Date: 3.2020
Location: Victoria Square Project, Athens (canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic)
As part of the 3rd Culture Night of the Athens Culture Net
Participating artists: Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou, Panos Papadopoulos, and Paky Vlassapoulou
miss dialectic asked three creators based in Athens to “open” the doors of their workshops and let us slip into their workplaces. In three parallel videos of a total duration of three hours, visitors were able to watch the artists in the invisible moments of their artistic creation in the city center. We met Paky Vlassopoulou working in her workshop in Exarchia, Konstantinos Chatzinikolaou in Plaka, and Panos Papadopoulos in his studio in Monastiraki.
All three of them created a cinematic calendar by filming their studios in an experimental mood, recording objects and materials, capturing their own presence and the presence of collaborators and friends, and playing with repetitive movements or even with the absence of action. The camera was allowed to run, and the excerpts of their day composed a commonplace. Their artistic practice emerged in real time and in a vibrant relationship with the spaces where their daily work occurs.
The studios, private spaces, and were often inaccessible to the public, since we usually encounter the work of art in its final stage of production and exhibition, now became accessible. The action aimed to record the artists' materials, phases, and methods before the work of art took the path to exhibition spaces, galleries, museums, and institutes. In this context, viewers were encouraged to approach the conception, the process, and the production conditions experientially, that is, to see the work in progress.
The camera became the means of capturing the unexpected event as it vigilantly observed the seemingly amorphous fragments creating a whole. In this place, sensitivity and silence acted as transformative forces, contributing to shaping the artist's unique universe. Thus, the studio was transformed into an active environment that projected in first-person aspects of art that we do not normally have the opportunity to know: where things take shape, and where the relationships between the elements are renegotiated as artistic “absurdity” often unfolds. Or, as Bruce Nauman wrote about the creation of Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) in 2001: “I was sitting around the studio being frustrated because I didn’t have any new ideas, and I decided that you just have to work with what you’ve got. What I had was this cat and the mice, and I happened to have a video camera in the studio that had infrared capability”.