ARCAthens Virtual Residency June 2020
We are delighted to introduce our Inaugural ARCAthens Virtual Residency Fellows.
Blanka Amezkua is an artist, cultural promoter, educator, and project creator based in the South Bronx with exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Art Base; Brussels, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, San Diego Art Institute, and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, among others. Amezkua’s practice is greatly influenced and informed by folk art and popular culture, and in 2008 she began an artist-run project in her bedroom called the Bronx Blue Bedroom Project (BBBP). BBBP ran from 2008-2010. Between 2010-2016, she lived in Athens, Greece where she initiated FoKiaNou 24/7, now FokiaNou Art Space, in the center of the Hellenic capital. Blanka currently operates AAA3A(Alexander Avenue Apartment 3A) an alternative artist-run project which offers food, dialogue, workshops, and art in her living room. Mentions of her work and projects can be found in various notable publications including HYPERALLERGIC, The New York Times, ART NEWS, HuffPost Arts, The International Review of African American Art, and Time Out New York. www.blankaamezkua.com
Eirene Efstathiou is a visual artist living in Athens, Greece who works in a variety of different media from painting and printmaking to performance to small scale installations. Her practice investigates collective and archival memory, sentiment, affect and how these function in the public sphere. Efstathiou is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University, (Studio Art Diploma and BFA, 2003) where she studied painting and printmaking, and the Athens School of Fine Arts, (MFA 2010). She received a residency fellowship at Zea Mays Printmaking in Northampton, MA in 2017, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the Athens School of Fine Art. Efstathiou has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Her most recent solo exhibitions include: A Jagged Line Through Space, Eleni Koroneou Gallery Athens (2020); Regarding the Continuity of Disrupted Images, Irene Laub Gallery, Brussels Belgium, (2017); I Draw, I Learn Greece, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece (2016). Her most recent group exhibitions include: When the Present is History, DEPO, Istanbul, Turkey (2020); Anatomy of Political Melancholy, Athens Conservatory, Shwartz Foundation, Athens Greece (2019); Truth Is Always Something Else: A dialogue between two Collections, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2018); ANTIDORON. Works from the EMST Collection, documenta 14, Kassel, Germany (2017). Efstathiou’s work is represented in public and private collections in Europe and the United States. In 2009 she was the recipient of the DESTE Prize, DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece. She lives and works in Athens, Greece. www.eireneefstathiou.com
Instagram Visual Conversation
ARCAthens Virtual Residency #1 is the work of our first two AVR Fellows, Blanka Amezkua, the Bronx, New York, and Eirene Efstathiou, Athens, Greece. The Instagram conversation below took place from June 1-June 30, 2020.
Week 1: Location
Photos by #blankaamezkua #AAVirtualResidency Under interminable historic repression and abuse towards the black community, national protests took place this weekend in USofA… [read more] Images from Saturday May 30, 2020; Mott Haven, South Bronx. [/read]
Under the Pavement, a Mountain’, 2017-19 (detail) Lithograph and screen print on linen 81 x 54 cm. Referring to the May ’68 slogan ‘under the pavement a beach’. [read more] The view of Lykavittos hill from Tsimiski st. in Exarcheia, in the background a small piece of wilderness at the outskirts of Athens. #AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #whereweare [/read]
“STAND BY AND FOR BLACK PEOPLE!!!!” ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡ Black was one of the first colors used by artists in neolithic cave paintings. In the Roman Empire, it became the color of mourning, and over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches, and magic. [read more] According to surveys in Europe and North America, it is the color most commonly associated with mourning, the end, secrets, magic, power, violence, evil, and elegance. – Wikipedia
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Imprint study or the view from the middle of the street. (That’s were we’ll be). Here from the demo last Sept. One year after the murder of Zak Kostopoulos. [read more] Justice for all victims of police brutality, white supremacy, fascism, murderous bigoted hate, systemic racism and the list is too damn long. In solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
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La Lutxona (The fighter); Embroidery on fabric and crochet; 30x31in.; 2007. “Today, we look at Toni Morrison for guidance: ‘If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.’ [read more] The world is on fire, and we are here for all those in the streets, at work, and at home, fighting for our right to imagine and create a world in which Black lives truly matter.” The Laundromat Project, Bronx
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Where we are always has a history. Bleach, 2016, Paper Matrix Lithograph and Screen Print on Paper Mounted on Aluminum, 54×57.5 cm [read more] From the series Other Things Happen in July Besides Swimming
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Mis Chingonas (My Kick-ass); Canvas tote and embroidery thread; 13x17in; 2020 –Tote bag listing the names of female writers that make my life bearable. [read more] ”If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.”
