Breathe me...

.Unfinished Sympathy

When I was little, I was minor. Lying in bed at night, I was looking at pictures, condensing the universe to the size of my room. Utterly alone, I was drifting among planets, the ceiling was opening up, saints were talking to me, corpses were playing hide and seek in the dark and in silence’s great awe I was hoping for just one thing: someone to share the magic and the oddities of what I was experiencing, confess to the world what was inspiring and what was frightening me. Was it a display? Loneliness? An exorcism? I never figured out. I just knew that if I wasn’t to talk, I would choke. And I still feel like choking up, unless I grab a camera or a pen. Then, my blood’s lap dies out and all things are revealed.

Nowadays I am not in my room anymore. And I grew up. With me dreams grew up, words and pictures multiplied. If those who say “Artists create in order to feel loved” are true, then it is not me who grew up, but my need to be loved. Eyes never change colour. Only their way of looking at things changes with time. It was then that I figured out I couldn’t keep cheating on myself. So, I hit the road. And I got lost. And the more I was getting lost the more I was finding me. So, I kept losing my way while repeating, ‘Unwind my heart. Unknown places we’ll reach, through roads yet obscure’. And some friends helped me fit the dreams in suitcases, because whenever I was packing alone, my suitcases were turning out overweight and I couldn’t travel.

And so I came to London to find myself, but in ten million people where do you start? Images followed me while I kept growing up. With me, I took a few photographs of people close to me and plenty of somebody for whom I once had lost my sleep for, proof that pictures exist not only to be reminiscent of times and places, but also to help us forget. And I needed that memo of amnesia, an artifact that I once loved and almost died for someone unworthy. Being here, I found reasons to save pictures once again. Brave new pictures, brave different pictures and a sag in my heart (from happiness?) made room for new lovers, new friends and brand new roads as well. But in every fairytale, a twist exists and even if mine was yet to be revealed, I had to create one. I am an artist after all!

Fast forward to last May when I went back to Greece for 4 months, took photographs with a small part of many random grey buildings and a large part of a certain clear blue sky and realized simultaneously that no matter how far I was running, every image was to be added in my diminishing treasures: my love stories, my thirty years, the place I grew up and a couple of people I once loved, but were dead by now. Everything I ever wanted to possess. An archive engraved into my DNA that repeatedly projects all of my life’s stories, my ever-changing body and my grandmother’s smile, which I slowly begin to forget.

Almost like love letters (where words matter, while ink and paper are of no importance), in photographs bodies and smiles mean nothing at all. People in them make the news. Because as a rule, pictures lie. Yes, my grandmother was always smiling in my birthdays next to me. What of it? Does that mean she was happy without her dead husband and her buried son? And how happy could my cousin be in that picture of her at the school yard, when two months later she would turn her back to the world and become a nun? But somehow like being in the dark for quite a while until you suddenly begin to see, photographs’ many lies always lead you to a certain truth: memory fades, but a picture will always linger, a reminder of the huge space my grandmother and my cousin still occupy in me. A piece of paper beauty, forever mine to keep.

Unfortunately, my kind of beauty was never easy. It is as Baudelaire would say, “Something blazing and unhappy, a bit vague and mysterious, open to various interpretations and sorrow – to an extent that makes you wonder if beauty without sadness can actually exist”. This is why whenever I face beauty, I bleed.

This explains why I kept aching, as I was photographing her.

I am talking (but words fail me) about my lady in gold, the woman I met by chance in early autumn at the Acropolis. Weather was far from raining that night but in my soaking heart she managed, with her unbearable and almost deathly beauty, to leave a mess. Her feral strangeness beamed under a dim spotlight as her torn, gold bloodied uniform and veiled face gained an extra layer of twinkle. It felt as if I had shed several layers of skin and I was walking around her like an open wound. In front of something so authentic and unique, you can’t do much but record it. A revelation of the highest kind. Like Japanese poets captivate the spirit of summer within three lines, she briefly summarized the loneliness, the uniqueness and the nostalgia of all the memories I have forever lost and which my futile efforts cannot capture in any other form or shape. Furthermore, she summarized me. More than any photograph of mine ever did. Even now, in absentia, her foreboding chill still creeps into my bones and even in silence, she’s deafening; the sound of a body being thrown out of a window: entirely without hope, of this world, or the next, or the previous one. I mumbled ‘Thank you’, she nodded approval and we parted.

Sometimes photography is useless, I thought later on. Instead of taking pictures, you should always tell the ones you love how you feel, in case you never see them again.

