"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.
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.
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.
Poetry issues #26, the last poetry issue featuring many works, was published in five parts between March and December 2022. It's a body of work that largely attempts to take poetry issues to the next level: The pieces are steadily leaving the 2D world, more dimensions (eg. audio and video) are being incorporated into the work, and the visual elements mingle more than ever with the text. And since this is just the beginning, I have decided to stop working in bundles of poems and let each piece grow on its own, and be published as a separate unit.
Part I: Our Lost Babies (poem), Mirrors (artwork)
A "lost baby" is anything we dreamt of and didn't flourish, everything we strived for but lost in the end. Creation and loss are main themes in this piece, but closely connected to letting go and moving on.
Mirrors is a larger assemblage piece (95x60), the first one in a series of worlds. Every box is its own small world but they are all connected and constitute a single piece, like a mind with its several thoughts and ideas.
For more detail:
Part II: Distance, a handmade book (and a song)
My own handmade paper, colored and illustrated with a mixed media technique, integrating collage elements, handwritten text and lots of color, that I always love.
Distance
The howling of the wind
triumphant in the space between us.
I just want to sleep
imagine the death of the wind
silence under the yellow sun
children's laughter roaring
a happy dog's bark.
That's how you tolerate loneliness
how sadness becomes sweet.
In a dream you held my hand
and led me through a dancing crowd.
In that dream you were my man.
An impression of the physical book:
Also, here's a link to the digital flipbook or, if you prefer, to the .pdf.
Part III: A Fight (video with sound)
A closer blending of text and image. In the video, the text is spoken and the image is moving. Everything changes a little in benefit of the whole.
A Fight
You were afraid that winter would come
and it was true: the days were getting shorter.
You longed for that last day on the beach
but the weather had already changed.
The end, most of the time, doesn’t come with a bang
but as an echo of thoughtless words or as an aftertaste
of dry, bitter grass.
It’s crazy how the weather changes
faster than my mood.
Anyway, I believe we’ll make it
through the winter.
We both haven’t been really good
at being weighed down by reality.
“Lightness” has the word “light” in it. Light is spring.
The last day on the beach I was alone.
I found in my bag a kernel of corn
that you had given me. It was stale
but I ate it ceremonially. It was late
it was cloudy and I was cold.
I set our messages of fire. We’ve had enough
sun for a summer. Now it was time to step back inside.
Part IV: Appropriation
I appropriated this piece in the same way man appropriates nature, in the same way that I am appropriated, boxed, controlled, tamed: the victim becomes the perpetrator.
So, I made sure
the animals
would graze
behind a wire
fence.
Part V: tinder date
More on the playful than the profound side, using the same superficiality that it comments upon, "tinder date" is the result of careful observation of the online dating world. I view my character with empathy, but of course my viewpoint is almost never a flattering one.
My tinder date
I shaved my balls
I rode my horse
I did my best
She never came
Now who will save me?
You can read more about the poetry issues project here.
More on the playful than the profound side, using the same superficiality that it comments upon, "tinder date" is the result of careful observation of the online dating world. I view my character with empathy, but of course my viewpoint is almost never a flattering one.
My tinder date
I shaved my balls
I rode my horse
I did my best
She never came
Now who will save me?
This project ends the 26th volume of poetry issues and the poetry issues project itself comes to an end. A new cycle begins, of course, but as I am turning artistically towards more three-dimensional representations of the text and as every visual and every text project become intertwined, I feel that they grow on their own and not as part of a bundle. I want to give them thus the right to exist more than ever apart from each other.
If you are curious, you can read more about the poetry issues project here.