Series of summer workshops organised in Chania, Crete.
2011 The Value of Garbage
http://www.kamworkshops.com/the_value_of_garbage/
http://the-value-of-garbage.tumblr.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/collections/72157627465915702/
2010 The Bankruptcy of Architecture
http://www.kamworkshops.com/2010/
http://the-bankruptcy-of-architecture.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/collections/72157624620710239/
2009 Shelves
http://www.kamworkshops.com/2009/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/collections/72157627452888121/
2008 Super Market
http://www.kamworkshops.com/files/KAM_poster_2008.pdf
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/collections/72157605602144950/
2007 Hospi-Table
http://www.kamworkshops.com/2007/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/collections/72157605723915431/
2006 WaterTank and River Bed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antonas/sets/72157605931534254/
2005 2 Bridges
http://2bridgesbuiltevent.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hospi-table/sets/72157602360469669/
2004 Paradigmata
2003 Limit wall
2002 Factory
http://www.kamworkshops.com/files/KAMworkshops_2002-2006.pdf
Participants
CHRISTINA ACHTYPI, ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS, ANTOINETTA ANGELIDI, DIMITRIS ANTONAKAKIS, AIKATERINI ANTONAKAKI, ARISTIDE ANTONAS, ORESTIS ARGYROPOULOS, YANNIS ARVANITIS, ANGELIKI AVGHITIDOU, ELINA AXIOTI, BOUKI BABALOU, ANDREA BALESTRERO, ETHEL BARAONA POHL, IRO BERTAKI, VASSILIS BOURDAKIS, ELIAS CONSTANTOPOULOS, SHUMON BASAR, MICHELE BRUNELLO, RICCARDO CALDURA, ARIS COHEN, KOSTAS DAFLOS, ALEXIS DALLAS, DIMITRIS DIMITRIADIS, DIMOS DIMITRIOU, ΜATTEO GHIDONI, DIMITRIS GOURDOUKIS, DIVERCITY, PANOS DRAGONAS, YANNIS FILIS, ANGELOS FLOROS, ANITA HACKETHAL, HARIKLEIA HARI, VILMA HASTAOGLOU, KOSTAS HATDJIKIRIAKOU, DIMITRIS ISSAIAS, PLATON ISSAIAS, MANUEL JORANT BRIQUETTE, NADIA KALARA, ELINA KARANASTASI, APOSTOLOS KALFOPOULOS, ELINA KARANASTASI, KERNEL, ZISSIS KOTIONIS, ANDREAS KOURKOULAS, PANOS KOUROS, KATERINA KOUTSOGIANNI, LAMB AND LAMP, VASSILIKI LEONTARI, EVA MANIDAKI, FOTINI MARGARITI, PETROS MARTINIDIS, POLIXENI MATZIOU, KOSTIS MAVRAKAKIS, PETROS MORIS, THANASSIS MOUTSOPOULOS, ΒERT DE ΜUYNCK, NIKOS NAVRIDIS, IOANNIS OIKONOMOU, FILIPPOS OREOPOULOS, NIKOS PATSAVOS, GEORGIOS PANETSOS, PANAYOTIS PANGALOS, KOSTIS PANIGIRIS, KONSTANTINOS PANTAZIS, LOIS PAPADOPOULOS, SPIROS PAPADOPOULOS, TITI PAPADOPOULOU, EVA PAPAMARGARITI, CHRISTOS PAPOULIAS, NIKOS PATSAVOS, VASSILIKI PETRIDOU, LILI PEZANOU, PETROS PHOKAIDES, MARIOS PHOCAS, ANGELO PLESSAS, DIMITRIS POLYCHRONOPOULOS, PANAYOTA PYLA, POINT SUPREME, CAROLINE RASPÉ, MARIANNA RENTZOU, ELPIDA RIKOU, ALCYSTIS RODI, LORENZO ROMITO, RENA SAKELLARIDOU, TASSOS SAKELLAROPOULOS, EVI SOUGKARA, ELENI SPIRIDAKI, DIMITRIS STAMATAKIS, YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS, EVA STEFANI, VASSILIS STROUMBAKOS, CHRISANTHI SOTIROPOULOU, NIKOLAS TRAVASAROS, DIMITRIS TSAKALAKIS, CHRISOSTOMOS TSIMOURDANGAS, YORGOS TZIRTZILAKIS, REA VALDEN, ARISTOMENIS VAROUDAKIS, YANNIKOS VASILOULIS, STAVROS VERGOPOULOS, VANGELIS VLAHOS, ARIADNE VOZANI, MARIA VRONTISI, SOFIA VYZOVITI, ZAFOS XAGORARIS, GIORGOS XIROPAIDIS, PEGY ZALI, IOANNIS ZAVOLEAS
(Barcelona _ May 2002, July 2003, April 2004)
The trip was organized in the context of the “Architectural Design” course and 3rd year students have participated. It included visits in important historical buildings, new constructions and building blocks as well as contemporary cultural infrastructures. During the educational trip two visits in architectural schools took place (ETSAB, ESARQ) and lectures were given by the professors: Maria Goula, Maria Rubertand Alberto Estévez. Additionally, cooperating with architects Enric Serraand Fermín Vázquez, the participants visited contemporary civil works and housing blocks.
