The Refugee Settlements of Alexandras Av. are the first apartment buildings ever built in Greece in order to house the Greek refugees coming from Turkey. The history in repeat.

“Photography and the body: the art of Kleopatra Haritou”

by Ian Jeffrey

What is art? We all have ideas on the subject, even if they fall apart on inspection. Maybe art is an utopian condition never quite achieved. Think of it as a trial zone or testing ground.

This particular modernist building may be interesting in its own right: those molded staircases, for instance, with their unduly tin handrails seem to provide an organic core to the building. The history of the property is also piquant, for it seems to have fallen from grace and to have been used as temporary housing. I doubt, thought, if the pictures on show here are those of a documentarist, even if they are appreciative of some of the finer points of the buildings.

One likelihood is that Kleopatra Haritou has used the buildings for an examination of several varieties of art. Photography has always lent itself to investigations, and this a case in coin. The pictures of the elegant staircase, for example, with its elegant curves and tinted planes make up an enquiry to modernism – of the kind practiced by in the 1920s and ‘30s by Edward Weston. Active in California and in Mexico, Weston took pictures of sand dunes, rippled and sharp edged. The modernist intention, expressed in such pictures, seems to have been to register the fall of light very exactly with close attention to gradation and tone. With sand, rock or painted plaster Weston and his contemporaries managed to make pictures that were like largely about seeing, detached from empirical subject matter. They were Purists. Some of the stairwell pictures in this collection refer back to the aesthetic values of Weston and his contemporaries. The difference is that these new pictures are in colour. In some cases, there are sharp tonal contrasts along with areas of darkness. Where the pictures of 1930 were often refined abstracts these are in some cases too, disrupted and melodramatic. What she has done is to take a well-groomed aesthetic format and to invest it with memories of the internal and even the intestinal: an endoscopic variant on a modernist theme, that is to say.

The pictures of the stairwells remind us of the purist tendency in modernism. They invoke a period when photographers were intent on art and not just on documentation. They remind us that art is at issue, and that everything else on show might be considered through art’s filter – no matter how disorderly and random. Why, for instance, take a picture of a table top with a few domestic items under a light covering of dust? Well, a table top or any flat supportive surface presents us with objects ready for use: a pan, a cup or a framed photograph to be picked up for inspection. Usually we look down on work surfaces, and to see them from any other angle is worthy of comment. Why, then, has she stooped to take a picture of a table top or crouched to bring herself level with items placed on the floor? Maybe she was remembering Giorgio Morandi, whose carefully placed still life items register his point of view, standing and scrutinizing. What these images do is to emphasize standpoint, and to make sure that it is not overlooked. There is, she seems to suggest something like an ideal or an innate standpoint for different kinds of things. On the staircase we look up and down, for this is where the steps lead, and we look towards the handrail which is our support in such an unstable setting. We place ourselves appropriately to look into a cupboard, at a screen, through a window or at a book. Perhaps, the pictures suggest, there is an etiquette governing all those things which we come across on a daily basis. Up to the present, thought, we have taken all this for granted. Morandi’s scrupulous placing of vessels, pots and pans on his studio table was a pointer in this direction, but he didn’t insist, preferring that we took in the implication subliminally. What Kleopatra Haritou does, by contrast, is to remark on standpoint as a topic. things, as it were, impose themselves on her according to rules of their own: even wallpaper, for example, has its format- an undifferentiated planar look.

These pictures propose that objects solicit us in their different ways. We address windows on an equal footing, for they give us light and make openings into the rest of the world out there. Towards chairs and beds, though, we incline, for they await for our bodies. Pictures and portraits, surrogates for the human presence, keep us at a respectful distance, but we approach books the better to make them out and to pick them up. These pictures of “The refugee settlements of Alexandra’s Avenue” are ostensibly records of an interesting place, but their real purpose is to introduce us to the presence of the photographer, our representative who acts on our behalf, peering, craning, stooping, and reaching. The series amounts to photography as a kind of proxy sculpture, for the hidden subject is the photographer herself, not as a controlling intelligence but as animated substance managed by this particular place. Following her tracks, up the twisted staircase and into the sparsely furnished rooms; we have no choice but to mimic her gestures, in imagination at least.

They are strenuous images, cunningly set out. They oblige us to make an effort, to look closely, for instance at pale spaces on a wall to discern just where the traces are. Furniture, as if making its own comments on the task of approaching the scene, might be pressed together, turned or placed as a barrier, impeding access. If you were to walk into such a space you would have to watch your step. They may look like photographs but at the same time they act as diagrams, guiding our approach, and in one instance she even features a pair of crutches, an ultimate aid to movement in difficult conditions.

