The Melitzazz festival returns for its 12th year in Leonidio Arkadia, this year dedicated to Nostos. In this context, the historic Tsikaliotis Tower, built in 1808, hosts four young artists with the group exhibition of contemporary art “Amatterofreturn“.

The artists Katerina Athanasopoulou, Kostas Bassanos, Nancy Haritonidou and Vassilis Psarras critically re-approach the concept of the “nostos”, through contemporary artworks in the form of video, animation, topographical interventions with neon and silk-screen works, which reflect on the idea of travel, memory, return, interweaving the personal with the collective. The artists “occupy” the spaces of the mansion and engage in a conversation with the place, its history and the travels of the Tsakonians. Through their works they negotiate personal affairs of return, emigration, memory and oblivion that are included in every journey. The characteristics of a journey where the certainty of decision is contrasted with the questioning of memory and interiority is intertwined with existential questions and dreams.

ARTISTS AND WORKS 

Katerina Athanasopoulou 

Title:  Apodemy

Year: 2012

Medium: Short Film, 5’

In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates likens the human soul to a cage in which knowledge is a bird in flight. Man is born with the cage empty and as he grows up he collects birds-knowledge that are put into the cage for future use. When he needs a knowledge, he tries to grab it by hand – but sometimes he catches the wrong bird. Ornithology uses the term ‘Zugunruhe’ to describe the restless, impatient behaviour of birds before migration, which occurs in both free and enclosed birds. These two images – birds as inhabitants of the human soul/cage and the agitation of the imprisoned bird wanting to escape were the impetus for Apodemy: A flock of birds circles and drives a caged vehicle, seeking escape from an abandoned, half-finished city, with streets interrupted by fragments of decimated statues. These hands are both the search for knowledge and the outdated heroes/leaders we have denied but continue to chase.

Kostas Basanos 

Title: Iwashereandthere

Year: 2007

Medium: 2.56 min DVD video with sound

The video installation I was here and there (2007), refers to the desire of escape (there) and simultaneous presence (here), in an endless past time, which as an oxymoronic figure of an existential condition, a wandering, indicates the impossibility of being here and there at the same time. Only at the point where the viewer’s gaze faces the purity of the horizon and escapes between the blurred surfaces of here and there, does this spatio-temporal condition acquire meaning, to the degree of the image’s purity, its perspectival depth. Whereas, the one who is ultimately here is the viewer. I was here and there is part of a series of works that deal with the notion of horizon, habitation, internal and external space through the transformative power of language, as a reflective experience of landscape.

Nancy Charitonidou

Title:  Memento

Year: 2019

Medium: Silkscreen on canvas and embroidery

Memories are drawn from stories that have been told to us, from people we have seen in pictures and photographs. An unexplored family tree creates our personal historical archive. We are filled with unfamiliar faces and stories, stored in old family albums, documents, black and white photographs in boxes. In this work, in a composition of photographs and texts through the practice of silkscreening, I encounter the familiar and the unknown in a return journey through objects that are characterized as autobiographical. A timeline of people and dates that invisibly define my own identity.

Vasilis Psaras 

Title: Rem.ember  (Site-Postscripts series)

Year: 2024

Medium: Neon installation, soundscape

A body, a place, a memory have the power to smolder within them. I remember; I enclose in memory something that engraves me, something that smolders like charcoal, as a minimal unit of activation of what seems impossible, raw material of a memory. It survives as an island from a sea of the past. The work presents an insitutextual installation of neon and soundscape, part of the artist’s series of works entitled Site-Postscripts.

Curator: Nancy Charitonidou

Duration: 3-7 July 2024

Venue:Tsikaliotis Tower, Leonidio Arkadia.

Opening Times: 19:30 – 23:00.

Webpage:www.melitzazz.gr/events/exhibition_event_a_matter_of_return_2024