This piece is part of a larger collaborative work, an interactive, infrastructure-related installation soon to be presented in the upcoming xpub group exhibition (27-30 June, S/ash Gallery, Rotterdam). I also like it as a stand-alone piece, so this is how I present it here. (Images and details regarding the installation will follow in another post.)

The poem is performative (improvisational reading) and list-based, simulating computerized speech: a form fitting the content.

 

Infrastructure Infrastructure Infrastructure

 

roads railways

bridges tunnels

water supply sewers

electrical grids telecommunication

do you communicate?

 

internet connectivity

do you feel connected?

commodities interrelated systems

services essential to enable sustain or

                                     enhance

societal living conditions

 

do you feel enabled? do you feel sustained?

do you feel enhanced?

 

hard infrastructure

physical networks

necessary for the function of a modern

industrial society

roads bridges railways

 

soft infrastructure

education

statistics

parks and recreation

law enforcement emergency services

 

Emergency Emergency Emergency

 

Infrastructure

synonyms

base framework

infrastructure as in foundation

noun strong matches footing groundwork

root support

do you feel supported? who do you support?

do you feel rooted? who do you root for?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ways In and Ways Out

 

"Desperation" was a thought inspired by the COVID-19 times, but it applies to every prolonged instance of trauma, that eventually becomes unconscious, and it takes time, distance and healing to realize its true dimensions.

As a piece, it incorporates elements from the past, such as a mysterious old recording I've been curious about for years and recently retrieved from an old mini-cassette recorder, and a footage of a place very deeply connected to childhood memories. It's more of a poetized thought than an actual poem, and although it's closer to prose I decided to follow the voice rhythm to create the written lines rather than doing it the other way round.

 

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With "Care" I feel that I go back to the roots of my love for art. Music was in the beginning of it all and now it's time to reconnect with it in a manner that feels complete. "Care" was a poem in the making that I had forgotten about for a little while and when I found it again I saw that it was more of a micro-song. It could have taken many forms, and I can definitely hear me screaming the lyrics in a different version, but this is how it crystallized (at least for now). The visuals were also brewing for a while in the background, with ideas revolving around time-lapses and chalkboards.

Care

I don't want you to care for me

care is for the hospice of emotions

I want your voice to burn like love

turn away from the care-ful cold

where feelings go to die.

 

 

Metaphors never cease to amaze me. They are often better and conciser at getting the meaning of the most abstract notions across than a simple description of a situation. As flexible molds, they shape and embody our individual thoughts helping us make sense of our experiences in a collective manner. In this piece different metaphors come together to express a sense of womanhood compiled by different experiential states.

 

 

metaphors

Men
I had three pens lying around.
None of them really worked.

Emptiness
She started counting her ribs. There, in the middle of the forest. When she came back from her walk, she called immediately her doctor: “I need to have an X-ray asap; there’s something wrong with my insides.”

Mother
She was picking the hairs from the floor, one by one, or in tufts, if they were clustered. With a sense of urgency. The same sense of urgency she had when the phone rang. Wired landline. Darting from the kitchen, running down the marble corridor, sometimes deciding within seconds at the kitchen door which phone to run for, the one in the living room (closer) or the one in the bedroom (more private).

Back to hair picking.

She would often go in absurd bowed circles, like a weird alien dancer. She would let you talk and in the middle of a sentence she would fix her eyes on a corner and, already bowing, she would go there straight to pick up the hair.

What does depend upon hair? I often wondered.

Not anymore.

Voltaire
I will not spend another night with you in my life, but we can still text if you like.

 

 

 

You can read more about the poetry issues project here.

 

2023 is closing with poetry issues #28, clearly showing a direction that I am feeling increasingly comfortable with: The combination of sound and image, captured and edited in manners that make them compete poetically with the text they come with, and the integration of text into a vivid visual style. Painting and drawing are coming back into the picture, and I dare to be myself more than ever.

