FAQ NET: Part VI www.dreamideamachine.com
FAQ NET: It is the name of the new column that we start as Media Partners on a regular basis of Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair, asking a common question to participating artists – representatives of artistic groups and collectives, resulting from the needs of conteporary reality and the changes that have already occurred after the Covid 19 Pandemic and the Global Lockdown; with Platforms Project-Independent Art Fair to pioneer in the European Art Fair space and to transfer the entire fair online at Platforms Project Net 2020 (14-31/5/2020).
By Efi Michalarou & Dimitris Lempesis
How do you feel participating in an online Art Fair like Platforms Project 2020? A new experience that emerged through the needs of Covid 19 World Pandemic fighting. What are the new challenges and what do you expect from this participation?
Vivi Perysinaki – Andreas Mitropoulos – Konstantinos Pardalis (ARTIA GALLERY): We are very pleased to take part once more in the Platforms Project 2020 alongside many distinguished artists and groups from all over the world.
The directors, Artemis and Michalis, faced many challenges and obstacles this year. They turned a difficult situation into an opportunity creating a new communicative experience where artists and their works reach out to the viewers.
Our project, called “Urban Multitudes”, has biopolitics at its core. A year ago we began studying the relation between people and their potential within an urban environment. It is a group project of 58 participants who collected photographs that comprised this video. Like Orwellian creatures we witness unprecedented circumstances that gave our team the challenge to work on the raw material and complete the project in the middle of a lock down.
Our works poses questions on power, surveillance and control, questions that are also posed by the dystopian reality of the pandemic, reminding us of Italo Calvino’s words, “Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.”
ART SNAPSHOTS:Reality check www.dreamideamachine.com
As dr. Kostas Prapoglou, the curator of the exhibition “Reality check”, says “The psychiatric hospital of Dafni is situated on the axis of the Ancient Sacred Way connecting Athens with the town of Eleusis (where the processional ceremony of the Eleusinian Mysteries used to take place in antiquity) and opposite the sanctuary of Dafnios Apollo, above which the byzantine monastery of Dafni was later erected in the 6th century Ad. In an area of high spiritual and mental rebirth since the ancient times the Psychiatric Hospital of Attica in Dafni was built in 1925 as the first State Psychiatric Hospital and has been continuously functioning ever since. The exhibition “Reality check” take place in one of the larger -now abandoned- buildings of the hospital ground. It focus transcends beyond the objective hypostasis of a psychiatric facility. It gazes further away from ideas of institutional confinement, it overrides mental illness as a medical condition and it surveys the structural constraints and qualities of the mind in relation with space and time. Spacelessness (having and understanding no borders or limits) is a term that is future investigated in this exhibition. We also explore how consciousness language and speech stand against gravity an how oftentimes visual landscapes turn into mindscapes and vice versa. Notions of the inside and outside are also being takes into account. Where is insanity really located? Where do we normally find the real madhouse?”
