On public space as a work in progress - A conversation with Chrysanthi Koumianaki

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 great pleasure to talk with Chrysanthi Koumianaki. Chrysanthi is a visual artist based in Athens. Her practice, which comprises of different artistic media, such as prints, video, sound and metal constructions, focuses on language and the notion of translation through the creation of new symbolic systems and codes of communication. In Fall 2019, we both participated in the Critical Practices Program of Onassis AiR. Today, we will talk about her research interest into public space and into nonverbal acts of communication, while discussing some of her individual projects, as well as her collective work at 3 137, an artist run space that she co-founded in 2012 and co-runs together with Kosmas Nikolaou and Paky Vlassopoulou.

Hi Myrto, nice to see you!

Nice to see you too. Welcome to Pali-Room! Thank you for joining this conversation. It is my sheer pleasure to talk with you today, not only because we participated together in last year's program, The Critical Practices, which ran from September through December 2019, but also I realized, while I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, that you were actually one of the very first people that I met in the Athenian art scene. We visited your exhibition, your artist run space 3 137 with NEON Curatorial Exchange and Nayia Yiakoumaki from London and since then I have been following your work and we have collaborated on quite a few occasions. So, I am really happy that we are doing this together.

Thanks a lot for inviting me too. I am really happy to have a conversation with you and to share all those things that we shared throughout this three-month period.

Shall we start from the beginning?

Yes.

Chrysanthi your practice, which develops through different artistic media, centers around the notion of language and translation and you investigate acts of non-verbal communication through the creation of your own semiotic systems and codes of communication. I would like you to tell us a few things about your practice. How did you start?

As you said, the idea of language, communication and translation has been the focus of my practice over the last few years, which I actually realized quite recently. It is not that recent. For the last seven years or so I have been working with these things. I was working on these things earlier. We had a collaboration at 3 137 with Panos Papadopoulos and Albert Mayr, who are both artists and had been working together since earlier and I decided to collaborate with them for a performance —Camouflage Lessons (2013)— that we did at the space. The starting point of this was to teach Albert, who is Austrian, Greek. So, I made a font out of my mouth —I Love You, You Love Me (2013)— which was somehow describing the movements of the mouth, that one has to make in order to pronounce a letter.

Such a difficult task to teach Greek to someone else.

Yes! We learned some basic phrases, like "I love you, you love me". This was actually not a shifting point, but I realized that my practice is about this thing, about the movement of our body and language. Then, I worked on a series of works that were about the slogans that I find in the public space, in the streets of Athens, and I translated them in a coding, in an alphabet, that I was the only one to understand, actually. It was a series of works. The first one was for a show at the Thessaloniki Biennale, curated by Katerina Gregos and it was called "‘God, I Suspect You Are A Leftist Intellectual…’ (2015). Anyway, the slogan came out of a slogan from May '68. So, I made this alphabet that consisted of plans of ideal cities that were designed in the Renaissance and I made a connection of those political slogans that I found outside, in the public space, with the architecture of a city and how this ideal design is connected to the ideals of a community. The slogans that I used in the piece were gathered in the streets of Athens, but the titled came from May '68.

OK!

This was back in 2015. Then, I presented another version of this work —Down with the Abstract. Long Live the Ephemeral! (2016)— at State of Concept Athens, when you were working there and then at Kadist, where I actually wrote the slogans with my pen, while the first version was printed. It was like posters that I found in the streets, like an archive of fictional political posters.

I remember that work and I remember when you were installing it, which was on the vitrine of State of Concept and I find very interesting this decision to put it on the vitrine because it's also a way to reflect on all the things that this alphabet, this language, refers to, which you cannot understand at the same time, but you were able to understand.

After this piece, I made a solo show with locus athens —titled Chroachym— at Mentis, a museum that is part of the Benaki museum and is an old industry of threads —they are producing threads. There, I created a system of communication between me and several other people, like a musician and two dancers. This was also another important point for my practice, because I started collaborating with people for this work and this is something that I also really still use and I like to do with my practice —to collaborate. Actually all those alphabets or codings that I make are mostly systems of communication. Because for me, it's a bit hard to communicate my ideas through speech, I found this way of communication somehow.

This encrypted way of communication.

Yes, but still there is some communication between the people who are working on each piece.

It is not only about creating a language, but it is also the act of translation with the disciplines that you collaborate with, like, for example, the dancer or the musicians.

Yes!

The Critical Practices program that we both applied for and both participated in was intended for practitioners who were experiencing a critical shift in their practice and needed the time to pause and reflect and reposition themselves. What was this shift, this critical point for you in your practice when you decided to apply for the residency?