.Silent Alarm

So here we are. Almost there. Escaping the bandwagon effect, oiling joints (even those we never thought that existed), rummaging through fears, putting the puzzle together. Together we cope. Nelda, Milda, Kieran, Ryan and me. From Tuesday the 12th until Sunday, 17th of May, the puzzle will be hanging in mid-air. Make sure you will catch a piece.

(To reprise the atmosphere of Chlamydiart at its very start, what follows is the thesis of our group. Excuse me if it looks a bit sugary, but I wrote it in the midst of an all nighter, almost within a fever dream, as I was trying to join the dots. Our dots as a group. Hopefully, it will line you up with our vision too.)

Chlamydia is a common sexually transmitted infection caused by the Chlamydia trachomatis bacterium, an obligate intracellular parasite of eukaryotic cells only found in humans and it is a major infectious cause of human genitalia and eye disease (Chlamydia Conjunctivitis)

CHLAMYDIART
(Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Disease)

A THESIS

Art was always considered an elitistic realm of the few, made by the few, so, inevitably, addressed to the few as well. But isn’t Art (the need to ask questions, keep evolving and generally unveil, underline or tweak reality) similar to Life’s fundamental goals? Wondering about the relation between Life & Art is like questioning life’s relevance to living.

Colliding Chlamydia with Art, we created a juxtaposition addressed as Chlamydiart, wanting not only to pinpoint Art’s infectiousness, but also spread it to the public consciousness like a disease for the eyes (and maybe the genitals!). Then why Chlamydiart instead of Glaucomart or Catarart (which also sound interesting)?

The answer is simple. In real Art –or at least the eidos we are interested in as a team, the artist works as a thoroughfare to his/her mind and his/her soul. It is cathartic. And like all things cathartic, it feels as if you just shed several layers of skin and you are left walking around naked, perhaps still in questioning and wounded for sure. However, this wound, this pain heightens you to the next level.

Easy doesn’t make you grow. Easy doesn’t make you think; and with getting ourselves through a highly demanding second year, we, as Chlamydiartists, got infected from ‘messing around’ with Art, but we are not willing to get cured any time soon. Instead, we decided to exhibit our disease and showcase our will to leave pure shores behind, in case we might find an ocean.


Humbly,
CHLAMYDIART

Fragilidad

You move in haze within my headspace. Slow down. Hold still. Someone is circling a little lower than the angels. Blissful I am (even though...)

Roots grow deeper; in ways we can't conceive. From beneath the ground you stare at me, daring me to blink. Blissful I am (even though...)

Calm down. Be still. We've got plenty of time to kill. Take me in, under your skin and bury me deep in love. Blissful I am (even though...)

Preoccupied, like a moth with the light, I came to your party dressed as a shadow. No one imperils, love evades. Yet, blissful I am (even though you're gone).

{All work and no joy makes Jack a dull boy}

Outside,looking in

.Achieved in the valley of dolls

This is the second version of the third, minor, exercise we had after the one with the picture we would take with us in a prison cell, had we been imprisoned, and the one we had to pair the same image with 5 different texts.

It is safe to state that this one was tantalising in the making, even if it shouldn't be. It was my fault. Throughout this second year in University it feels as if I am making easy things difficult. How and when I aquired this queer tendency to masochism, is something that escapes my mind though. In the first edit of it, I had included 3 portraits that all three worked perfectly in my opinion (in a attept to stay positive within my melancholia?), even if the guidelines of the exersise were sharply accurate. Bring:

• A successful portrait I have taken
• A successful portrait taken by someone else
• A portrait I consider unsucessful (that either I or someone else has taken)

Therefore, it felt suitable to re-edit it in parts. The only image which survived this revision is the one with John and Yoko taken by Annie Leibovitz on the 8th of December, 1980. That same evening when Lennon, on his way home from the recording studio, was shot and killed by a deranged fan. This photo was set out to become the cover of Rolling Stone's commemorative issue and John Lennon's last photograph ever."We were feeling comfortable because it was Annie whom we respected and trusted", says Ono for the picture. This is the one reason for choosing this image (the other one is that it exeplifies the state-of-the-art ways in Leibovitz's practice): in my mind, therefore in my own work, a good picture occurs not only of the mathematics behind the shooting (what camera you use, what kind of flash, et al.), but mostly of your relation with the subject. It is not about how you take a picture, but what you actually put in it. And this image occured mostly from the qualities arised from the intimacy formed by the relationship of Leibovitz with John & Yoko.

