ARCAthens Virtual Residency #3

Food and home was our first week’s subject. One of the first links we established was the importance of food and its socio-cultural implications in our respective cultures. Many of these conversations were naturally linked with our origins, childhood, or our early years of adulthood. There are many important reasons this topic was inescapable: Alba’s emblematic long-term relational and portraiture project, The Supper Club, bringing together 50 contemporary artists of color from the United States to discuss their identity while sharing food. Michalakakos has herself ‘offered’ her body in the performative dinner Kiss me like you’ll never kiss me again (2015)  and through the use of furniture evoking the domestic environment and the complexity of family relationships [Le poulet dominical (revisited), 2009]. Moreover, biographical elements such as Alba’s Dominican roots and Michalakakos’ origin from Mani in the South of Greece and childhood memories from Alba’s mother working in the garment industry while Michalakakos’ dad was running an antique shop have shaped their practices.

But this rather safe topic of conversation became so much more when Alba posted her video ‘Eat’ (2003) where we watched a black man trying to eat a whole boiled egg looking like a head. This work is inspired by the Manifesto of Antropofagy by the modernist writer and poet Oswald de Andrade commenting on how Brazilian intellectuals could appropriate western culture for their own sake and ultimately dominate the “dominant” by ingesting the difference. According to Viveiros de Castro,  through the act of anthropophagy ‘what was eaten was the enemy’s relation to those who consumed him, in other words, his condition as enemy’.

Alba was extending the conversation that was initiated with the artwork mentioned before, Kiss me like you’ll never kiss me again where Michalakakos cast herself and with the help of the pastry chef Parliaros decorated it with koliva, a wheat-based dish we offer in Greece for the commemoration of the dead. The artist herself cut the belly’ almost like in a Caesarean section and offered the koliva kept inside. Her body was devoured by the art lovers in an act of symbolic cannibalism with religious and pictorial connotations of The Last Supper expressing the artists’ recurrent themes of life and death. And, of course, what happens in between. Love.

The body serves as an architecture for both Alba’s and Michalakakos’ practices. Architecture allows us to manifest new worlds. In the second week of the residency, Alba introduced the work  “Twins and Queens” (2005-2006) belonging to a series of photos where she combines sewing and photographs to make masks. She combines different elements from different races and cultures to create new bodies, bodies that exist ‘in between’ containing multitudes. As a response Michalakakos’ proposes hybrid bodies: between human and animal and intensifying an atmosphere of ambiguity [L’anatomie de la liberté (detail), 2020].

Their vision has no ambiguity though: they refer to worlds that are inclusive, multiple, transient with a continuum between all forms of life. The transition from the second week to the third where we examined myths and myth-making processes was so organic, flowing like a river as the work  Reef and Hold (Danu) emphasizes:  “Danu’s lack of a definitive mythos suggests she was an ancient goddess and her name belonged to any number of individuals, races or things dealing with water” mentioned Alba. 

Moreover, Alba has been working on doll sculptures since 2011. Their prepubic hybrid bodies are not identifying with one sex or race resisting to categorization and integrating elements from reality and fiction ( Jelani Golden Feather, 2018). Michalakakos builds on pre-existent and new myths such as Prometheus’ punishment (Guilt, 2017)  and the extremities of vultures [ Head over heels #2 (Narcissus), 2017]  such as beaks and claws to explore the feeling of guilt that is often associated with the experience of people identifying as women. Myths, after all, are ways humans have invented to cope with and overcome their struggles.

The residency came to end with the topic ‘liquid’ signifying the fluidity of experiences we have lived and shared. There is such a gentle and suggestive approach to fundamental socio-political and  biopolitical issues and existential questions by both of the artists. While they share strong approaches, for example Alba’s ‘acts of resistance’ against racial and cultural binaries and Michalakakos’ persistent labor on velvet working on women’s conditions and existentiality, they also leave so much space for reception, interpretation and reflection. As the feminist studies scholar Christine Downing said “there is space within sisterhood for likeness and difference, for the subtle differences that challenge and delight; there is space for disappointment-and surprise”.

For me an experience of sisterhood is an experience of being present, being whole while containing multitudes.

Eleni Riga