When I applied for the residency, it was just after a very productive period and after a big show that I did in Belgium at Netwerk Aalst, where I presented a body of work reflecting on my ideas about public space and how we are also part of it, how we create in the public space. At this point, because I presented these works that I had been working on for a long time, I really needed a shift in my work and I had very much the need of collaboration with other practitioners as well, from other disciplines, like dancers or more focused on theater, that I was back then interested in, but hadn't had the chance to collaborate with. So, it was a chance for me to find new collaborators or just take some time with other people. And also, because I'm always collaborating. I mean, apart from my practice, we also run 3 137 and at my studio I am always living with two more artists.

Let's name these two artists. You are running 3 137 artist-run-space with...

With Paky Vlassopoulou and Kosmas Nikolaou. We are at the space since 2011, but our first show was in 2012. And so, I was always working with other people and I wanted to see how it would work if I stayed with some other people for some time from other fields that I don't know, with new potentials anyway. So, this is why I applied for the program.

It is interesting because you were moving from one cohabitation to another and I am not sure whether you were expecting, for example, to have your space in the house. Because when we applied and we got accepted, we didn't know how this would work out. We didn't have any idea of the building and how we would share the space. For example, as a curator I never have a studio space. So, space for me was not perhaps so important, but perhaps for a visual artist it is something else.

This is true. That was another thing that I had actually forgotten about. This was also a reason to apply. It wasn't the most important, because I already had a studio, but to have an extra studio space on my own was something, which didn't work, actually, but that's fine. That's all right.

I think the sharing that took place here was extravagant in that sense.

Yes!

What was your initial research question?

My research question was about the work in progress and what does the work in progress mean in the public space, in the public sphere, and what does it mean in the artistic practice? Because, you know, we are a very small circle —I mean, the artists— and we have a method of communication between us, but to speak with other people, it's another thing. So, because of all this occupation in my work with public space, I was looking at this word "the work in progress" and what do we mean by works in progress in the public space. We're talking about infrastructural works. How is the city progressing? Do we have a role in this or are we just participating in something that has been planned for us?

How do you interact yourself with public space as a methodology?

I am interested in different things. One thing is that I'm looking at the walls, for example, of the city, that we discussed a bit before, as a public archive of what's happening, like the public news somehow. If you walk, for example, in Koukaki, you would see mostly slogans about tourism and the Airbnb or if you walk around the area of Omonoia, you would see mostly slogans about the assassination of Zackie Oh or queerness and identity issues. In Exarcheia there are more classic slogans, let's say. It is like reading the news. This is what I like and there is a continuous progress that you cannot predict.

Because one day you might walk in the street and you might find a slogan and the next day there might be something else.

Exactly! Yes, and there are also patterns of actions, like the graffiti or like the gum, for example, on the pavements of the streets. We can say that there are new tiles made out of an action that we do or there are the broken metal bars in the streets, out of accidents, that are always there because no one puts new ones. There is like a new vocabulary built out of us and that is also characteristic for a city.

Ι was about to say that. As we speak, I am thinking about our perception of public space and how we formulate our perception and how particular is what we're discussing right now to Athens as a landscape, for example, because Athens is a city that has a lot of visual elements in terms of the slogans and the graffiti on the walls in contrast to other European cities. I want to ask you if you would be interested to do this kind of research in another city or if you have thought about it?

Yes, I have thought about it and for example, in Paris you can see things like that, like slogans in the streets or stickers on benches or on a wall. It is a dirty city as well. The gum is something also. The gum on the pavement is something very common to most of the cities. I mean, most of the European cities are not so much left like Athens, but still I think it is a bit of a universal code somehow. It is not only Greek, but when someone visits Greece, of course, they will say about the graffiti. It is like a monument of the city.

That is true.

I started, for example, this research looking at the different slogans of the areas and creating an archive of those different areas, which was also very helpful for me later and now.

You showed us some of your work in Open Salon #2, where you presented some work in progress.

Yes, I presented a draft for a piece that I am actually showing now. It was a uniform where I was writing with actual letters slogans that I gathered in Athens and now the time has come actually to show this final piece, which is a performance that I'm doing with an actress, Eva Vlassopoulou, at a group show called "Statues that don't move, don't speak, and don't laugh" in the area of Kato Patissia.

It is an exhibition in the public space.

Yes, it is an exhibition in the public space, in several different squares and my piece takes place at a small basketball court. During the summer period I gathered slogans from this area, which was, of course, mostly about racism and fascism, because the area is mostly inhabited by immigrants. The Greeks don't really live there. So, I found it really interesting to gather all these information.

What kind of slogans were they? Were they political?