Maria Papadimitriou, Temporary Autonomous Museum for All (T.A.M.A), National Participation at the 25th Bienal De São Paulo.
Commissioner: Efi Strousa.
The Greek proposition for "Metropolitan Iconographies".
Greece is to participate in the 25th Bienal of São Paulo, to be held from March 23 to June 2, 2002 with the theme “Metropolitan Iconographies”, with Maria Papadimitriou’s Τ.Α.Μ.Α. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All). The Commissioner for the Greek participation is art historian Efi Strousa. The Greek presence in Brazil is financed and organised by the Ministry of Culture.
The theme of the 25th Bienal of São Paulo, “Metropolitan Iconographies”, provides an opportunity for an international showing of a very interesting ongoing project initiated four years ago at Avliza, the settlement of a nomadic Vlach-Rumanian community near Athens.
The Τ.Α.Μ.Α. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All) is the potential result of the artist’s involved research and action around one of the most crucial concerns of contemporary art—the artists’ relation with the urban environment.
In this work Maria Papadimitriou emphasises the social role of the artist, channelling her creativity into the core of the acute problems arising from the contrasts between centre and periphery, high and low social strata and the lack of social structures to deal with the multicultural character of the metropolis.
Contemporary art keeps drawing from the constantly changing, contradictory picture of the city. The effectiveness of the artistic presence is not necessarily measured by the scale of a sculptural or architectural project but by the quality of the artistic act and the degree of sensitivity through which a social and physical space may assume a more essential role in the overall social development.
On the one hand the work of Papadimitriou reveals the weak points of the city’s social structure; on the other hand, it sheds light on the daily existence of the people in an area where, for all its utter destitution, life goes on in its own creative way.
The Temporary Autonomous Museum for All is based on the value of inventiveness, being open to propositions and ideas by artists, architects and people from the realm of arts and letters who respond to the call to contribute to alternative ways of action and perceive life as developing through a course between fixed and changing structures; in this way the ‘temporary’ becomes an ‘autonomous’ field of creativity.
The T.A.M.A. is the sum of the activities of Maria Papadimitriou in collaboration with her volunteer associates and the people of Avliza, aimed at designing and realising an infrastructure which would improve their standards of living. This resulted in designs for various spaces, open or indoor, such as modular homes, buildings for children’s creative activities, recreation and guest facilities, kiosks, etc., offered by the T.A.M.A. to the Roma community in a primary form and the inhabitants themselves are left free to complete them according to their own aesthetics.
Over the last two months that Maria Papadimitriou has been working on the presentation of the project at the 25th Bienal de Sao Paulo, a parallel effort was initiated to find sponsors to undertake the realisation of some of the T.A.M.A. structures proposed by a team of architects, who were amongst the first supporters of the artist’s idea. The T.A.M.A., which aims for broad social participation, is gradually becoming a reality thanks to positive response from cultural institutions and individuals from the art world. Up to this moment, some of the most prestigious art-lovers and organizations, such as ALPHA BANK, Mr. Prodromos Emfietzoglou (art collector), Ms. Anny Costopoulou (artist and art collector), Mr. Dakis Joannou (art collector), Prof. Constantinos Papagheorghiou (art collector) have already adhered to the idea of the T.A.M.A. and will contribute by offering the means for the realization of some of the structures proposed in the project. At the same time, an ever increasing number of young artists and people from various disciplines are supporting it by their active participation.
The Ministry of Culture has already responded by undertaking one of the projects, the Kiosque à Culture by Brazilian artist Fabiana de Barros, which was warmly received by the community and has been taken over by the children who engage in creative activities with Maria Papadimitriou.
The artist shall use the 100 sq. m. available at the São Paulo Bienal to convey her experience from Avliza and the Roma community through a visual environment with video projection, photo lambda prints and everyday objects and elements typical of the aesthetic of the community, music, architectural propositions and evidence from the realisation of the projects.
