Opus Just for One Person – Part One

“Opus Just for One Person”

“Opus Just for One Person” is a trilogy – a combination of visual, musical and performance art. The work is inspired by and mainly addresses the 30-something generation; the observation of human interactions over close to a decade – and a little more; and people’s progressive isolation.

What does it mean to dedicate my most beautiful love song to someone no longer present? It means – among many other things that shall remain unspoken – that I end up with an act of creation for My-One-and-Only-Human, while trying to put in order everything that I hold dear.

The aim of the work is to go against the tide of cynicism in all its forms. To utter all that we struggle to say, every confession that was not made. The resistance to convenience. The sharpening of every edge. The readiness of the eyes. The selflessness of smiles.

At its core: the need to preserve tenderness.

"Opus Just for One Person – Part One"

On February 7, 1985, Matsie Hadjilazaros hands us the poem “Reversed Dedication”, addressed to her beloved Andreas Embirikos, ten years after his death. An attempt to “share” this poem with every person who has the need to be a You for someone else. The drag performer Imiterasu borrows the voice and words of Matsie Hadjilazaros without mimicking her physical person, using the lip-sync technique and that absolute expressiveness the eyes have when addressing another. The human body as an intermediary; as an agent of memory, words, gazes, gestures and tears – an agent carrying remembrance to an acute present.

The poem, and the voice of its creator, become the main ingredient of Part One.

A work of video art with a drag performer lip-syncing a poem. A dedication Just to One Absent Person. A portrait with fragments of features and movements. In lighting that does not imply, only signifies. An intense yellow color in the background symbolizing the present, and a grey woolen sweater with flecks of color on the performer symbolically referencing the unconscious, the up to now.

To whom am I addressing this de profundis confession, now that its first addressee is not here?

To one’s own self.

Because You and I are now one and the same.

In perpetuity.

This work of video art is screened inside a dark chamber installation, a large-scale Τerrarium, like a seed that will gradually be revealed. A private place inside the public sphere is seeking to create a safe space for contemplation and meditation. A personal connection between the work and its receiver. At the end, spectators are invited to write down their own dedication, if they so wish.

An opportunity for the poem to be heard in the present day, to continue to be heard, to not be forgotten. Not it, nor its maker, the world, and its instigating cause.

Born in Thessaloniki in 1914 and raised in a cosmopolitan milieu, with frequent trips to European cities and countries, and an intense social life and society lifestyle in her early teenage years (hers was one of the most socially significant and financially flourishing families in the city), Maria-Loukia (Matsie) Hadjilazaros would go on to face the family’s gradual social, economic, and finally physical decline. In the mid-1930s, Matsie found herself in Athens, working to support herself in the wake of two divorces. Seeking solutions to her problems, Matsie turns to a new science that was then making its emergence in Greece – psychoanalysis – and meets the psychoanalyst and poet Andreas Embirikos. The pair’s meeting led to a romantic affair, followed by marriage. Andreas Embirikos initiates Matsie into the worlds of poetry and surrealism. Putting the surrealist tenet of free expression into practice, and adopting the associative technique of automatic writing, she sets about creating an intensely personal and singular body of poetic work.

Her first published poetry – the 1944 collection “May, June and November” – is also the first modern Greek poetry written by a woman that touches on love and life with such freedom, immediacy, and experientiality, in ways that are guilt-free, uninhibited, and direct, yet without being vulgar or unnecessarily provocative. It is, at the end of the day, a lyric form of poetry, addressed completely and absolutely to another person, the one whom this love entails – addressed, in a universal way, to each one of us. A universal form of sensory poetry that demands the active engagement of its readers, activating their own senses, and bringing up similar memories in their minds.

And then: her separation from Embirikos, her 1945 journey on the legendary Mataroa ocean liner to Paris, her encounters with the surrealists living there (Breton, Tzara, Domínguez), her life with Picasso’s nephew – the painter and engraver Javier Vilató, and with Cornelius Castoriadis. Matsie Hadjilazaros would continue writing poetry in Greek and French, and returned to Athens once and for all in 1973. In 1985, ten years after the death of Embirikos, Matsie published her most important poem, “Dedication in Reverse” – a completely liberated, total, and absolute surrealist confessional, a “concert for one man alone”:

"you to me are Dinosaur a most amazing one

you to me are pebble soft fruit ripened by the sea

I belove you

I jealousy you

I jasmine you"*

—Christos Daniil, PhD in Modern Greek Literature, researcher at Matsie Hadjilazaros's archive

*Poetry translated by Nikos Stabakis (“Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology”, University of Texas Press, 2008)

“The Mandra” is situated on a pedestrianized precinct in Plaka (at 2 Dionysiou Aeropagitou Street). This seemingly abandoned plot, located directly beside the neoclassical building that houses the Onassis Library, is opening its doors to the public once more, following in the footsteps of Attik’s “Mandra” and interwar Athens’ variety shows – an inclusive and interactive performance form that created masterpieces using just “the boards, a little paint, and quite some trailblazing”.

Lying hidden at its heart is the most representative example of Athenian Belle Époque open-air theater architecture: an outdoor stage built in 1909 belonging to the “mandra” (“yard”) theater type, which is to say an outdoor theater taking the form of a rudimentary stalls area with an Italianate stage. Athenians of old knew it as the “Athinaikon” (“Athenian”), as the “Arch of Hadrian Theater”, but also as the “Germaniko” for a time, when German operettas were all the rage.

“The Mandra” is bursting into our daily lives to break through boundaries and create freely, without limits. To become a point of discussion and reference within the city, open to powerful experiences and emotions, accessible to every passing anyone without a ticket. Not in the soothing sense of some picture postcard showing a listed Athens monument brought back to life, but as a buzzing hive of uncensored culture and expression, fully embedded in the dynamic Onassis Culture ecosystem until 2069.

In the fall of 2021, the heart of “Mandra” will beat once more inside the palimpsest that is Athens, this time with “Opus for Just One Person – Part One” by the artist Ioko Ioannis Kotidis, an in-situ installation inspired by the greatest poem of the first Greek female surrealist poet – Matsie Hadjilazaros – and her absolute love for Andreas Embirikos.

The space will go on to host events that seek to startle, and spark discussion about everything that’s happening and everything that ought to be happening – works that perfectly align with the realities of the city and world in which we live to form a diverse mosaic of human experience.