– Nikki Giovanni
#aavirtualresidency #blankaamezkua
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A list of demonstration meeting points from July 1965, that although nearly illegible, are almost identical to those of July 2015, to those of today. Lists are useful, as are indexes and archives. [read more] These works are a meditation on the speculative and the desire for other words. From the series, ‘Other Things Happen in July Besides Swimming’. ‘Is there Life on Mars? 1 and 2’, 2016 Paper Matrix Lithograph and Screen Print on Paper Mounted on Aluminum, 45×45 cm #AAVirtualResidency
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“America’s Protests Won’t Stop Until Police Brutality Does. This country has failed to provide one of the most fundamental protections in the Constitution: the right to life.” [read more] NYT, June 1…As artist Eirene Efstathiou and me continue our visual dialogue, through this very timely virtual residency, whe hope the visual windows that we open, as we exchange/comment/suggest, reverberate within you too…
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Source material from ‘A Jagged Line through Space’ and a poster found along the way, because some things bear repeating (aka my favorite pandemic poster).
Curatorial Reflections Week 1: Location
As the first week of the first-ever ARCAthens Virtual Residency (AVR) closes, and we prepare for Week 2, the theme changes from Location to #Proximity. [read more] ARCAthens has invited #BlankaAmezkua (#TheBronx) and #EireneEfstathiou (#Athens) to an #InstagramTakeover, where these two wonderful artists engage in a visual conversation.
Although ARCAthens had aspirations of a more robust digital platform from its inception, the timing of the AVR’s birth was directly inspired as a response to the #Covid19 #Pandemic. Little did we, nor our #Fellows, ever imagine our first week would close on the 10th day of historic demonstrations inspired and captivated by tragedy and the nation’s disgust, exasperation, and readiness to push the country further away from the death-grip of institutional racism.
Predictably, many of the AVR Fellows’ posts have been journalistic. With the theme of “Location” -Blanka’s base is in The Bronx, Eirene’s in Athens- both Fellows are in locations experiencing public demonstrations. This time, both in Covid and protests, The Bronx is #epicentric.
Mixing original, sometimes older works with current photos is revealing a poetry in this project that transcends documentation and begins a peak at deeper, long-identified issues of research and concern for both these artists.
The dots are connecting in an interesting, multi-layered visual poem, and I excitedly anticipate Week 2.
I’ll chime in again at the end of Week 2. Meanwhile, please share your thoughts with us here, and stay healthy, stay focused, and support the arts, for a vision with clarity and hope.
Yours,
Aristides Logothetis
#AAVirtualResidency
#blankaamezkua
#eireneefstathiou
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Week 2: Proximity
New York City Begins Reopening After 3 Months of Outbreak and Hardship…As many as 400,000 people may return to work on Monday in a city still recovering from the pandemic and roiled by protests.” [read more]NYT, June 7, 2020. As we begin to open the city, I wonder, how many people will be reluctant to touch or approach others? I contemplate, on how much this pandemic + our enclosure has affected the way we feel about our skin and that of humankind…
Image: KARNALITAS (Sisters); Embroidery on cotton fabric, 36 x 36 in., 2005 / ARCAthens has invited
and
to an #InstagramTakeover, where these two wonderful artists engage in a visual conversation in June. For week 2, the theme changes from Location to Proximity. Join us!
#AAVirtualresidency #proximity #southbronx
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“If you experience the love, you have to touch the spirit not the body.” ~ Rumi / “On Tuesday morning, 15 days after that anguished cry, Mr. Floyd will be laid to rest beside his ‘Mama, his mama’ [read more] ” NYT June 9, 2020…RIP George Floyd / #AAVirtualresidency #blankaamezkua #proximity #southbronx #hands #touch #love
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During the lockdown I was nostalgic for crowds. Now that lockdown has been lifted, I wonder, how close can you come to another person from 2 meters distance? [read more]
Here bodies close to each other, at a concert, in protest and a festival, Details from the works: ‘Map Trace 1’, ink on found map 2016, ‘We Are Not (Just) An image on T.V.’, Oil on panel 2013, and ‘Ρετάλια 88’, lithograph/ARCAthens has invited
and
to an #InstagramTakeover, where these two wonderful artists engage in a visual conversation in June. For week 2, the theme changes from Location to Proximity. Join us!
#AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #Proximity
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Some years back I began a series of photographs, where I placed my body inside corners, in this exact posture, as a way to occupy space and fuse my body with the architecture. [read more]I later began placing my body, exercising the same posture, proximate to different interesting artworks I found/find in museums or galleries. This image was taken in Chelsea, New York City in 2015.
#AAVirtualresidency #blankaamezkua #proximity #chelsea #red #painting #newyork #southbronx #motthaven
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A Jagged Line Through Space, the making of, or hot August days, in which various existences shed their skins. How close do we come to other beings? [read more] “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” Donna Haraway from Staying With Trouble (really anything from this book)
#AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #proximity
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The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. A republican businessman and reality television act was elected. [read more] On Wednesday morning, November 9 I received a call from my niece Sofia, she lives in California, announcing her discontent with the results. She was 19 yrs old at the time. I couldn’t stay up for the results that night, it was nerve wrecking. Upon hearing her voice and learning the dreadful news the next morning, I rushed to Central Park. My body implored for the solace I find when I’m in proximity to nature. And now, given the months we’ve experienced in lockdown and the last two weeks that as a nation we have collectively voiced our urgent discontent with police brutality and daily ongoing racial injustices committed towards our black communities; again my body begged to find comfort in nature. Not as an escape, but rather as a moment to deepen and sincerely ask how we can assure there will be equality/equity all over the board, in every social structure that exists and shapes who we are as a society. 2020 has revealed much to reflect upon and demands that we change and abandon our wicked ways.
#AAVirtualResidency #blankaamezkua #proximity #nature #trees #life #vida #arboles
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From around 2013 until the present I have done a series of actions in public space that are neither exactly performances nor activism, but awkwardly and intentionally situated somewhere in between. [read more]For these, I adopt the persona of a partisan or revolutionary from another era. In one such action in 2014 called ‘For All the Reasons in the World’, I walked down a central commercial street in Boston, chanting a litany of slogans collected from demonstrations, from friends and from memory. Slogans in Greek tend to rhyme, and have a call and response character. Unsurprisingly no one responded. How close can we come to the social justice struggles and uprisings of another country? In this work, I thought about how we simultaneously understand with clarity the demands for justice from elsewhere while at the same time the cultural particulars of each struggle remain specific and oblique, in many ways a different language. I believe that solidarity is in part born out of this double understanding.
#AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #proximity
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CORNERS AND FORM. An ongoing series of photographs created through my interest in the physicality and the importance of corners in space (internal and external) [read more]with the presence/absence of other forms/or my body. In these images, I am interested in how my body fuses with the proximate constructions and immediately propels it into a more vulnerable state. I initiated this series in 2014 in Athens. Photos were taken in: 1. Exarcheia, 2.Ioannina, 3 Nafplio and 4. Amari/Crete. #AAVirtualResidency #blankaamezkua #proximity #exarcheia #ioannina #nafplio #crete
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I have never lived in a landlocked place, yet although I have always lived in close proximity to the sea or the ocean, encountering it in an urban setting is always both a surprise and a relief. [read more]These photographs are from a series of works from 2010, ‘Iera Odos Revisited’ that involved a lot of psychogeography wandering along a historic route from Athens to Eleusis.
#AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #Proximity
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Excerpts from the work ‘Artifacts (for) the Revolution’ 2014. How close do we come to the world as we wish it to be? How close is what we imagine to our everyday practices? Where is it embedded but latent in everyday objects? [read more] As Hypatia Vourloumis writes in ‘Ten Theses on Touch’ in thesis 3 on the secret love letters written on a popular Greek anarchist site, “The letters reveal the commons, language, landscapes, and sociality of anarchist spaces and practices entwined with yearnings galvanized by and galvanizing a revolutionary ideal. Desire to touch and be touched by the amorous other is always also the desire to touch another world.”
#AAVirtualResidency #eireneefstathiou #Proximity
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Curatorial Reflections Week 2: Proximity
With Week 2’s theme, #Proximity, #BlankaAmezkua (#TheBronx) and #EireneEfstathiou (#Athens) ask us several questions: • How close do we come to the world as we wish it to be? • [read more] How close can we come to the social justice struggles and uprisings of another country? • How close do we come to other beings? • How many people will be reluctant to touch or approach others?
