FFF2 | Stills

Announcement: We would like to inform you that the Onassis Stegi was obliged to stop the projection of the work by Kris Verdonck entitled "Stills" on the corner of Parnassou St. & Paparigopoulou St. (Klafthmonos Square) due to complaints lodged with the police regarding the work's artistic content.

The projection on the corner of 8 Sina St. & Vissarionos St. will continue till 31 May 2015.

Naked giants haunt Athens, crammed into claustrophobic spaces. The city becomes the backdrop, and the walls of distinct buildings ideal canvases, for Kris Verdonck’s monumental ‘living wall paintings’.

Kris Verdonck conceived and produced new “Stills” especially for Athens. In his own words: "The basic idea for the Stills are the caryatids, but the projected characters are not so heroic, they are everyday people like you and me, doubting ideology."

The original destination for “Stills”, the video screenings —or, rather, live wall paintings— the avant-garde Belgian artist has been creating since 2006 were the imperious, mausoleum-like buildings built outside Rome under Mussolini in praise of the fascist ideal.

Colossal naked human figures crammed into extremely claustrophobic spaces are projected onto the frontages of well-known Athenian buildings. Hemmed in, like vanquished Titans, beneath the weight of the walls, the city and the world, of Memory and History, they creep and cringe in the inescapable condition of their unfreedom, sometimes humming—their only solace this—melodies from Wagner’s operas… The image is as multivalent as it is emblematic.

Verdonck’s giants can be viewed in dozens of ways: as distorted reflections of a city’s residents, for example, or totems of fascism’s repressive megalomania. By assigning new meaning to the outcries of Sixties radicals, the artist has reignited our expectations with respect to the relationship between art and everyday life, public space and private emotion, disputed and hegemonic geography. With studies in the visual arts, architecture and the theatre, the Belgian artist embodies his own artistic roots in the hybrid galaxy of his work and gives new meaning to the terms ‘urban intervention’, ‘theatricality’ and ‘visual environment’; his aim: to stimulate both interaction between the arts and their intervention as a powerful force in urban memory.