This lively and colourful staging shall present the history of the community and its encounter with contemporary art within the broader physical and social context of a big city. Another part of the project is the virtuoso clarinet player Yorghos Mangas, who will be seen performing in a video made by Maria Papadimitriou.
The Greek participation in the 25th Biennale of Sao Paolo is accompanied by a] catalogue in the form of a book [in Greek, Portuguese and English], as it records the contributions of the first participants with texts, artworks, ideas, proposed buildings and infrastructure projects (see next page).
On the occasion of the opening of the Biennale, the European countries will hold a joint feast-reception at a public building in the city centre on Wednesday, March 20.
Duration:
23 March – 2 June, 2002
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion
Fundação Bienal, Portão 3, Parque do Ibirapuera, São Paulo
Organised by:
Ministry of Culture
General Directorate of Cultural Development
Fine Arts Division
Commissioner:
Efi Strousa
"BLACK BOX", Alexandros Psychoulis, National Participation at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), interactive installation.
Commissioner: Efi Strousa.
BLACK BOX is in short an "automatic animator of speech".
It consists of a video-wall, a microphone and a powerful computer.
There are approximately 4,000 images stored in the computer (still and moving pictures) which correspond to an equal number of English words. The images belong to the mental space of the artist, in other words to a Greek male, named Alexandros Psychoulis, of thirty-one years of age who lives in Athens.
The viewer can speak his words into a microphone. His words automatically project images on the video-wall. In reality, the visitor speaks and his speech is animated through somebody else's experience.
The artist sees his own images in the mouth of a stranger. As a result he cannot control them any longer.
With these simple and sparse words, Psychoulis describes the alphabet of the words and the images he has created. Is it perhaps a game of unexpected combinations of words and images? It might be that as well, if we pause in front of the screen and speak and play for a while. In any case, there are not many alternative ways any longer that can make the viewer stop in front of an image. Screens have now usurped the place previously occupied by paintings. This is true enough.
However, Psychoulis's BLACK BOX apart from containing unexpected and secret information is also an ark that encloses the soul of a contemporary artist interpreted into experienced images. Their projection is activated by vocal speech, but their narrative character changes according to each distinct way of thought and is coloured by the oral expression of the viewer who utters them. Things that are voiced, as Aristotle tells us, are the mishaps of the soul. The vocal script, as Derrida later explains in his treatise De la Grammatologie, listens to its speaking self. In this way a new language is born.
The evaluation of the radical transmutations of world culture during the passage from one millennium to the next, and the role of the new deceptive pictorial image of the world, introduced by digital technology, will be decisive.
Who does the language of the image belong to? Who is its creator in today's world? And who is the principal image-maker of the world?
This role has been ascribed to the artist for centuries throughout the history of art and civilisation. Art addressed itself through the power of rhetoric to an recipient and the world of pictorial representation was either a window that opened on to a designated field or level of symbolic images that spoke their own language. A language that has always exercised power on the eye and the soul in different ways. The image of the work of art, as a text, was offered for the reading of the plot, the form and the thought which the artist wondrously unfolded in the eyes of the observer.
Art in the twentieth century has radically changed the basic structure of pictorial representation. It has broken and minimised it to the point that the narrative character of the artistic text has now completely disappeared. Or conversely, it detached the "text" from its purely representational and fictional quality and restored it to the domain of language itself. Art as a language has explored all the ways that led to and revealed its source, from the fundamental formalistic structures to the conventional expressions of body language. In addition, the natural and social environment has become the framework of the observer with a view to rendering him active in the re-creation of the natural environment and abolishing his being a passive recipient.
The long list of the transmutations of form, structure and concept always had a constant characteristic. The transmutation was the result of a single creator, orator or versatile commentator. Behind each elevating or annihilating transformation of art, the "magic wand" was manipulated by the artist's hands. His writing was the reading text. Within this continuous relationship between writing and reading, the observer was always an integrate part of the design of the work of art.
With his work entitled BLACK BOX, Alexandros Psychoulis drastically intervenes in the fundamental scheme of art through the centuries. In reality this vigorous intervention is not entirely due to him. As a man and artist of this age, Psychoulis is today the recipient of this transformation in the relationship between writing and reading. This transformation questions the role of the creator irreparably. This time, it is science itself that has moved the magic wand, rendering the reading of the pictorial "text" an undertaking that does not permit passive acceptance. Any image, any word mediated as knowledge or information through the demonic digital machinery can simultaneously be substituted according to the volition of the viewer by his personal intervention.