The #AVR Fellows’ images this week are records of their artworks, whether objects or performances, and they seem to weave here an extempore chronicle of conceptual, narrative, as well as formal relationships: corners, cones, and lines, leading from one image into the next, as the touch of a hand passes on the baton of wonder.
Together with the Fellows, we ponder #Proximity through physicality, presence/absence, and desire –“Desire to touch and be touched by the amorous other is always also the desire to touch another world.”
Yours, Aristides Logothetis #AAVirtualResidency #blankaamezkua #eireneefstathiou
Week 3: Movement
The Movement of Bodies ♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆
He fractured white light into seven colours, reckoned the distance to the moon, wrote laws for the movement of bodies: no mystery to him, until now. [read more] Planets in their orbit, the sea’s tides, his eyes locked to the lit face of the young mathematician. A body at rest remains so unless some force act on it. So many years, no joy but in numbers, no troubling of the flesh. The pink tongue-tip idly licking a finger constricts his heart. His edges flicker, scintillate, like a heat-haze. A hand brushes his cheek
and it colours: to each action an equal and opposite reaction. He tries to think straight: the moon. I worked out its mass. Moonlight, kissing in moonlight. The movement of bodies. The moon draws the tides. A knife in my eye. Once, probing for truth, he nearly blinded himself. This time he will flinch from the lacerating light. Legend will say he died a virgin, and never saw the sea. ♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆
Poem from Sheenagh Pugh’s 2005 collection, The Movement of Bodies /Photos of me playing with my shadow while fascinated by the forms created by very slight variations of my posture and movements in Morelos, Mexico 2017. Posted by
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Movement of bodies and of movements in Exarcheia square has not stopped for as long as I remember. [read more] Photographs from the public action ‘When the Revolution Comes’ from 2014. Referring to a Greek anti-dictatorship resistance tactic of recorded declarations that self destructed via a small bomb, the cassette player plays a declaration/re-make in Greek of the Last Poets song of the same title, and in the persona of the revolutionary I destroy the cassette player. The dogs of Exarcheia square are the most enthusiastic onlookers. Post by Eirene Efstathiou.
SWING FORWARD WHILE SWAYING BACK
In 2018 I was invited to create an installation for a show by cultural worker and curator Amanda McDonald Crowley [read more] I decided to pay tribute to 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were forcibly moved, taken then disappeared in the State of Guerrero, Mexico on September 26, 2014.¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! My contribution was an onsite mixed media installation with 43 moving and floating painted figures/silhouettes; and a list of the names of 43 disappeared students stenciled on paper . We also invited Don Antonio Tizapa, the father of one of the missing students who lives in New York, to come and speak with the students of Hostos Community College about this tragic event; October 3 to December 5, 2018 at Longwood Art Gallery in the Bronx. Post by Blanka Amezkua
#amandamcdc
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A sudden camera movement indicates the passage of time, or an abrupt break from the way we usually experience time. [read more] Details from works in the series ‘Other Things Happen in December Besides Christmas’ 2016. These paintings are from stills taken from an anonymous video uploaded to the internet on the night of December 6th 2008 in Athens. What counts as history? What counts as a historical document? Oil on screen print on paper mounted on aluminum. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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《Movement Song》
By Audre Lorde ♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆♡
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck moving away from me beyond anger or failure your face [read more] in the evening schools of longing through mornings of wish and ripen we were always saying goodbye in the blood in the bone over coffee before dashing for elevators going in opposite directions without goodbyes.