Talking about intimacy, this is the reason I have chosen the first image as well. It is a portrait of my niece taken while she was playing at my house's garden. I used to babysit her whenever I was in Greece and no matter how many pictures I ever take of her, she always begs for one more! Out of the hundred portraits I have taken of her, this might not be my favourite one, but it still suprises me due to her stunning assurance, especially for a then 3-year-old child.

And that is exactly what repels me in the following image: the lack of assurance.

Instead, it is a Kingdom of boredom, which justifies all the cliches of photographs taken for promotional reasons. Oasis in this portait, taken by Nick Wilson, are a bunch of guys that their ages added together come close to 200 years. Yet, they can't reach the craftiness of a little girl.

Impossible forests

'Freedom is the possibility of isolation.

You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory of curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude.If you can't leave alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you are not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you are forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own and it follows.

Tired, I close the shutters of my windows, I exlude the world, and I have a few moments of freedom. Tomorrow I'll go back to being a slave, but right now-alone, needing no one, and worried only that some voice or presence might disturb me-I have my little freedom, my moment of exelsis.

Leaning back in my chair, I forget the life that oppresses me. Nothing pains me besides having felt pain.'
Fernando Pessoa,somewhere in Lisbon, sometime around 1931.

An extract from 'The Book of Disquiet'-world's strangest photograph made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes.

October 13 was the 287th day of 2008. Until the 8th of December, 56 days were left to test my sanity & stability. And you bet they did as I was struggling to set up a low key version of my internet site for the Digital elective.

The inspiration pyre was set alight by various elements: Cure's classic 'A Forest'(Come closer and see/See into the trees/Find the girl/While you can), Nine Inch Nail's paean 'Hurt'(I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel), William Whalton's novel 'Birdy', underground comic books, Yoko Ono, 'The Head'(Eric Fogel's early nineties cartoon series for MTV)...The list is endless. But the main spark lever was my need of a sanctuary and the need to bring forth the undying human quest of freedom. Then, Pablo Picasso ('Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up') and Fernando Pessoa ('We are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philoshophies') collided in me and Desde Adentro ('Look Inside') was born.

In practice, not only forests proved impossible though. Everything was! Or at least seemed so in the beginning, as I was trying desperately to squeeze my infantile Flash skills into my vision. And as much as I hate compromises, under deadline pressure I had eventually to give in to some. So, the trees morphing into a girl's hair of my original (quite ambitious) storyboard, evolved into trees morphing in an endless loop. The menu page got twisted as well, where key elements, as the Bansky inspired girl, were only kept. In the end, my mind came round to the idea that while a project comes into fruition, some changes will always be inevitable. Moreover, the whole experience ripened into a quite enjoyable one, mainly for one reason: it allowed me the joy of being kept suprised. Because I would never, deliberately, throw myself in doing anything like that. Or, as K.P.Kavafis would say,'Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey/Without her you wouldn't have set out.'

On December 8 1854, Pope Pius IX pronounced the Immaculate Conception tenet, which states that Virgin Mary was born free of original sin. While Desde Adentro is far from being immaculate, it still holds as a miracle to me and a proof that whenever you don't know where you are going, then any road will take you there.

Waves - and then goodbye

Somebody is walking backwards in search of you. The circle game. Like counting from zero to infinite. You are talking to yourself as growing mountains in your head make your skull contract. Why I lose time while blood keeps running in me?

Travelling, I am travelling. At first, because I’m curious. I want to know what is happening further on, primarily because I am disturbed with the finality mass consciousness cast stupidity upon our microcosms. By changing viewpoint to a stereotype, you make it more bearable. It is almost therapeutic as well: observing your pain from a distance, you smoothly overcome it as you realize that everything is relative and transient and universal and, at any rate, insignificant.

I also travel for religious reasons! Like going on a pilgrimage, to be precise. I want to discern God’s shadow, even if there is no God. Identify the elementary noema of this dirty epic we are used to call life. Identify me. Who (or what) I am and who invited me in this garden, in this party and when will the party fade away. Could be this ultimum is a sand less desert or a shady edge, where you finally lay down as you find your place in this world. No matter what it is, we are in need of an answer, in need of a God. And I don’t know what the answer is, but, intuitively, I know that this God is love.

Travel to find love. Travel because of love. Travel to sort out love. Travel even to escape from love. All versions tried and true as I keep begging for a miracle. Everyone does it, I bet. Turn a different corner and discover angels playing seesaw as you keep searching for your missing parts and unconsciously trying to revisit your true homeland, your childhood; a place and a time when you were unlamented, complete and certain of a few things. But you can’t return. You can only look behind from where you came and go round and round and round in life’s endless circle game (Joni Mitchell never lies).