 

---

 

Call Me

The public phone booth, where generations have spent hours and small fortunes talking to friends, family and lovers, where tears were shed and laughter echoed, seems to be a curiosity of the past, a ghosted presence in the urban landscape. One of my plans for the future is to re-imagine the phone booth. For now, I present here the best example of a public phone booth's organic role for (and inevitably its integration into) lively subcultures.

 

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This little jewel is handling many themes at once. I was fumbling with the topic of unrequited love in my mind for quite some time and then one day, one of the first nice ones, I was lying on a bench looking at the sky and there was this optical illusion of the pole falling while the sky remained still (of course it was the moving clouds). So then the two topics mingled, and more layers came, especially the broader one, of living in one society but in essentially different realities. I didn't use any elaborate phrasing but I believe the meaning gets across, all the more through the simplicity of the language.

 

Reflection

 

For a second I thought

we were two-gether

mirroring each other

sharing an understanding

of this world that is melting

like ice-cream on hot asphalt.

 

---

 

"Stubborn" is a commentary on roles, contemporary life, love and how looking up to someone shapes us. I enjoyed how the composition came together, through a mix of loose ideas and experimentation, and the result is highly personal but in certain ways also bigger than a mere obituary to a god or a father.

 

Stubborn

 

Dear father,

I am very ambitious

as I was made in your image and likeness.

 

It is true

that my goal is

to be successful in life

 

just as you wanted me to be

 

but my success is divided into late mornings

and long nights

into loves not watered down into potentials

patience, expectations and compromise.

 

Dear father,

I am living in a garden of steel

when all I ever wanted were flowers

and interactions free of roles:

Skirts and pants united.

 

I wanted to be rich

but my non-accumulative currency would be

the primary formation of meaning –

experience, as a principle.

 

For you, dear father, I still want to be

the perfect son

although I was born

a stubborn daughter.

 

---

 

Sicily 

 

 

I am changing. Growing. As an artist and as a person. This means that I am integrating and using the past as fertile soil for a happier life. In my artistic practice this translates into an organic approach to creation, less focused on a specific outcome. I let my artworks mature and grow too, which basically means that I give them more time than ever before. Still, I want my materials to be approachable and relatable, my process sustainable, able to be executed anywhere, anytime. Sicily demonstrates exactly this mindset. It is the outcome of a very strange, intense trip, and it incorporates elements of a personal journey, a greater cultural kinship, mirroring memories from across the sea (being Greek, Sicily bears for me a special weight) and an account of people's desires and often futile efforts against increasingly alienating environments. In my mind the piece has both melancholy and hopeful notes, peace but not resignation.

 

---

 

Need

the green muddy sea is also a sea

and when the lips are thirsty

and when the skin is dry

you'll head for the water

muddy salty green

 

 

We have learned to live in a constant state of unsatisfied need. A lurking panic rules our lives. A kind of wild greed that doesn't derive from not knowing when to stop or from nothing ever being enough but from not absorbing something that might or might not be there – an asthmatic relation to the world. This greed is escorted by an abysmal fear of death, a vertigo caused by the lack of a full present moment that will defy and even invite and shatter death with its completeness.

Need is real. Not something we create in our heads. Maybe we can control it or forget about it, like a hungry stomach that you trick or lull to sleep, but it is still there. Need makes us compromise, which might not be a bad skill within a society, provided that everyone does so. But a need not met for long makes you vulnerable. In its best version, dealing with a deep need can be a humbling experience but more often than not and in the long run it's simply humiliating.

This piece aims to reflect the uncontrollable lengths we go to in order to satisfy such needs, the desperation that leads us to substitute their true objects with things that resemble them, things that will eventually not cover the needs they were brought in to cover, and might even harm us.

 

---

  You can read more about the poetry issues project here.

