A Hollow Place

Rapid urban development has fractured our relation with the natural environment and its key role in the development of our civilization placing it at the margins of our imaginary, as something to be protected from our own human greed. Caves and the underground more than other aspects of the natural world have disappeared from our common imaginary becoming increasingly a space we only experience through trains that make us cross our cities quicker or filled with all the tubes, cables and canals we do not want to see on the surface. The cave, once natural shelter, storage space and place which inspired myths and dreams about an “other world” has turned into a trivial space useful only to hide things we don’t want to see or need. 

Caves have lost their aura, their mystique and value as the place where our ancestors started depicting the world around them, experimenting with colours and shapes in order to transmit messages to others. These places, where humans first stated their need for culture and the arts, have increasingly become barren of our presence. The imaginary is long lost of caves as a space of encounter with fantastic creatures and lands inspiring literature masterworks like Cervantes in the episode of the Montesinos’ caves, Jules Verne’s underground worlds or even Queneau’s ironic and irreverent depiction of Altamira’s caves in his “Les Fleurs Bleues”.

A Hollow Place is a unique project through which four internationally acclaimed artists are given the opportunity to inhabit a cave for a day and reflect on the role given to this space within our contemporary imaginary. Their interventions will populate the cave individually and for a day only, creating a sense of am itinerant community sharing a place without claiming any ownership over it; highlighting at times its physical elements, of protection as well as constrain, while at others attempting to create a temporary home without claiming it as their own, without leaving any trace of their passing. 

“The Smith and the Cave”, as the first edition of this project, interrogates the materiality of the cave, the sense of violating an intimate space when entering it juxtaposed to the sense of protection it gives us. The figure of the smith, in this context, acts a historic reference (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateux, 1227: Treaty on Nomadology) to an itinerant individual dwelling temporarily on a land which s/he doesn’t own, yet which provides its livelihood through the extraction of precious goods. Smiths cross the lines of both nomads and sedentary people as they move-on once they have exploited the land they inhabit leaving a void behind but little trace of their lives. They are cave dwellers by artistry and craft, not by nature. Their characteristics are neither nomadic nor sedentary, neither fully part of that natural world, represented by the cave and rapidly vanishing, nor entirely within the urban structures, which have taken ownership of the underground. This makes these figures critical in understanding the boundaries and the overlaps between these two realms, forcing us to reflect on the nature of human movements.

With a similar attitude the artists invited to participate in this first edition of “A Hollow Place”, through individual interventions, which will only be visible to the public for one day, will reflect on the sense of fragility this space emanates. By doing so they will, like a smith, extract a specific knowledge, feeling and sensation from the space before abandoning it for the next dweller. The four episodes are thus seen as independent yet thoroughly interconnected through the space itself and the narrative they all follow in reasserting a cultural value to the underworld and the cave in particular.

*: The cave can be reached only through a narrow path and the entrance has a rather low ceiling height, which visitors will need to navigate. The size of the cave itself limits the audience to 4-5 people at the time.

10th October 2018 – Nikolas Ventourakis: 

Nikolas Ventourakis lives and works between London and Athens. His practice situates in the threshold between art and document, denying one-way resolutions and offering an invitation to embrace ambiguous imagery, where the photographic is not yet real, and the familiar is a projection of a mix of memory and abstract thinking. In 2013 he completed an MA in Fine Art (Photography) with Merit at Central Saint Martin’s School of Arts and was the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at CalArts with a Fulbright Artist Fellowship. He has exhibited internationally, most recently at the NRW Forum, Düsseldorf, the Mediterranean Biennale of Young Artists 18, and the Thessaloniki Biennale of Photography.