It is most unusual to find photography that reminds us of how we approach a book, say, or a door or a window. Generally in photographs we are ascend with cultural data and pieces of evidence that we can put together to get some impression of life and times. In the history of painting, however, there are examples of the kind of art practiced by Kleopatra Haritou. Looking at J.L. David’s “Marat assassiné” (1793) you will find yourself imitating the set of Marat’s head should you try to read the inscription on the letter held in his left hand. The Marat scene is the best example of this kind of imitative procedure I can think of in painting, although there are many others. They abound in Titian’s paintings, for example: those torturers who feel the heat in the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence are good instances. 

 I doubt if kleopatra Haritou feels that it is her duty to make us remember just what it is like to ascend a vertiginous staircase or to approach a chair. It is probably just a feature of her art that she is engrossed by the kinetics of the body and its objects, and that the buildings on Alexandra’s Avenue provided her with a perfect theater of operations.

ACROBATS, by Kleopatra Haritou

2016

The gate to the drug-wonderlands of central Athens is in open view to the public. I start visiting them. I start facing the city as one solid body. Its veins and arteries move in parallel motion. However, vital communication is precluded. The one fears the other. 

The veins are the homeless, the Acrobats, all drug addicts. They are socially considered to be the carriers of dirty blood in the city’s heart. Their life equilibrates on a black rope, on one shot miracle. What ’s there left for them to be lost? Their hopes and dreams are blended with toxic liquids, daily injected. They are under no illusions as to their social achievements; the only bet to win is placed on dependance, hoping that desire for life won’t awake, as it seems to be a dead end of pure pain. Yanis seems inordinately serene knowing he has a few days left to live. 

The arteries are the ordinary citizens, walking by the drug corners without ever fixing their gaze on the Acrobats. They exhale fear whenever death is obviously related to life. Afraid that abdication won’t find a crack to enter their life, they constantly demand a miraculous cleanse. Death must move out. The anonymous Acrobats mirror the lurking preposterous anxiety of their life’s downfall, of the city’s downfall. Mrs. Lucas keeps calling the police to come and kick them out. Their existence is awfully embarrassing to her. 

5pm at Omonoia square, female addicts trade sex for sisa and end up beaten up in plain view. No tears! No fear! Just self pity when after a while, their oxygen deprived brain, asks for their lost children kept in asylums. How ironic! Sisa is made of battery liquid, the one used in mechanical toys. Some Acrobats have rotten legs like broken dolls. They sleep in burrows at a central park of Athens. Their eyes never respond, their brains are broken, their skin strives to wrap their bones, and their sclerotic bodies freeze in a sculptor’s pose under the warm light of the street lights. 

The Acrobates are generally kind to me. They apologize and thank me. They feel embarrassed and ask me not to touch them. Blood stains are all over them and HIV is reigning. It takes a lot of acid to digest this osseous reality. All these human shadows exist without any sunlight, yet my instinct makes me wanna reach out my hand and help. But at the end of the day, I can only describe the aged young boy holding a box wrapped in paper full of colored roses. I wish to describe the girl with the rotten nails, assorted into the same color of her bracelet, roving her bony wrist. Signs of dignity. But all I hear are words like imprisonment, exile, infringement, divergent. 

During my night sleep, both worlds start haunting me, crying for order, otherwise daylight would find me cursed. Who can inject justice? No answers lead to peace. And in the school of death, there are no teachers. 

The economic crisis of Greece amplifies the problem to the maximum. Like the cellulars of a new born, the wounds in the central parts of the city’s body keep proliferating. HIV, psychotic deliriums, and roid rage (aggressive behavior caused by excessive steroid use) push addicts to act in plain view with Hollywoodian violence, even towards their addict fellows, just for a hit. But hate becomes empathy soon, and they reach for help; a fresh vein for injection is their common land.

I climb up high to look at my city from above. In its’ entrails several drug street corners fill in the city’s body. The wounds are bleeding. Part of Athens is committing suicide with the use of cheap toxic drugs. Another part is constantly protesting. I hear the sound of the caravan bursting. New generations come in louder. Nowadays they are also shouting for the environmental crisis. Cold light is showering the Parthenon as it’s standing still on its bones. Within the city’s buzz, I hear Parthenon’s breathing, sounding like a housewife left back alone to iron the family’s clothing in the heat of mid-August. Democracy seems osseous as I look at the apartment buildings, standing in anarchy like cement skeletons, dividing in camps vain ideologies; Are you Christian? Are you straight? Are you white?

- Oh, I ‘ve so much work…I gotta run.

- Are you getting paid?

- No, I ain’t got any social security.

