PARALLEL EVENTS

Pictor at Action Field Kodra 2010

 PICTOR

The idea of these meetings was dictated from the need of search and the determination of the city’s aura. It did not aim at the obligatory reconciliation,
let alone at the challenge of rage, but, at a sign inviting to dialogue.

An attempt to determine the composition of “genius loci”, to combine the full stops which shape the contradictory, indefinable but somehow fascinating profile of Thessaloniki. A search of the relation of the contemporary artist with the place he lives in, this place through time, the time through this place, that safeguards and also abolishes, that brings to despair and at the same time comforts, that isolates and redefines as well.

A meeting of the artist with the gaze of the archaeologist, the historian, the architect of theory or practice, the poet, the intellectual, the other; one who walks on a stratification, charmed or angry, by watching life resisting, both to the chaos and to its planning, spitting in the city’s multicultural past, erasing the starting points, extinguishing the last traces of memory into the noise and aspiring exclusively in the city’s economic future.

A city that fears the silence is afraid to look inwardly, and offers certain recipes of melancholy. And perhaps this last one is not the worse element for those who seek the dialogue and the communication, through the fascinating and at the same time painful adventure, the artistic manifestation.

Teta Makri
Peer Professor of the School of Visual and Applied
Arts of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
July 2010

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Phase 1:

Time: October 2008. Place: Warehouse B1, Contemporary Art Center of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki Port. The workshop Pictor takes place with a series of meetings (every Saturday morning), a circle of open discussions. Topic: Exploring the familiar (walking in the city when the city is not here). Historians and writers, artists and academy professors, journalists and architects are invited to deposit their experiential relationship with the city of Thessaloniki, to outline the contemporary urban landscape of the city, to exchange views and thoughts, to share their experiences through a living and direct speech. The speakers, who come from different backgrounds, develop their subject in front of the audience, which consists mainly by artists. This is indeed the ultimate goal of the workshop Pictor: to become a stimulus, a source of inspiration, a driving force for artistic proposals, actions, interventions and utopian projects.

Phase 2:

From the Port to the Cape of Kalamaria, Pictor’s proposals cross the sea and they are presented entrenched in an old camp, but also ready for any intervention in the city. Originality, urban, simple and everyday inventions, they all aim to the improvement of the most important thing in the city, our everyday life. Within the elapsed time (from the beginning of the Pictor workshop until today that the moment of the presentation of the proposals of those who attended and followed the vision that Teta Makri has inspired), one thing remains certain: something seems to be changing and this is only the beginning! And we are glad that we are part of it.

Domna Gounari & Areti Leopoulou
CACT curators

Participants:

Lila Agrafioti
Lena Athanasopoulou
Evgenia Grammenou
Thalia Grigoriadou, Eleni Laloumi
Stavros Dagtzidis, Vassilis Karkatselis, Efthimis Mouratidis
Nikos Dikas
Ioanna Kali
Kalos&Klio (Christos Kalos & Klio Tantalidou)
Christina Karaoglani
Chryssa Lekka, Maria Stefanidi
Alexandra Marantidou
Anna Bonarou, Natalia Alexiou
Theofanis Nouskas
Fenia Pagoni
Natalia Pantelidou, Penny Kostinou
Sophia Parthenaki
Maria Parianou
Giorgos Rymenidis
Vaggelis Tremopoulos

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