The application of this new mode of "writing" in an extensive radius and scale in the natural and social environment is daily read in the powerful presence of the pictorial media, from advertisements to every kind of signification. It remoulds the environment of contemporary man into an open illustrated text, where the avant-garde design of form, the simplistic codes of communication and the most advanced metaphorical use of writing-reading coexist on an equal footing.
For this reason, it is not strange that a young artist with perspicacious and sagacious spirit concedes his image-making role to the language of the observer. Psychoulis does not simply create an unrestricted work with his BLACK BOX. In reality it is deceptively beguiling. The BLACK BOX is like a Trojan Horse which as a toy contains hidden and unexpected traps. He encloses information in the "black box". His own images are the products of a private interaction between images and words as experienced in his own personal environment. By definition, they are not familiar to others. Thus they are stored in the memory of a computer. The thread that connects these images with the source of their origin is invisible and mystical as it is unwound by experiences that are not repeated and do not belong to the viewer. All the illustrated information, all the connections that bind it to speech, are clearly a personal matter of contemporary man.
The viewer who projects them on the screen with the use of his voice, appropriates them and starts experiencing the illusion of personal narration. Without seeking to do so, he takes on somebody else's role, while their initial moulder -the artist himself- automatically becomes the observer of his own self, the viewer of a process of detachment from his own self.
Nothing corresponds to anything.
A strange presentation of the re-presentation is inaugurated.
In the archeology of language, Rousseau claims that "the first language was necessarily pictorial," therefore, metaphorical.
This claim seems to find correspondence in the pursuit of a new artist who searching for a new mode of "writing" instinctively turned to the exclusion of his "ego" from his own language.
Psychoulis ploughed the terrain of many different arts and forms of communication before being drawn to his BLACK BOX; from the theatre, video films and illustration to cartoons, narration, the graphic arts, multimedia and publishing. In a great number of his produced works, co-creators and colleagues equally underwrite them and, in some cases, as it happened with his installation entitled "Machinery-free Industry" (1994), the visitor of the exhibition appears to be a co-producer. The objects placed in his installations in space are his own creations that have an intensely ironical character like the works he appropriates. The wooden sculpture that decorates the glass ark which contains the sacred heirloom of the braided piece of hair of the favourite heroine of all his narrations, Anna-Maria, is the work of a worthy anonymous Greek craftsman with whom Psychoulis becomes one, as it also happens with the deceased constructor of the Infant-Recipient. He voluntarily confirms or revokes his existence in the capacity of the artist-creator in relation to what already exists in everyday life whether that may be in the past or in the future.
This characteristic is a constant force in Psychoulis's creation and he does not hesitate to eliminate the identity of the creator, the omnipotent "ego" of the artist who has always dominated or bolstered art's proposition. Thus, the BLACK BOX adopts the common method of "writing" through the interaction inaugurated by digital technology. However, the use of this apparatus, the artist does not pretend to be paving the way in order to facilitate the viewer's transport to the top of creation. The person who talks in front of the screen, enters into it in order to dispense with the artist. The viewer, left by himself, becomes the forger of art. Left alone, the artist, becomes an awkward observer. BLACK BOX is a signpost showing the way to a situation of extreme alienation and detachment from everything familiar. The sign that signifies the present offered by Psychoulis, is in reality a big question mark that is brought about by every radical change of values of a certain civilisation and, consequently, its language.
In the design of an "ecumenical" level of co-existence and understanding the experience of Babel prevails as an almost necessary precondition. "In what place could we understand each other by talking and listening to one another? "Could that happen in the theatre", Derrida wonders, "which unites spectacle with speech, and could it substitute the unanimous assembly?" Even in the theatre language cannot remain pure and new; it becomes complimentary.
With this question in mind, Psychoulis considers the theorem of the qualities of the dead and living languages with clear-sighted thought. Grammatology explains that "the unvocalised and universal writing of science is in this sense a theorem. As Leibniz used to say, "ad vocem referri non est necesse".
The BLACK BOX restores the birth of language through the lost unity between seeing and oral speech. With this process that is facilitated by high technology and which also revolves round the particular reality established by electronic society, Psychoulis transfers the quality of the artist to the intermediate stage between the pre-lexical condition of civilisation that gives birth to vocal writing and the strictly personal reality as experienced by the individual.
Psychoulis's BLACK BOX is deceptively offered as a toy. A toy in which his entire life is incorporated with pictorial signs that cannot be interpreted. His illustrated life, stored in the computer, becomes a womb. The artist-creator is rid of his "ego" and maintains his femininity. The word of a third party, the word of the new society, of multiple sensitivities and individual creativity, will produce the sperm for the birth of a new language in a different art form.
Efi Strousa