“ENTRY - EXODUS” 

“Death is insignificantly divergent from life”

- Thales of Miletus

The central axis of “Entry-Exodus” is the method of dialectics on life and death. It is a dialogue in-between these two worlds. Life and death are presented through interlocutor elements, aiming to kowtow the sphere of the unapprehended, and present death as the Other significant half of life rather than its intimidating opposite. Death is introduced through the cemeteries as the after-life entrance. Entering the communal entrances of the living ones we come into the landscape of burial, the final exodus from life. In the absolute absence of the human body, and by the inspection of both world’s decorative elements -forms, colours, textures or symbols- a cohabitation of the tangible “here” with the mortal idea of “there” is thus created. The one culture reflects wondrously the other. 

Like an existential scout, I ‘ve collected the evidences that place both worlds into a state of democracy and equality. Philosophy after all is obliged to handle the dialectics of the being and the non-being, of the finite and the infinite, of freedom and nature, without placing these opposing edges in a relation of exclusion or elimination. 

Miraculously, a distinctive narration of Greece’s history unfolds throughout the pages, starting from the ancient patterns and finishing at the status of the modern Western world. On the one hand, the entrances of the Athenian apartment buildings, constructed mainly after WWII and the Greek civil war, look like an archipelagos of bodies reborn after death. Just like human finger prints, each one unique and uncommon, liberate the city’s habitants from its bunker-like concrete grey buildings. 

On the other hand, the cemeteries tend to remind us of a crowded urban environment. “We humans are the heroes”, seems to claim the enormous modern photo-portraits on the tombs. The portraitomania -the only example of democratization and anthropocentricism of death- is the new trend. Similar to posters of contemporary folk singers, they fill in the modern burial landscape next to the blockbuster religious heroes, replacing the bourgeoisie “andriandomania" (obsession with busts) as a result of the economic crisis. Often, we come across Roman-style palaces and ancient-hellenic temples that resemble the city’s houses, with aluminum doors and windows. The splendor of plastic flowers in supernatural colors with which the modern necropolis are decorated, add splendor as balconies of Eden. And candles that once floated in olive oil, are now replaced by strobe lights, flashing on and on until the batteries run out. 

For us all, a bed time story is a pleasant necessity in order to fall asleep. Through humorous or compassionate references to the classic religious fairy tale, I’ve entered the current idiosyncratic trends of the Champs Elysees of sleep and cohabitation. 

Art -according to the great Greek poet Kostis Palamas- is the only one that can defeat Time.

Athenian partment building entrances and cemeteries bare an essence of museums, of colorful modern galleries, where we bid adieu.

An ongoing edition for the burial landscape of Tinos island

The film "IERA ODOS" is an essay film/hybrid documentary on the modern Sacred Rd. (IERA ODOS), one of the oldest roads of Europe.

Drawing on the myth of Persephone, a mythical woman whose life is entirely defined by others -the husband, the mother and the humans - the film follows this modern protagonist as she crosses the Sacred Rd. in order to bring Spring upon earth, once again, during the Anthropocene era. The distance from the one edge of Sacred Rd. to the other, is defined as the intermediate distance from the underworld (Kerameikos) to the surface of earth (Eleusis).

The woman becomes the road, revealing also the difficulties and challenges women face towards their independence and equality.

A documentary -in progress- on the commercialization of the burial landscape and the civil rights of the deceased in Greece.

research/screenplay/direction: Kleopatra Haritou

Funded by:

• Greek Film Center

• Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation

LONDON 1997

“…The body, the carrier of emotions, desire, and sexual passion, has been treated throughout the evolution of civilization as the aggressor of reason and the victim of the impending search for social equilibrium. According to Nietzsche, each era gives rise to the creation of a corporeal ideal, a special characteristic that is at the same time a new body.

Eroticism has long ago been kidnapped from the space of the body, of secrecy, or from the space of privacy, and it lives in conversations, playacting, and objects. The commercialization of human passion burdens, above all, the same body of eroticism for the benefit of the economy.

Deeply rooted in the body, sexual desire has been treated as the driving force of social development and placed at the base of the social edifice, not simply as a calculable biological property but as a product of power and historical forces. During the last century, a crisis has been observed in neurological diseases, which can be translated as symptoms of various changes. The suffocating public spaces, the absolute fetishism of commodities, and the commodification of sexuality. By lending human properties to inanimate objects, commodities gain power, autonomy, and life, while humans undergo the alienation of their activities as they are transformed into commodities.

The neurotic body, ruled by stress and anxiety, unable to have control over its life and its desire, in order to escape from order, erases the borders of sexual identity that keep it imprisoned, and it is being reborn.

To what extent will the dependence and trust invested in human rationality be sufficient for it to be able to respond to nervous crises, those that have essentially been produced by organic logic itself?…”