Need

the green muddy sea is also a sea

and when the lips are thirsty

and when the skin is dry

you'll head for the water

muddy salty green

 

 

We have learned to live in a constant state of unsatisfied need. A lurking panic rules our lives. A kind of wild greed that doesn't derive from not knowing when to stop or from nothing ever being enough but from not absorbing something that might or might not be there – an asthmatic relation to the world. This greed is escorted by an abysmal fear of death, a vertigo caused by the lack of a full present moment that will defy and even invite and shatter death with its completeness.

Need is real. Not something we create in our heads. Maybe we can control it or forget about it, like a hungry stomach that you trick or lull to sleep, but it is still there. Need makes us compromise, which might not be a bad skill within a society, provided that everyone does so. But a need not met for long makes you vulnerable. In its best version, dealing with a deep need can be a humbling experience but more often than not and in the long run it's simply humiliating.

This piece aims to reflect the uncontrollable lengths we go to in order to satisfy such needs, the desperation that leads us to substitute their true objects with things that resemble them, things that will eventually not cover the needs they were brought in to cover, and might even harm us.

"Stubborn" is a commentary on roles, contemporary life, love and how looking up to someone shapes us. I enjoyed how the composition came together, through a mix of loose ideas and experimentation, and the result is highly personal but in certain ways also bigger than a mere obituary to a god or a father.

 

Stubborn

 

Dear father,

I am very ambitious

as I was made in your image and likeness.

 

It is true

that my goal is

to be successful in life

 

just as you wanted me to be

 

but my success is divided into late mornings

and long nights

into loves not watered down into potentials

patience, expectations and compromise.

 

Dear father,

I am living in a garden of steel

when all I ever wanted were flowers

and interactions free of roles:

Skirts and pants united.

 

I wanted to be rich

but my non-accumulative currency would be

the primary formation of meaning –

experience, as a principle.

 

For you, dear father, I still want to be

the perfect son

although I was born

a stubborn daughter.

 

 

 

This little jewel is handling many themes at once. I was fumbling with the topic of unrequited love in my mind for quite some time and then one day, one of the first nice ones, I was lying on a bench looking at the sky and there was this optical illusion of the pole falling while the sky remained still (of course it was the moving clouds). So then the two topics merged, and more layers came, and especially the broader theme of living in the same geopolitical space but experiencing essentially different realities.

 

Reflection

 

For a second I thought

we were two-gether

mirroring each other

sharing an understanding

of this world that is melting

like ice-cream on hot asphalt.

 

 

 

Poetry Issues #27 is the journal that poetry issues was always meant to be: A newsletter containing all the latest work (from January to April 2023, beginning from the oldest). It includes poems, objects, paintings, essays, videos and songs. Thinking back to those months... They were difficult, tumultuous, full of happenings and life events and stresses, sickness and winter, responsibilities, early wakings and all-night parties and early wakings, reflections and self-reflections. Yet there was always the time – no, there was no time; there was always the need, to create. And some beautiful things were made, some wonderful ideas were born.

 

 

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chapter #1

The first in a series of illustrated dialogues, #chapter I goes wild in the combination of image and text embracing punk aesthetics and posing an important question: How important is the legibility of text for expressing its meaning and how much can we omit before the narrative breaks?

 

 

 

#chapter I

january 23

 

 The earth had turned upside down

so I woke up and saw the moon

where it had never been before

or was it me that had changed place?

 

No, no, you said

the world has turned upside down and 

I am sisyphus or maybe

it's the summer that's coming. 

 

---

 

 

 

In case you get lost, I made a 

 

map

 

We walk through deserts

in alien lands.

Our mouths 

are running

dry. 

 

---

 

 

Another little boxed world. Boxes represent the confines of our existence, largely but not exclusively within society. I always try to combine playfulness with profound themes, as I believe that this playfulness speaks directly to the core of our existence, to an inner child.

Visually, technological elements (ear pods, antennas, chips) are juxtaposed to the actual act of listening, and finding meaning, while strong words demand individually and as a whole our attention.

