I wonder if I could be your mirror

2012, like music to my ears

1.   Chromatics | Kill For Love
2.   Crystal Castles | III 
3.   Saint Ettienne | Words and Music
4.   Hammock | Departure Songs
5.   Holy Other | Held
6.   Vitalic | Rave Age
7.   K. Bhta | Χρυσαλίδα
8.   Johann Johannsson | Copenhagen Dreams
9.   Bvdub | The First Day
10. Jessie Ware | Devotion
11. Death Grips | No Love Deep Web
12. Greg Haines | Digressions
13. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti | Mature Themes
14. Delilah | From The Roots Up
15. The Irrepressibles | Nude
16. Lindstrom | Smallhans
17. Oscar Mulero | Black Propaganda
18. The XX | Coexist
19. Lana Del Rey | Born To Die - The Paradise Edition
20. Paul Banks | Banks

I could see for miles, miles, miles

“When you invoke something transcendent you arrest movement” - Deleuze

Holocene, Calgary, Perth, Minnesota - allegorical sceneries of a fatal fall that washed us all ashore in what we sustain today. Anesthetized from everyday routine, people forget that we walk on a planet whose ground is filled with bones. Try to understand this futility of life through Art and have faith in a love profane yet glorious, that does not have the shape we usually attribute to her. Many times in the acknowledged patterns (relationships, cohabitation, marriage, et al.) there is no trace of love but fear and abandonment. Henceforth, you realize that while you were looking for God in any plausible den, he lay at your threshold all along. And it is my belief that if this God is love – attainable gratuitously and free in an elusive and pivoting moment of creation and existence, then art is a form of prayer, the humane way of appealing to Him.

Without further ado, these are my best albums of 2011

1.   Bon Iver | Bon Iver
2.   Kate Bush | 50 Words for Snow
3.   Com Truise | Galactic Melt
4.   John Maus | We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
5.   Dustin O'Halloran | Lumiere
6.   PJ Harvey | Let England Shake
7.   Austra | Feel it Break
8.   Kele | The Hunter
9.   Gang Gang Dance | Eye Contact
10. Birdy | Birdy
11. Florence+the Machine | Ceremonials
12. Korallreven | An album by Korallreven
13. Hior Chronik | Unspoken Words
14. The Sound of Arrows | Voyage
15. Gavin Friday | Catholic
16. bvdub | I Remember
17.  M83 | Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
18.  Glasvegas | EUPHORIC /// HEARTBREAK \\\
19. Epic45 | Weathering
20. Gem Club | Breakers

Alas, I bear no wings

Clouds are piling on clouds. Masses of chiaroscuros. The wind in your eyes, a storm within your heart. Hold on tight to a love that will expire with the universe, breathe and dive deeply into your skin. Withdraw all water from pain. Still, only pain remains. Open yourself up as the horizon’s goniometer and embrace world’s mother, the sea, mutely. Suddenly a flock of soul appears, moving relentlessly in circles; and for a rare, fleeting moment in existence you find Him looking right back to you. It is God moving over the face of the waters. ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ you ask, although you know. And He replies, ‘Nothing is heavy to those who can ascend’.

 

Other Worlds I

Land hemisphere

Other Worlds II

g

Cerebral hemisphere

.How could you be so heartless?

Letters from nowhere are penetrating a man's desolated ambience, while his heart keeps missing some beats. What is the first step in rearranging a broken psyche?

.A soul-porn short film by Giannis Drakos

Breathe me...

.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.

.Mother stands for comfort

(Spring to my kingdom come)