The exhibition Tactile Ghost, curated by Elina Axioti, focuses on the boundaries of touch as the world emerges from the recent pandemic: “The world of surfaces and the air we breathe should function as supports for life itself,” says philosopher Judith Butler. “Under pandemic conditions we come to worry about the infectious consequences of touch and breath, proximity, loud shouts of joy, dancing too closely, feeling the heat of someone else’s breathing.”[1] How, then, can we imagine new descriptions of alternative social relations and new representations of the material world on an island like Antiparos after a succession of mandatory quarantines?

With new commissions from AMA House, Eva Papamargariti and Marios Stamatis are called upon to explore the particular confinement of touching and the boundaries of material coexistence. Understanding social distancing as a situation of voluntary confinement calls for a collective response to a threat. This response is accompanied by necessary choreographies and virtual escapes parallel to the tactile world we knew. A tactile ghost and a lost materiality hover over the world, asking us to tell the story of touch. The spaces created by this research are potentially utopian and yet trite as we familiarize ourselves with so many lost elements of everyday life.

The video installation And then, they grew out limbs that could not be tamed by Eva Papamargariti and Marios Stamatis’s INSTAR performance will be shown at the exhibition. A number of sculptures related to the two works will be presented by appointment.

[1] Judith Butler, Losing touch: Fragments on the Inhabitable World, lecture delivered at the European Graduate School, September 3, 2020. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/judithbutler [Accessed July 24, 2021].