The text of this piece is composed of found material from the text that accompanied Gernot Wieland's video Turtleneck Phantasies (2022) at Kindl – Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The video-art piece was highly inspirational and much of this inspiration was transferred to the text describing it. I took pieces of it and made something new, opening up the dialogue.

 

Learn to Listen

childhood

second skin

what remains?

 

a kind of obsession

protective remembrance

words

texts and drawings

 

dance, the absurd moments

The ubiquitous presence

all the little forms

traumatic experiences

excluded

I have phantasies

and (mostly illegible)

little attention.

 

What stories do I tell myself

unheard, and forgotten voices

possible ways of returning to the centre

anchor

a serious shipwreck

whose stories are told

dedicated to the murmuring, the illegible, the unspeakable,

 

In other words

Contemporary

 

---

 

 

 

The Monster Bride or Metamorphosis of the Object

 

I always thought that if you have even the slightest view to the natural world, you don't need television and you never get bored. There is always something happening: A cloud, a breeze, some wafting smell. Even inside, if you have a fireplace, you can spend hours watching what is possibly the strongest resemblance of a mystical dance the natural world has to offer. All these joys of the senses and the mind are connected to some kind of movement, some kind of wave. 

However, there is also another level of observation: The observation of the unmoving, the still, the silent. If you observe anything long enough, something magical happens: It starts changing before your eyes. The object exists only in immediate connection to our perception of it. If the objects were conscious of their existence, they would be divided between the view of themselves and our view of them. Which view would be holding the truth? These were my thoughts, as I photographed this object and watched the monster-bride endlessly change before my eyes. Different corners, different light, different relation to space, to itself. It began as an interpretation of an amplifier by its maker (Christian Kennecke, aka @ernstunited) and in the perception of those observing it it became a bridal dress, a bride, a monster, a purse. 

It has been some time since then, and I'm still thinking about the monster-bride, probably because I hadn't examined anything so intently in a long time. Watching the object for so long left a strong impression that is still growing in me. Obviously, observing hasn't stopped when I took my eyes away. My mind is still processing, my perception of the object is still changing, evolving perhaps. If you watch anything long enough, you fall in love with it: It becomes an extension and expression of you, a poem that touches you deeply. I am not sure if hate is even a possible feeling, once you get close enough to anything, or if feeling depends on the object's nature, if such a thing exists, or our own disposition. In any case, if I ever get bored, if I ever feel empty, all I have to do is get out of my head, stretch my gaze to anything my gaze can reach, and enjoy the show. 

 

• 
• 
• 
• 
•  

 

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I used this nice photo (which is one of my odes to the public space) as a prompt and wrote chapter II of of a yet unnamed series of poems (look chapter I above). Unlike fight (which might by the way, be chapter 0), instead of the image here it's the text that is moving. It's the first time that I'm experimenting with animated text and I must say that I like the idea a lot.

 

 

 

#chapter II

 

We sat together.

A body's gap between us

for the wind to roam free.

 

We hummed an old song

in false notes. The wind

sang along.

 

An eternal second

– a good company.

 

---

 

A sad song wrapped in pink. I know microfiction and micropoetry exist, so here I introduce the micro-song. It's quite addictive when on repeat.

 

 

To Catch a Dream

 

You set your traps

from wall to wall

hide

in small corners

in the dark

 

but don't you know

that you can't catch a dream?

 

The dream catches you.

 

---

 

 

Lipstick (acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 40x30) is the first in a series of paintings that question our dependence on objects for validation, attraction, confidence and gender identification. The object is larger than life, because larger than life is the space it occupies in our lives, and the text balances between existential threat and singalong lightness. 

 

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A little piece about our constructed sense of the future, our need not only to believe in it but to make it happen, our desire to be eternal.

 

 

 

Broken Hands

 

In the Indo-European language

there was no future tense.

We carved the future

tense 

with hammers, chisels, and might. 

 

Our hands bled over the earth

they stained the stone, the cold messenger

announcing our triumph 

over time

we would be gone

only to return

as a participle.

 

 You can read more about the poetry issues project here.