Janis Rafa: Manège | Onassis Foundation

“Manège” will offer a spatial, ethnographic, and visual exploration of concepts of dominion, supremacy, and marginalization amongst horses and masculinities at the complex entity of the Hippodrome of Markopoulos, in the southeast of Athens. The project is concerned with issues of marginal experience and domestication in the periphery of the urban, between differently positioned subjects inhabiting common spaces. It focuses on invisible cultural structures and spatial practices, all of which have been invented to entertain and empower the human species and the supreme white male.

The hippodrome is a location of 1,110 acres, hidden, semi-abandoned within its own exotic and liminal context. It is occupied by a small community of diverse subjects that live within this construct that balances between a rural past and an underdeveloped present of marginal glory, intrusive entertainment, compulsive animal training, gambling, and constrained wilderness. As in my past works, I am concerned with local and spatial histories, power structures, domination, affection, and refugee observed through the presence and resilience of the non-human agency, in this case of the horse. Equally, the hippodrome is a complex place that I want to investigate in different levels and depths, taking into account that it is a peripheral man-made structure, a place of human-animal cohabitation and animal usage, but also a place where marginal life resides and stays unseen. The animal is always at the epicenter of my attention so as to produce alternative narratives and observations.

This is a familiar context for me, as I share a personal history and trauma attached to the equine and working within a male-dominated horse-training community during my youth. My practice has as its ultimate goal to propose a posthuman cartography of a place that concerns the invisible, the insignificant, and the unregistered, praising in this sense an archeology of abandonment of a different kind.

Janis Rafa

Love me. Lick me. Forgive me., 2023. Words, neon light, glass, 100 x 125cm. Courtesy the Artist; Onassis Foundation

Creator's Note

Entering Onassis AiR, I had a specific thematic in mind and a very particular location to investigate. The location was the Greek hippodrome at the periphery of Athens, which I have previously explored on the video installation “The Space Between Your Tongue & Teeth” (2023).

However, this time my aim was to exhaust it as a condensed geographical source that offers specific representations, symbols, and architectural formations on systemic power structures of control, domination, and entertainment. My interest was to decode and produce anew a visual vocabulary of how the horse’s body and mouth is performed through particular equipment designs, technological means of interspecies communication, and architectural formations for organizing bodies and identities within the equestrian and horse-breeding culture.

As Jane Bennett argues, all matter, even the most seemingly inert metal, has agency, “material vitality” that influences everything around it.

However, the residency aligned with my research location in a somewhat unexpected way. The hippodrome announced its permanent shutdown at the beginning of March 2024, closing its gates to the guests and making access impossible. This had an impact on my original plans to use the hippodrome in Markopoulo as a place of observation, documentation, and contact with man-made structures equipped to control and host the animal-athlete and certain male-dominated communities. The inability to access a key location forced me to search for new ways to approach the visual and theoretical dialectics that this long-term project aims to bring forward. Parallel to the visits I made to the space in an attempt to regain access for filming, I also developed other projects that combined text, animation, archival footage, and sculpture.

Focusing on the horses’ mouth and bridle bits as seemingly utilitarian objects, I began the residency with making a new video work entitled “I Betrayed Your Mouth Endlessly” (2024, animation with sound, 5min). The personal and the universal elements of the work ultimately reflect on what Derrida simply posed as: “What did it mean to place a bit in a horse’s mouth?”

I worked on a text co-written with Ioanna Gerakidi and collaborated with a 3D animator, Guerrilla Motions, in order to develop the anatomy of a horse’s mouth that speaks the written words. The piece was completed and presented as a single-channel projection for the Open Day #10 in March 2024. In combination with the video, a try-out reading performance of the text took place at the Galaxy Space, by Effi Rabsilber.

Following this work, I embarked on a collaboration with the Eye Filmmuseum archive in Amsterdam. It was the start of a visual and historical research on colonial footage and moving image documents, in which horses are at the epicenter either as trained or wild herd.

At the same time, I completed a proposal for a film that will be shot at the closed and now semi-abandoned hippodrome. This is pending permission and will be a collaboration with drone imaging and lighting equipment through which the architecture and figures of the site will be documented.

During the Open Day #11 in June 2024, I decided to avoid presenting any moving image material, despite my habit of doing so. Instead, I concentrated my attention on presenting sculptural works that focus on the same theme as above, but through different means. The works presented varied in materials and scale, but all had one thing in common: they were artefacts, worn by time and friction, used and re-shaped or deformed by horses.

The sculptural side of my research has been sitting as a by-product of my films for years, but during the residency I had the chance to focus and expand on it through building new Athens-based collaborations, participating in workshops, and experimenting with materials and scale. With the completion of the residency, I aim to further develop this sculptural language, alongside my moving image narratives and installations.

During June 2024, I had the chance to invite Onassis AiR fellows and staff for a visit to the Equestrian Jumping Competitions for the 2024 Nations Cup held at Markopoulo Olympic Equestrian Center (next to the hippodrome). My aim was to enter such exclusive locations together and critically observe a sport built around the animal’s body and its forced capabilities, but serving our unquestionable eyes, bodies, and needs.