Do not remember me as a bridge nor a roof as the maker of legends nor as a trap door to that world where black and white clericals hang on the edge of beauty in five o’clock elevators twitching their shoulders to avoid other flesh and now there is someone to speak for them moving away from me into tomorrows morning of wish and ripen your goodbye is a promise of lightning in the last angels hand unwelcome and warning the sands have run out against us we were rewarded by journeys away from each other into desire into mornings alone where excuse and endurance mingle conceiving decision. Do not remember me as disaster nor as the keeper of secrets I am a fellow rider in the cattle cars watching you move slowly out of my bed saying we cannot waste time only ourselves. ♡☆♡☆♡☆♡☆ Peekaboo; Black and white photocopy, glitter, and glue; 8.5 x 11 in; 2014. Post by Blanka Amezkua
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Works from the series ‘A Jagged Line through Space’ or excerpts from a natural history of Exarcheia home of so many movements. [read more] I moved, traversed and wandered in this space following psychogeographic maps drawn by others, pausing at thresholds, landmarks, points of interest (and quotidian) and unofficial monuments. Audre Lorde is right, the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. New tools are necessary, new maps. ‘A Jagged Line Through Space’, 2019 Etching and mezzotint on paper 20 x 25 cm, and ‘Razzle Dazzle K’., 2019
Etching, lithograph, Chine-collé and guache on paper 34 x 24 cm Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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Nopal (from the Nahuatl word nohpalli for the pads of the plant) There are approximately one hundred and fourteen known species endemic to Mexico… [read more] Nopales are generally sold fresh in Mexico, cleaned of spines, and sliced to the customer’s desire on the spot. Like most true cactus species, prickly pears are native only to the Americas. Through human actions, they have since been moved to many other areas of the world. Prickly pears (mostly Opuntia stricta) were originally imported into Europe during the 1500s. In Greece, it grows in such places as the Peloponnese region, Ionian Islands, or Crete, and its figs are known as frangosyka (Frankish, i.e. Western European, figs) or pavlosyka (Paul’s figs), depending on the region. Source: Wikipedia /
Nopal silhouette; Sliced nopal; Variable dimensions; 2014 —– Post by Blanka Amezkua
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Some images of furniture of the movement, or the dynamic evolving life of objects, (and their outcome), or what if we think about reification as and expanded dialectic with vectors moving every which way? [read more] A dumpster is a bland utilitarian thing until it becomes a flaming barricade; a trace of a burnt dumpster on the street; architecture as a stage set; gesture as a choreography. Details of paintings and drawings from the series ‘Memories of the Present’ 2013-15. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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VANISHING WHILE MOVING ——-On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were forcibly abducted and then disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. [read more] They were allegedly taken into custody by local police officers from Cocula and Iguala, in collusion with organized crime. According to official reports, the students annually commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre; police attempted to intercept several of the buses by using roadblocks and firing weapons. Details remain unclear on what happened during and after the roadblock. It’s been almost 6 years since their disappearance. In 2015, 43 pieces were created , during 43 consecutive days, in private and public locations, to create awareness and clamor for justice; each piece contains the name of one student. Materials used for each were nails, string, and silhouettes of my body.The parents continue searching for their sons while demanding truth and justice. The complete 43 for them/43 para ellos project can be found here: https://43forthem.tumblr.com/
Post by Blanka Amezkua
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People move for all sorts of reasons, and the politics in and behind movement has many layers and dimensions. [read more] Here a capsized raft in the north eastern Aegean Sea from July 2015 floating above swimmers from the Pan Balkan Games (a sporting event) from July 1965. This work ‘Bank Holiday 1’ 2016, Paper Matrix Lithograph and Screen Print on Paper Mounted on Aluminum, 55×57 cm, from the series ‘Other things Happen in July Besides Swimming’. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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Curatorial Reflections Week 3: Movement
For Week 3, the theme chosen by the #AVR Fellows was #Movement. #BlankaAmezkua (#TheBronx) and #EireneEfstathiou (#Athens) abducted us, sailed us, and transported us to places of their past, places that also seem like places in our present. [read more] We began the week with the movement of bodies and shifting shapes, budging against shifting social spaces, which then pushed us on to movement’s anticipated end: absence –absence of bodies and absence of spaces.
Again we are asked questions to ponder: -What counts as history? -What counts as a historical document? -Can the records of movements through a space made for moving bodies remind us of our shifting social constructs and our shifting social contracts? -Can the forms of paper shaped mandorlas, laid out as a mandala, move us to imagine how violence can erase human beings, disappear their, and our, humanity? -Can a cactus, delicately transformed into the shape of a body remind us of the journeys between worlds, old and new?
Can a capsized raft in the north eastern Aegean Sea transport us to imagine journeys through space, through fear, through hope and desperation? -Can we be moved ourselves?
