Back to Athens 8 International Arts Festival 2021

Opening day: Thursday, July 1, 16:00 - 22:00
Duration: July 1 – 4, 2021

Back to Athens 8 Curatorial team: Georg Georgakopoulos, Fotini Kapiris, Christian Rupp

 

Natural equivalence

 

“It is in the Renaissance that the false is born along with the natural. From the fake shirt in front to the use of the fork as an artificial prosthesis, to the stucco interiors and the great baroque theatrical machinery. The entire classical era belongs par excellence to the theatre...In the churches and palaces, stucco is wed to all forms, imitates everything- velvet curtains, wooden corniches, charnel swelling of the flesh. Stucco exorcises the unlikely confusion of matter into a single new substance, a sort of the general equivalent of all others, and is prestigious theatrically because it is itself a representative substance, a mirror of all the others.”

Jean Baudrillard

 

This is a part of Jean Baudrillard's text "Stucco Angel". Megaron Isaiah may not be a building with a renaissance architecture, however, in 1923, the period when it was built, carries elements of an architectural eclecticism with plaster decorative elements inside and outside of it which represent different motifs from nature. The counterfeit is the dominant form of the classical period from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, before we reach the present phase of the simulation.

By conjuncture, the building houses the Stavrakos Film School for decades. Thus, the building fatally has in its "bowels" an underlying theatricality that overflows in the corridors of the Palace and echoes the political extensions described by Baudrillard.

On the occasion of the space and the Angels of Stucco, Marina Papadaki and Panos Profitis present works that put nature and the body (imaginary - symbolic - real) in the epicenter. While the two artists have different artistic practices, there are common points such as the biological exploitation and instrumentation of man/nature, the human-machine relationship, reproduction, and copying in the work of art but also the industrialized society. The element of (re)production there is in Papadaki's paintings through the representation of a Ford-ism environment, but also in the sculptural installations of the Profitis where the forms are repeated like copies of a defective machine.

At the same time, there is an underlying sarcasm. The rails in Papadaki's paintings depict the frenzy of the "Modern Times" production line (Charlie Chaplin) and highlights the dipole power-knowledge in our rationally constructed reality, while the sculptures of the Prophet seem to have sprung from the same rational universe where Nature / human and machine boundaries are not clear.

 

“Natural equivalence” by Panos Profitis and Marina Papadaki, is presented in context to Back to Athens 8
International Arts Festival.