NEW ARTWORKS: Vivetta Christouli – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

I now the work of vivetta Christouli for many years, as I know that she likes to play and experiment with space, light and various other materials that coexist and function between art and architecture. On the occasion of her new site specific installation at the foyer of the Bageion Hotel in Omonoia Square in Athens-Greece, we are discussing for the challenge to create an artwork in a building and an area that is historically and socially charged, intertwined with movement and migration, both national and International.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Vivetta Christouli Archive

Mrs. Vivetta Christouli, would you like to tell us how come up the idea to create an site specific work the foyer of the Bageion Hotel in Omonoia Square and which was the challenge for you as an artist?

I believe in the potential of the site-specific work of art as a vehicle for a raised consciousness about the condition of the site for which it is created and where it is exhibited. The creation of an ephemeral site-specific installation in Bageion Hotel in Omonoia square was the result of a gesture to reconceptualize the dynamic relation between the destabilized society of the center of Athens as maintained by immigrants, refugees, homeless, tourists, and what we call “heritage culture”, as seen in historical buildings like ‘Baggeion Hotel’.

The installation is entitled “Hybrid Bridges-Unspecified boundaries”, a vertical column with the aim to connect the present with the future and the local with the international.

A vertical column constructed by stowed recycled clothes is installed in the old Bageio Hotel’s foyer, constituting both a symbolic beam and a bridge. It refers to the bridging between the glamor of the old Athens’ center and its contemporary social diversity, where the local is turned into international. In the center of Athens where multiculturalism seems to lead our paths to the future, this ephemeral installation intends to raise awareness on antithetical aspects that we tempt to disregard: formed/unformed, fixed/movable, precious/disregarded, historical/contemporary, unique/common, cultural/political.

Is it a way for you to widen the boundaries between the timeless and the ephemeral, of temporal and monumental, of architecture and art, natural and artificial?

The iconic armature pile of the site -specific installation Hybrid Bridges-Unspecified boundaries, while it refers to some kind of support for the worn out building of late classicism (1880), in reality needs to be supported since it is constructed by soft material: clothing. Moreover, its ephemeral character is opposed to every aspect of the timelessness of a ‘work of art’, and predicts its future absence from the site for which it was created, converting it in some kind of ‘negative monument’. On the other hand, its video or photographic reproduction allows it to be revisited again and again, and offers to it endurance over time.

At the same time in your installation you are using recycled clothes, what do they represent for you and which is their semiology for the project, the building and for the wider area of Omonoia, an encumbered both historically and demographically, which has welcome with open arms many generations of refugees from different regions and countries in the history of modern Greece.

Clothes, and especially those that have been worn, bear something from the person that wore them: odor, mood, condition and can be described to have been part of that person. That’s why it is so difficult for people to dispose the clothes of someone they loved and who has died. For immigrants, refugees, and homeless, the clothes that they carry with them, might be the only belonging they possess. For the creation of the site-specific installation Hybrid Bridges-Unspecified boundaries, I have used clothes that have been worn and are gathered in order to be recycled, in an attempt to create a sense of displacement: the movement of the experience of the outer space (Omonoia Square) inside the exhibition space. When the exhibition is over, the clothes will find their way back to recycling…

The self-adhesive tapes that as you say “Mend temporally, the damaged floor, while reflecting in their shiny surface the walking visitors and the architectural shell that surrounds them” contain the viewer? Are you interested for his participation? Is “Hybrid Bridges-Unspecified boundaries” an interactive project? In an era that distance and proximity are under negotiation, which is the action and which the interaction?

The site-specific installation Hybrid Bridges-Unspecified boundaries, is fulfilled by the presence of the viewers. The observers notice their blurry idol on the reflective surface on the floor, they are disorientated by the linear exchanging of the self-adhesive tapes, confront the size of the column and are emotionally taut by the stowed clothes. They become part of the work. Moreover, they become aware of sharing the same space and time with other viewers. In this condition of the viewers’ shared contemporaneity, it is manifested a notion of the collective, which encompasses a contemporary notion of the dynamic relation of action/interaction.