As part of a bigger, collective project and following the subjective map of Rotterdam this project was adapted to fit the city of Groningen. Inspired as always by infrastructure, it grew to include Eemshaven and to pose questions regarding the cost of development and of our increasing needs in energy and data. Below is the video produced from footage of Eemshaven and the city of Groningen, juxtaposing liminal and gentrified (or on the verge of gentrification) spaces and the ever-expanding energy and data factories of Eemshaven.

An ever-changing mobile population
Our mixed paths
Our lost orientation
Making history that soaks into
An angry earth


A greedy machine is marching
From the end of the world
A new order
A dark mirror.
 
We remain

Stoic like oaks
Entangled
In deep rooted feeling

Or

Anchored like house boats
In half-deserted ports
Rocking with the waft
The ebb and the tide.

In a playful manner, the project also speaks about and celebrates the mundane but magical corners as met by the curious eyes of a stranger.

Here are some pictures of the project in its natural environment: SIGN Project Space, commissioned and hosted the work from 26 September to 6 October 2024. The relevant object which compliments the video was created with SIGN's DIY approach in mind. It incorporates elements of temporality, temporariness, orientation as experienced from the viewpoint of the visitor, thoughts on the big issues of the city and 3D-printed GPS logs.

A subjective, interactive map of the infrastructure of Rotterdam. Each layer of thread represents a different level of infrastructure and each pin is connected to a touch sensor that triggers different media files related to the city and displayed on the screen in the center. One of these files contains the poetic piece "Infrastructure". The piece aims at making the viewer conscious of the networks of infrastructure surrounding her and asks her to consider her position and role in an elaborate design where everything seems to be connected. 

The work, that was completed both as an idea as well as an object with the tireless help of Rosa and Victor, was presented in S/ash Gallery, Rotterdam, from 27 June to 2 July 2024, as part of the collective xpub Special Issue #24.

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.

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.

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.