Very much political, mostly about, like "fight racism", "destroy racism", about the right wing government, the Golden Dawn. So again, it's another chapter of the city, let's say, and I thought it was interesting to make a costume for Eva with those slogans that were written then again in a new abstracted language, but one that someone can more easily decrypt or translate. So, Eva acts as a public monument and she wears those slogans. She could be from a mime in the streets or a vandalized monument. I actually used a method -I didn't use it, I imitated a method- for her clothes, the batik, but I'm talking about the African batik. I know that we will discuss a bit later about the other one. Because there's a big African community there, I thought of imitating a batik textile with my drawings, my language. So, it's like mixing the two languages together, the Greek with the African, let's say, and somehow change that tradition and applying some contemporary discourse in traditional methods.

For me, it is interesting to see how you turn this into a living monument. Also, in contrast to the very first stages of the work, because when you made the uniform last year as a work in progress, you used this kind of textile, which is not really a textile, it is a material which is almost transparent and when someone wears it, you can see what is behind.

Yes.

And you were hanging one of these uniforms in the space. For me, that also represents the absent body. Also when we see the slogans in the streets, there is the absence of the author or the bodies who wrote that language and now you're giving it back, you're giving the body back to the language.

You are very right that the transparency of this textile that I used has the idea of absence. The absence is there somehow and now my decision of having a body, working with a performer was because I was thinking of monuments as something that is not static and it's changing.

In this performance, you cannot see the face of the performer. So, it is not like you're actually giving a body.

Yes, this was actually a big conversation that we had with Eva and we both agreed that if we would like to speak about the notion of the monument, we wouldn't like to have a face. Because thinking of monuments, you always think of a person. What does this monument stand for and why someone who is not a persona cannot be a monument?

Well, going back to the batik.

Yes!

I am going to move the discussion a little bit. Last year, we had a three-month program, which was full of activities and there were quite a few intense workshops and seminars and a trip that we did together. I was wondering which moment has stayed with you up until now?

There are few moments. For me, the trip to Indonesia was really amazing. It was a really amazing experience and I'm not just talking about the place that we had never visited before, or that it's quite hard to go, but also the things that we visited and the program that Elia and Raed made for us was super interesting for me. From the collectives that we had the chance to meet and to see how the artistic community works there and how much more united the artists are there, to the traditional techniques. It was very interesting for me to see both the traditional music, the Gamelan music, the shadow puppet theater and the technique of batik. I remember when we visited this performance of the shadow theater, that was actually a touristic thing, it wasn't something very executive, but still I found it amazing that we entered the backstage of the piece and you could see the musicians and how they are dressed and how much time they spend together there playing very quietly their music. I realized that they're actually having some good time together. They were spending a lot of time together. So, I really like that the whole back stage was much more interesting than the front stage of the performance. It was interesting to see the puppets that were actually so much carefully made for the player. The audience couldn't really see the puppet in front of the screen. They couldn't see the details, they couldn't see the colors, the very much detailed figure. For me this was like taking care of the player rather than the audience and at the same time, because we had the chance to meet those Gamelan musicians, I remember that they said that all those performances were made for the palace and actually the people couldn't visit the performances. They could be either behind the scenes or they couldn't go. So, it was really interesting to see that the interesting part wasn't for the privileged people, but for all the rest. This was actually something very very sensitive for me. It was something that I really appreciated somehow.

Going back to the part where the tradition meets the collective practices, that we had the chance to visit, that also goes for me. How in all the things that we watched from the Gamelan to the shadow puppet theater, there is this collectivity that is kind of embedded in the culture.

Yes, but I think tradition anyway is connected with collectivity. I mean, talking about, for example, dance, most of the traditional dances are for a community of people, usually a local community of people or for two people. This is something that I'm always thinking of lately, looking at how those community gatherings refer to a specific community. What does the local mean in all of this? Who are the people who participate in all this? Those are things that I think we can reconsider today and also, I think, if we could reconsider and reimagine tradition is like trying to shift or alter a bit the history.

I think that at least in Greece, from my perspective, I always perceived tradition as something very conservative. It is important to think of it as something that also inspired communities and perhaps if this exposure to other kinds of traditional cultures makes us think that, this is also very important.

I very much agree with you. I always had the same idea about tradition and I always thought of it as something very conservative. But if you think that tradition is something that is changing, that it can change, I think, it can shift from the conservative to a tool.

Yes, and if we think of the etymological root of the word in Greek, which is "paradosi", it means something that you pass on.

Exactly!

From one generation to another. This can be a device, that is not really transformed, but is definitely something that is changing constantly.

Exactly! I was always somehow interested in traditional techniques, but maybe because we visited a completely different culture, it made me look at it in a different way, like learning a new technique that is not part of my culture, but as a visitor or a viewer. I am not really part of it. We went together to a batik workshop and we spent a couple of hours there and I think this was a very nice sharing that we had.

