are still lots of material that are not incorporated in the text and audio walk. I would like to revisit that. I would also like to revisit exactly what we were talking about before. What is performativity? What is this ambiguity between the shared performativity of participants, performer, passer-by. And then, I would rewrite the text to a final draft and in terms of production I would do again the recordings and finalize the recordings and finding maybe a more efficient way of sharing the audio with the participants that would be interested in doing that walk with me.

Thank you. Thank you all three of you for joining this conversation and for your time and I hope that we meet along the route somewhere between Athens or Paris. Thank you Aris! Thank you Dimitris! Thank you Lenio!

You're very welcome. Thank you.

Thank you Myrto and thank you Lenio and Dimitris for following me on this route.

Thank you for inviting me. It was a great pleasure.

Yes, it was super. It was super and I hope I'll see this live and meet you in person. I hope we will have the occasion to.

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.