Myrto Katsimicha

Myrto Katsimicha (b. 1991, Αthens) is a curator based in Αthens, Greece. She holds a BA in Media, Communication and Culture from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Αthens (2012) and a MA in Curating the Contemporary from London Metropolitan University and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014). Her research focuses on independent forms of organizing in the arts and alternative educational models. In 2017-18, she was the 12-month intern in Adult & Αcademic Prοgrams, Educatiοn Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New Yοrk. Within the framework of her internship she conducted field research on the independent art scene in Mexico City (Guilty Pleasures, EP Journal, 2019) and later organized and co-moderated the public program From Mexico City to New Yοrk: A conversation with Tamara Ibarra and Rachel Valinsky on collaborative practices and the links between independent art spaces and contemporary art institutions (MoMA, September 5, 2018). In the past she has worked for art institutions in Greece and abroad such as documenta 14, Αthens & Kassel; State of Concept, Αthens; the Αthens Biennale; and Phenomenon Anafi, among others. In Fall 2019, she was a participant of The Critical Practices Program of Οnassis AiR.

Past curated projects: "Unlikely Outcomes: An Improvision", Void, Αthens (2019); Deliverart, a moving art experience in the streets of Αthens (2019); "10.000 Steps—Thodoris Pistiolas", Vorres Museum, Αthens (2019); "If I cannot bend, I will move", Snehta Residency, Αthens (2019); "Going where we come from", a performative walk in the neighborhood of Kypseli conceived by artist Maëlle Gross and co-curated with Olivia Fahmy, Αthens (2017); OpenGround 2016, a professional development workshop for young artists and curators co-designed with Cristina Perillo, State of Concept and the Onassis Cultural Center, Αthens (2016); "Things are left to become concrete", Snehta Residency, Αthens (2016); "Of other places", series of film screenings, State of Concept, Αthens (2015); and "EXOTICA and 4 other cases of the self", co-curated with Fanny Nina Borel and Elisabetta Rabajoli, me Collectors room, Berlin (2014).

Myrto is a participant of the Critical Practices program of Οnassis AiR 2019-20 and program documentation and communication officer of Οnassis AiR between January 2020 and March 2023.

TIME, TIME, TIME

Hans Castorp went on: ‘You’re coming back down with me, aren’t you? I see no reason why not.’

‘Back down with you?’ asked his cousin, and turned his large eyes full upon him. They had always been gentle, but in these five months they had taken on a tired, almost sad expression. ‘When?’

‘Why, in three weeks.’

‘Oh yes, you are already on the way back home, in your thoughts, answered Joachim. ‘Wait a bit. You’ve only just come. Three weeks are nothing at all, to us up here – they look like a lot of time to you, because you are only up here on a visit, and three weeks is all you have. Get acclimatized first – it isn’t so easy, you’ll see. And the climate is not the only queer thing about us. You’re going to see some things you’ve never dreamed of – just wait. About me – it isn’t such smooth sailing as you think, you with your “going home in three weeks.” That’s the class of ideas you have down below. […]

Who’s got so much time to spend – ’

‘Oh, time – !’ said Joachim, and nodded repeatedly, straight in front of him, paying his cousin’s honest indignation no heed. ‘They make pretty free with a human being’s idea of time, up here. You wouldn’t believe it. Three weeks are just like a day to them. You’ll learn all about it,’ he said, and added: ‘One’s ideas get changed.’

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1928

As I was ‘taking stock’, of my thoughts and impressions from the three months I spent at the Onassis AiR house as part of The Critical Practices Fall 2019 group, I started mounting “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. In his seminal novel the author takes up on the ‘journey’ of a young man to a first-class tuberculosis sanatorium on the Swiss mountains that lays the foundations to his own moral and intellectual growth while introducing him to the highly organized daily life of the ‘institution’, an enclosed world with its own order, where any preconceived notion of time seems unfit, if not irrelevant. It’s interesting to find out that there was a second name for this widespread disease of the early 20th century. Consumption, as they used to call it. In his introduction to the 2011 edition Adam Foulds eloquently explains: ‘Death from consumption came slowly; it was a disease that peοple lived with. In a sense it became a way of life for its sufferers. It was understood as a quickening of life, a burning, a wasting. It was associated with passion, intensity and a kind of spiritual refinement. […] In fact, passion was sometimes identified, as the cause as well as the symptom of the disease.’ In order to be cured, ‘You had to adjust to the place, the process of becoming institutionalized, with all the narcotizing sense of safety and order that provides.’ Inside this microcosm, ‘it seems that all of human life is there, enclosed in space and time...’ Long before the turn of the century, this once fatal disease had been cured, or so it seems. For ‘consumption’ has taken new forms in this hyper-accelerated reality we live in.