Yours,
Aristides Logothetis
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Week 4: #MagicOrTheTimeIsNow
It’s time for some looting, y’all. ♡☆♡☆♡☆♡ Nothing new under the sun. For everything there is a season. And this is the snatching season. You know that you would not be the first to take everything you can get in the midst of a crisis. [read more] (Yes, that dude really was running down the street with a cheesecake in Seattle.) Start Looting as if Your Life Depended on It: A Call To Action By Gail Drakes (@gaildrakes) / Pipecleaner and me; Photo series; 2016. Post by Blanka Amezkua
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The weather is consistent: hot. Μainstream political promises for tomorrow are rhetorically as predictable as the weather, and as practically limited as a confined space. [read more] What can happen as if by magic, between two tomorrows? So many desires invisible to those in power compel and propel folks out into the street. To quote one of my favorite Greek insurrectionary poster: discipline is over, life is magical. (πειθαρχία τέλος ζωή μαγική) (and as a topical and regional bonus: the fountain of Omonoia square in its previous incarnation). This work from the series ‘Other things Happen in July Besides Swimming’: ‘Tomorrow 1’, 2016 Paper Matrix Lithograph and Screen Print on Paper Mounted on Aluminum, 55×71 cm. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou. #eireneefstathiou
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What passes for structural changes in the org? Insist on that. Cuomo said a pandemic was the perfect time to reconsider the ENTIRE CONCEPT of public education! [read more] Consider the power and infinite positive potential of that comment if you had ANY reason to believe that he had the best interest of kids from marginalized communities at heart! That can be you, right now. Make some big moves on the side of justice and freedom. From, “Start Looting as if Your Life Depended on It: A Call To Action,” By Gail Drakes (@gaildrakes)/ (link here) —— Photos of: Where attention goes, energy flows; Mixed Media, silk flowers and pins, variable dimension, 2019; included in the show MATERIAL WITH MEANING at Bronx River Art Center. Post by Blanka Amezkua
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Two works from the ‘A Jagged Line through Space’ series. ‘Flora over Asklipiou’ and ‘Dark Star’. The magic of things reflected in the sky, the magic of the quotidian. [read more] Urban botany, star gazing by day and in traffic, a moment, just one, and then another outside of time.
Both works, lithograph and screen print on linen, 2017-19. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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Get in. Get out. Get it over with. This burden shouldn’t fall to you, yet here we are. You have spent so much time doing this work, and they have spent so much time ignoring the pain — even if they recoil in shock at the suggestion. [read more] You need to get back to healing, back to figuring out how to raise free Black children in a nation that doesn’t deserve them, back to finding ways to connect with others who can support you right now, finding ways to hold on to hope despite the concerted efforts to deny it to you. But now is the time. Rise and Shine. Time for ONE MORE PUSH, fam… until the next push.
From, “Start Looting as if Your Life Depended on It: A Call To Action,”
By Gail Drakes (@gaildrakes)
(link here) —— Kalamata findings/ nails/ dead cricket; Black and white photographs; variable dimensions; 2016. An image from this series was included in THE BORDER CROSSED ME at Bronx Art Space, South Bronx in 2016. Post by Blanka Amezkua
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Details from the series ‘How Things Are Made’. Frankenstein newspaper collages, terraced Cycladic landscapes, and loom schematics chronicle the labor of making, of consent and resistance, of the mundane and the exceptional. [read more] From 2017, lithograph and screen print on paper mounted on aluminum. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
Depending on where or when or how it goes down, they might even come to you looking to cover their behinds. [read more] They already plan to tell people about the “listening session” they had and how they “consulted with their staff of color” on how to proceed. This could happen at any time, so don’t get ready, STAY READY. And when the time comes, feel no shame, be opportunistic, stand in your finally — if temporarily — acknowledged power. . .and start looting. Snatch as much as you can, demand better for Black people in your organization. Demand the kind of “better for Black people” that fuels #BlackLivesMatter, the kind of better that makes life better for ALL OF US, all marginalized communities (and, SURPRISE! – better for all the people for whom these systems were built). Bend the arc. Do it for the culture.
Start Looting as if Your Life Depended on It: A Call To Action
By Gail Drakes (@gaildrakes) (link here) —— Disco dreams; Color photographs; Variable dimensions; 2016. A series of photographs taken in random locations using a portable pipe cleaner soft sculpture as the main protagonist in the overall composition. Post by Blanka Amezkua
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Drawings from the archival work ‘Fortification Typology – an Overview’ (2014). The drawings are from a group of photographs I found at the Greek Military’s historical archives. [read more] The photos, taken by the National Army are of captured Democratic Army of Greece fortifications from the civil war (1946-49). I was struck by the fact that as a set they read as an architectural typology, as if the photographer could have been photographing Cycladic farmhouses instead. I remember at the time of my research, the civilian archivist (there were also soldier archivists) asked me why I was doing research into this period of Greek history, “everyone already knows what happened then”, he said. Yes, I answered, but no one ever talks about it. He grudgingly agreed that this was the case. Strictly speaking this wasn’t true at the time, as deep in our so-called crisis (the last one the financial one) right-wing politicians frequently invoked the civil war as an argument against any challenges to their ruinous status quo. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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2020 NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS:
1. return to the basics: the lungs, they are for breathing. the heart, it is for forgiving.
