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.