You were very excited after this workshop.

Again, the most important thing about this workshop was that we had the chance to spend time together. It wasn't so much about the production. It is interesting to see an old technique and how the ladies are working there for hours and hours constantly on a piece of textile, but I think the most important thing was the time that we spent there and how we could focus on something.

It needed a lot of concentration and attention.

Yes, and this is something that I am trying to focus on lately in my work. Because we live in this world and we need to make a lot of things at the same time, my concentration is very much damaged the last couple of years. So, I would like to apply those kind of practices in my practice as a healing for me as well.

Maybe for others too.

For others too, yes.

Speaking of time —the time that we share or spend with others or the time that we spend alone— and since the residency had a lot to do with time and what followed this residency period was the pandemic and the lockdown, I was wondering, how do you think about time right now and what constitutes a pause or a break?

I see time as something very intangible, of course, and this immediately brings to my mind the relationships. Time for me is very much connected to the relationships that we create and I'm trying always to connect time with the present, the past and the future. The past, actually. I mean, we don't really know the future, so we always relate the future to the past. This is why I'm also thinking of tradition in all this. It speaks about time. One point is what we said, the time that you spend on something, and the other is how to shift the history, how to shift the time that has passed and what you bring to the future. The pandemic, I think, for me is something that will shift a lot of things, and it has already altered our thinking of time and relationships. During the quarantine, for example, I thought that it was a good chance to pause from several things. At the same time, I was working very hard for a couple of things that would take place after the quarantine, but either they never happened or they were postponed.

Going back to the collective work and gradually closing this discussion, in parallel to your own work you ae also running 3 137, with Kosmas and Paky, that we mentioned before. How does the personal become collective and where does your individual artistic practice stand in relation to your collaborative work?

I think one part of my work, which is collective —I am talking about my personal practice— maybe came out so organically, because we were already collaborating with Paky and Kosmas at the space. What we're doing at the space or as a collective is mostly centered around ideas that we all have and sometimes we don't develop in our personal practices and we want to explore together or we do explore them in our practices and we want to see what are other people's or other practitioners' reflections on them. The character of the space has changed a lot throughout the years. When we started the space, there weren't really a lot of other spaces. We just wanted to open our studio and work with other artists that didn't really have the chance to show their work, because they were young like us. So, we did some exhibitions or some performances or talks. The talks weren't something so common a couple of years ago in Athens. Actually, it was after 2016-17, closer to documenta 14, that a couple of new spaces opened and now actually they're flourishing. There are a lot spaces by artists in the city. We started changing the program. We didn't feel that we have to add something more on this level, to make another exhibition or another talk. There were already a lot of things going on in the city and we started doing more research-based projects like the one that we did about the artists who worked during the 70s in Greece -this was mostly because of the lack of an institution that would represent those artists in Greece and I'm talking mostly about the museum (EMST), that is still not working properly- or a radio station that we did in 2015, where we tried to work with collectives that were running around the area of Exarcheia and other social initiatives and artists, but it was mostly focused on the neighborhood. Now we are actually working again on a radio station that will run in late November, where we want to invite as many collectives as we can and spaces that are running in the city and understand why there's this need of having a space and why do people from abroad move here, to Athens, and choose this place. We are also thinking about what artists have to do with the changes in the city regarding the housing issue, tourism and all of this. We take it as a case study. But anyway, our practice at 3 137 very much reflects our concerns about the city, the city of Athens.

It reflects your interests as artists, while you are also growing and developing your work.

Yes.

It is a space that also marks your time as people.

Yes, I think all of us think of our collective work as part of our personal practices as well and we also see the program of 3 137 as our collective piece, somehow.

One last question regarding your experience at the residency has to do with your working habits and I was thinking that repetition in the form of the repetitive movements or patterns that are recurrent elements in your work in your effort to construct this new language is also perhaps a way to construct new habit. Because repetition is part of that. So, I was wondering how do you see this experience of breaking from our habits or creating new habits that was part of the program as well?

Like you said, I think habits and the language that we use are very connected things. I mean, for example, if we change some things on the language that we use or how we use our language, we can actually change some habits. Repetition, of course, creates a vocabulary. Our habits are connected to our language, like if we say that every day we wake up and we drink coffee and we wash the dishes and then we go to work, this is part of our personal vocabulary, which is not actually very personal because a thousand more people are doing the same thing. So, this is a vocabulary too.

I have never thought about that as a vocabulary. That is very interesting. The next step would be to make a dictionary, I guess.

Right. Yes, why not?

Well, I am looking forward to reading your dictionary at some point. I wanted to thank you for the wonderful conversation, for looking back and for sharing all these memories.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you so much.

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.