When I entered the ‘enclosed world’ of the Οnassis AiR house I had already started experiencing the symptoms of the new ‘disease’. Anxiety, fatigue and restlessness being the most prevalent. In an effort to remain conscious of myself – what I regarded as being conscious back then –, I used to divide my own continuous present into hours – working hours mostly – and yet I always found myself lacking of time. As I gradually felt the danger of a physical as well as a psychological collapse, I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that my ‘passion’ for work had become a ‘habit[1]’ , one I had to let go. But what do you do to undo what you do? The Οnassis AiR house, where I could continue to confront my day-to-day realities from ‘safety’ seemed like the ideal setting for a break – three months would be enough. Upon starting, I was already thinking of an ending. A different concept of time, I had at hand.

I keep calling it the ‘house’, as we all in fact did from the early days on. ‘Feeling at home’ seems the only and best way to describe what took place during our three-month residency in this newly founded space. Perhaps because habituating oneself in a new place, ‘inhabiting’ a space and keeping up with its daily maintenance, is one of the first encounters with the passage of time and its eventual breakdown that allows oneself to experience it in its truest form, as a movement in space through the body.

It was indeed through the multiplicity of the bodies that moved in the space that I managed to traverse my time there differently. We – an interdisciplinary group of strangers – met under the auspices of the Οnassis AiR house to pause and rethink what we do and how we do it, eventually repositioning ourselves and our practices. A shared goal, responding yet to our own individual needs. How do we thus work together with our differences? How can we work differently? Preoccupied by the necessity to fulfil the roles we had already ascribed to ourselves upon entering the house – visual artist, curator, performer, theatre director, musician – we found ourselves circling around the very same patterns of our (working) life before. For to work differently, one need to first imagine a different way to be. ‘Is it possible to conceive of a (small) group with no Telos? Would such a group be viable?[2], Roland Barthes poses the question and explains that a community consolidates its status as such once it ceases to respond to outside events.

Within this new site of our daily coexistence, hermetic yet nuanced by an often-exhaustive program of activities, the ‘house’ gradually enfolded us – and our ‘idiorrhythmies’ – creating the conditions for another kind of community to emerge. One that allowed for each individual's personal rhythm to exist within the rhythm of the collective, where the shared experience of different entities allowed the individuality of the singular to encounter the plurality of the collective. Barthes’ concept of the “idiorhythmic” group was made possible, even for a little while. We questioned our personal and collective identifications, while exercising our collective thinking to reach the ‘aha’ moment of new found lands (Manolis Tsipos, Feedback Workshop); setting ‘things’ to ourselves to challenge the threshold between a before and an after (Ant Hampton and Christophe Meierhans, The Thing Automatic Workshop); turning ourselves into soft-shell crabs and exposing our skins to experience the breadth of our senses (Raed Yassin, Intensive Month); tuning in and out the tonalities of our individual breaths (Irena Tomazin Workshop of discovering the many voices); getting fermented (Markus Shimizu, Workshop on Fermentation); we touched and were touched by language (Ioanna Gerakidi, Theory Workshop); and we stuck as part of an ‘unstuck clinic’ (Mark Leckey); until we finally came to face the paradox that ‘getting used’ in this new timeframe we set for ourselves should consist in ‘getting used to not getting used’. Within and beyond our bodily and spatial identifications, what we experienced together was nothing, but ‘time’ itself. Reimagining ourselves, to never be, but to always become.

[1] ‘Habits are those practices of thinking and doing through which we engage bodily with our daily environment, practices that have always already slipped our rational analysis. They constitute learned gestures, rhythms, or postures of our bodies that are incorporated in a particular space and time. Therefore, habits form the political identity of our bodies and are inseparably linked to the world views and knowledge that we consciously and unconsciously perform. We know how difficult it is to become aware of a habit, let alone to get rid of it, and therein lies the complication.’ Binna Choi and Annette Krauss, "Afterword: Have you had a productive Day", in Unlearning Exercises: Art Organisations as Sites for Unlearning, p. 171, Valiz: Amsterdam, 2018.

[2] Roland Barthes, ‘Homeostasis’, in HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER?: Novelistic Simulations of some everyday spaces, p. 47