With time on my side here, I return to Syntagma Square two days later, as I feel I have unfinished business. I wander, projector in hand, and to the side of the square, the west this time, I see a plinth with a statue mounted on the top. A figure ready to travel. I sit on the floor and project on the plinth below. The woman in the film walks in a different direction.
Here nothing and everything is happening. An audience is hard to detect, however, it soon becomes a game of frames…
In front of me, and as a backdrop to the statue and is a water wall that changes color every 20 seconds. It reminds me of cinema curtains and a promising light from behind. On a wall to my right is a couple kissing, a camera dangling from the woman’s wrist. The lens pointing towards me. To my left, is a woman making a panoramic shot. I may be in one of those frames I expect, but she does not see me either. It is all incidental here.
I sit for four minutes, returning to my original performative structure. Then I stand up and walk back towards the central fountain. I first pass a man with a video camera who has been sitting on the wall, filming me from behind. He does not acknowledge me. I exist within his frame too. Secret audiences here. Interesting hidden ‘conversations’. Stark and invisible once again, I walk around the square, disappearing into the crowd…
From Skanderbeg Square to Syntagma Square and 705km of road between Tirana and Athens, across the Albanian/Greek border. I do not know at this point that many of the borders that I have just ‘slipped’ through will be closed off behind me by the time I return home. Fences being planned behind me.
I am no stranger to Athens. This does not make it easy. I can navigate this city, and familiarity becomes the problem. Graffiti covers the city. This becomes a problem. No wall space. Flood lights, and cafe lights, mean its too light. This becomes a problem. Too many people. Another problem. The problems become interesting, because I cannot find a space…
I try to avoid Syntagma Square, as it feels too much of a circus. I am however drawn to it as a democratic space, a space of public gathering and one that resonates with shift and change.
It is also the place with least Graffiti. I surrender to Syntagma Square. I am however lost in the crowd. It pulses with tourists. I cannot hear the city. Feeling pushed and pulled I find a corner that is too light, too dissolute, and so I project onto marble. This is the least successful performance of the trip. I cannot listen, and I am unable to ‘enter’ the performance and this leaves me feeling more like an ‘operator’. while I ‘operate’, people walk up and down the stairs, some watch from above.
Disorientation has seemed crucial to my process. No time to understand the surrounding heightens the sense of place, and the sense of my body in the space. But here, for tonight, an irritability prevails.
Strategies and Tactics…
The following day I walk into the National Art gallery, lured by a huge banner ‘Strategies and Tactics’. I cannot resist. The title resonates so well.
Presented by The White House Biennal, Athens, and curated by Lydia Pribisova, work from Slovakian Video Artists speaks volumes in a large beautiful space.
The work is mesmerising, and I consider its theme more closely in relation to my processes and invented borrowed spaces. Contrapositions of strategies and tactics. Strategies of power, and tactics to find a way through, new alternatives, developing innovate ways of working. The powerful and the non powerful…
I chat with a curator. I chat with the security guard about opening times.
I return to the gallery at 7.55pm It is closed.
I like the flat concrete front. The expanse of paved floor in front. Not many people around, but I am not searching for that kind of audience. I sit down and turn the projector on. Distance and space means that the scale of the projection is larger, and this impacts on the experience. I lose edges. Ambiguity and intimacy play with each other here. During the four minute performance, I am only aware of the shadow cast by the security guards peak cap, moving back and forth on the same wall. We watch each other, and nothing is said at all.
Here, aside from the security guard, I have an audience of drivers, moving past or stopping at the traffic lights. Perhaps a viewer from a window in a nearby tower block…
A flat plain and a signpost at a crossroads marks Albania. There have been 389km of unfamiliar road between Sarajevo and the city of Tirana.
It is evening. I experience an alarming shift in scale, and complete disorientation. I walk to the site of the Enver Hoxha Pyramid, simply because it sounds strange and intriguing, and cannot get my bearings. I walk around this a huge structure, its white marble tiles now covered in graffiti and dirt. I am told that it was built as a museum to honor the late communist leader, then becoming a NATO base in 1999 during the Kosovo war, and in 2001, an Albanian TV station. It is now part of a site where a wall monument and Peace Bell that has been forged out of melted bullets has been placed. It feels like a disused playground.
The rest of this space is a parking lot and a bus station. This space is surrounded by grand boulevards, wide roads, and the ghosts of rolling tanks. I cannot ‘read’ it and neither can I project on the pyramid. The graffiti covered tiles rejects the light. I am being left alone though…
I wander around the wall, beneath the bell, across a ramp. And here I project whilst walking, whilst the image becomes a torch. This performance become one of searching. I have also slipped out of my four minute ‘structure’. I glimpse dark figures and they glimpse my movement. I become more aware of my fleeting presence, of watching and being watched, focused glimpses. It stands for something.
I start to notice an eroticism in the shifting pace of each city…
