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
For Ways In and Ways Out I combined an exercise on loitering, observing, and list making in public space (xpub field work), with a list describing a situation left open to interpretation taking place within the private sphere. The excellent Jon H. Miller let me use his music, and the result speaks for itself.
"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.
Desperation
Looking back
there was a lot of desperation
but we couldn't feel it.
It was like a filter
all over reality.
A reality that you get used to
like every other reality.
There was desperation.
It had a color.
It was mostly grey but
not just grey
a little bit of dark
blue, also.
Sadness, I guess.
There was, but
we couldn't see it.
But now that the filter
that film
that was covering the horizon
and the sky
and the reflection of the light
now that this is gone
yeah, in hindsight
there was a lot
of desperation.
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.