2. remain porous through the pain. a broken heart is an invitation: there is space here, inside. [read more]
3. your life is your greatest romance. so, speak roses. make every conversation a ceremony.
4. amidst diffused despair, harvest hope. cultivate idealism. wear them like heirlooms.
5. become indelible. linger in everything you touch.
6. permanence is unambitious. things don’t die, they go somewhere else.
7. “natural” & “reality” are political aesthetics. birth new worlds. every pattern can be unwoven.
8. language is bewitching, but do not mistake talking about the thing as doing the thing.
9. comparison is creativity’s curse. genius is the ability to orbit elsewhere, imagine otherwise.
10. even trash is teeming with life. surrender to your insignificance & find your magic there.
11. empathy is a daily baptism, but do not confuse bartering your dignity as compromise. ——-******** / Alok Vaid-Menon
ALOK is an internationally acclaimed gender fluid writer, performance artist, and public speaker based in New York City. /photo of the floral installation, “Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes”; Mixed media; silk flowers, thumb tacks; Variable dimensions (72 x 72 in roughly); 2020. Part of
EXODUS III: : MEXICO IN NEW YORK – FROM OROZCO TO OROZCO at WhiteBox, NYC
May 5 – June 12, 2020. Post by Blanka Amezkua
#alokvaidmenon [/read]
Two views of a road that leads to the sea. If, as I speculate, Exarcheia is an island, then undoubtedly the Polytechnio is its chora and its southern coast. Two blurred and fleeting views of its historic front entrance gate (and a detail). [read more] The works: ‘Gate 1 and 2’, 2017-19, lithograph and screen print on linen, diptych each panel 81×54 cm. Post by, Eirene Efstathiou.
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Curatorial Reflections Week 4: #MagicOrTheTimeIsNow
#BlankaAmezkua(#TheBronx) and #EireneEfstathiou (#Athens) complete their Virtual Residency with ARCAthens #AVR during a moment of unprecedented uncertainty. [read more] This moment, the #SummerOf2020, is a moment of “seeming” oppositions, and the Fellows explore these distressing contradictions through contextualizing the images of their artwork with their own text as well as excerpts from thinkers they are inspired by.
The Fellows have been asking us questions throughout the AVR, just as we are desperate for answers. We all have questions, now more than ever, about the pandemic, about the state of our communities, our nation, our world, our planet, our humanity. I’ve often found myself asking, “Can someone please tell us the truth?” Alas, answers, and truth are always elusive, and, as we search now, we seem to be in a moment of haze, confusion, and lack of clarity. Or, are we? Is tomorrow really “unknown” now any more than ever, or is our perceptive facility under a necessary reconstruction? Blanka reminds us the words of #AlokVaid-Menon: “permanence is unambitious. things don’t die, they go somewhere else,” and “’natural’ & ‘reality’ are political aesthetics. birth new worlds. every pattern can be unwoven.” Maybe it’s not haze or confusion we are experiencing, but the pain of truth, unmasked, forced on us to contend with?
Eirene asks, “What can happen as if by magic, between two tomorrows?” I was pleasantly surprised to see the Fellows choose this final week’s theme, #MagicOrTheTimeIsNow because, as we battle viruses –physiological or perceptual- artists (and all of us, really) need to continue asserting and embracing the unknown: that which we may not yet be ready to visualize, or even comprehend, through our corrupted rational or political tropes, and allow for a courage, or audacity, to overtake us for that which comes, however new, together, with light.
Yours,
Aristides Logothetis
#eireneefstathiou [/read]
#Congratulations to Blanka Amezkua on the completion of the first ARCAthens Virtual Residency! [read more] Through this Instagram Takeover, her visual conversation with Eirene Efstathiou guided us through an invigorating, poetic journey during these grueling days, challenging us and inspiring us!
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#Congratulations to Eirene Efstathiou on the completion of the first ARCAthens Virtual Residency. [read more] Through this Instagram Takeover, her visual conversation with Blanka Amezkua guided us through an invigorating, poetic journey during these grueling days, challenging us and inspiring us!
#AVR1 [/read]