I still wait for the big miracle myself. You can say I need it. And the more I need it, the more I travel. Inside, outside. And what happens in the meantime is my life itself. So, I can’t complain.

(Spring to my kingdom come)

.Something like a mama

Today was a good post day. Apart from the Amazon envelope (containing ‘Memories of a color’, the debut album by Stina Nordenstam, of whom we’ll talk about someday soon), the postman delivered, crustily, a heavy parcel from Greece. On it there is a postal code that contains me. My mother sent it from Oropos. Again, like every month. Sometimes, twice a month.

I wore a smile and sank into it: small jars of tahini with honey clothed in kitchen paper, for fear they might break, Greek newspapers and magazines, a 4-piece sheet set (I told her not to send it!), chocolates, ‘The Man who fell to Earth’ (and I forgot in Greece and desperately wanted him to revisit me in Milton Keynes), more chocolates, a Korres’ shampoo with aloe and soapwort (which is supposed to cleanse me gently),a knitted scarf…

But this time, as I reached the bottom of the box, I also unearthed her face. Perhaps because I bow to its necessity lately. Or maybe because I could vividly visualize her glassy stare as she was schematizing this boxed wonderland. There is a whole world (half-real/half-imaginary) in here. With waves kissing its shores; and weightless, clear and almost transparent clouds. The flying cities of Moebius and Magritte, Italo Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili, the Ocean Cities of Tokyo and Plato’s Politeia. A place where tears (in case they fall) become night blooming lilies, two suns (too many able fires), His eyes, trees - and like the falling man, I’m trying to hang on to some dust, some grass and this point of Motionless Time where everything reconciles again. This land remembers me, resembles me, pertains to me and made me. And one day my eyes will be underneath her ground.

Now this world is marked on the top right hand corner of a box. I, on the bottom right. But it feels like I’m balancing on the gulf in between. I put my arms around it and carried it to my room. And as I walked in, she was there. Waiting to take care of my wounds. Just like when I was a frolicsome child and had cuts on my knees from falling down.

I still fall, Mother.

(tmatoillmotwhsif)Utterly Tranced

And fall even deeper than love

Sometimes, I think you want me to touch you...

.There is a light that never goes out

‘I think about you on a moonlit night/And the stars all see to weep
When there’s so much love to give/There’s never any time for sleep’ Beth Orton

In life, anything can happen. Especially nothing. Once you know that, you’ll be fine. Find a little piece of nothing and cling to it. Because even nothing feels like something, when something’s gone.

In prison, it takes courage to stay human. Your images are only part of somebody else’s extended perspective. Your chains are someone else’s freedom. Teeth stuffed in the back of your head. A frown so permanent it makes your eyes invisible. Silence. And water. And stone. But no stars. No point of light to carry our souls outside, no heavenly body to influence our luck. No sign of a God. No one to pray to. Access denied, abort or retry?

De Sterrennacht.

A twisted map of spiraling stars (like the ones children hide in their pockets), a worn-out card postal of encircling light, pinned on the prison wall, pierced through you, nails your fate and there, there’s the moon. A hazy nil! An eye in reverse! Above us the waves. Here comes Christ

-world's first surfer- on crutches. Here comes another God. And here comes another one, like a buffalo thunder.

Saints preserve us. And you’ve been saved.

Dubnobasswithmyheadman!

Seeing is a form of reading.

When you rush through folders containing images in your computer, your reaction is usually limited to a dipolar OK/NOT OK argument. What happens though when you go back to an image more than once and you are asked to pair it with 5 different titles?

I decided to use a caption from a last year project and blend it with a small selection of the reactions I had in time (ok,I admit it, the fourth one is a re-edition of a classified advertisment found while flipping through the pages of The Guardian Guide and its soulmates section...). Originally, the image (myself covered in plasters) was a visual interpretation of the inner wound laying inside us, as if saying 'This is myself broken before you'. With this exersice, the semiotics behind this photo became even more fragmented (and humorous). Filtered through The Little Prince, the Band Aid catchphrase from a 50's advertisment found in National Geographic, Dan Wilson's lyrics to 'Breathless' and,well...THAT advertisment.

I'm not quite sure if the image ages gracefully though. Compositionally and technically it may be ok, but whenever I look at it now I get annoyed by my cheeky grin behind the plasters. Hence, if I was to choose one title today, this would 'Not Ok'.

.Verzweifelt Glücklich

The only baggage you can bring is all that you can't leave behind