Eva Vaslamatzi: This City is a Wasteland

Photo: Alexandra Masmanidi

As the historical center of Athens changes rapidly under the effects of touristification and gentrification, a parallel manifestation of manual labor persists in small crafts and trade workshops. Their persistence through time, often the result of the generational continuation of the family business, serves as an opposing force against the flow of development, providing a sanctuary for rituals and remnants of past uses of the city. The curatorial research project “This City is a Wasteland” aims to regenerate these spaces through an open conversation with visual arts practices. The project directly involves these places, not as frozen-in-time transmitters of history, but rather to highlight their current creative power through collaborations with artists. Without rising to the status of monuments, the workshops become potential knowledge-sharing capsules, placing contemporary art practices in an ethnographic process of mapping a fading era of the city, as well as of a production mode melding traditional methods with conceptual processes. This research aims to reveal the possibilities of cohabitation between different generations and the common creative root joining art and crafts.

Eva Vaslamatzi

Creator's Note

My research began with walks through the city's historical center, where I looked at old stores and workshops dedicated to crafts like metals and woodworking, as well as trades like weapon, shoe, and textile repair. Realizing that there are fewer such places in the center as a result of touristification and uncontrolled development, I concentrated on spaces in an intermediate state, i.e., spaces that, because their products are no longer in demand and thus are no longer commercially active, serve as museums or time capsules, preserving the interior and history of the shop and its trade. One such space is the Angelopoulou sewing warehouse, which was established in 1925 in Aghia Irini Square and is still in existence today, run by the founder's two daughters, who have taken over the business. Despite its declining clientele, the warehouse still opens every day, opposing the flow of development in the neighborhood and waiting for its commercial potential to be reactivated so that shops like this one become valuable again.

Our conversations with Maria Angelopoulou, combined with interviews I conducted in 2023 with shopkeepers from the Kairi Arcade and artists who participated in the group performance "I heard them singing in the mountains," which took place in the same arcade, serve as an important research source for the project. This material, together with other literary and philosophical sources, prompted me to write the text "This City is a Wasteland." Inspired by TS Eliot's "Wasteland," the piece is structured as an open-ended scenario centered on an indeterminate transitional area. The script features five protagonists—the artist, the philosopher, the merchant, the florist, and the investor—conversing, or even soliloquizing, on the transformation of a city, resulting in an uneven polyphony. Each, in their own way, concentrates on the past, present, or future, projecting their individual needs onto the city's public spaces. The merchant and the philosopher are concerned with the present and therefore focus on the current state of the city and the market, whereas the artist and the florist, who both live nomadic lifestyles, are concerned with the future, despite the fact that they are aware of the small impact of their work on the world. The investor is always in a rush because he already imagines himself in the future, and he frequently appears dissatisfied because his additional wants are not addressed. Their statements don't relate to a specific city; the scenario can be set in any place that is undergoing change.

For the Onassis AiR Open Day, the text was enlarged and installed within the space, serving as both a stage set and a play at the same time. The text invited the viewer to approach and activate it using QR codes to generate a random soundscape. At the same time, the text was accompanied by a sound piece that provided a non-linear interpretation of the text. Margarita Athanasiou, Paki Vlassopoulou, Charbel Haber, Nefeli Myrodia, and Gijs Waterschoot performed the roles to music by evi nakou and Charbel Haber. The textual work is a preliminary public presentation of the research and will continue to be an open medium that may be expanded with new material and activated in various ways in public settings.

Conception/Composition: Eva Vaslamatzi

Includes extracts from interviews with Alexandros Drakopoulos, Dimitra Kondylatou, Vassilis Noulas, and Kostas Papaioannou

Includes references to the works of Roland Barthes, Svetlana Boym, Anton Chekhov, Bernard-Marie Koltès, and T.S. Eliot

QR codes: Maria Angelopoulou, Eva Vaslamatzi, and Dimitra Kondylatou

Graphic design by Ogust.

Sound work Design and editing by evi nakou.

Voices: Margarita Athanasiou, Paky Vlassopoulou, Charbel Haber, Nefeli Myrodia, and Gijs Waterschoot