The concepts of enclosure, freedom, flight and escape, embraced under the general concept of heterotopia, arise in the works of 13 Greek artists that are presented in the exhibition “Recreation – Maid in Greece”. The opening of the exhibition will take place at the Alatza Imaret, on May 25th under the framework of the 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Following Michel Foucault’s track of thought which defines heterotopias as places both beyond and within reality, suspended between utopian and functional space, culturally and socially determined, this exhibition aims to assemble and present the synthesis of a sample of relative visual references. A series of creative events both define and are defined by the heterotopic dimension, functioning themselves as a landscape and topos which reflects a sense of reality as a desire to escape from that same reality and, at the same time, a trajectory towards a different “reality”.

By re-formulating the concept of the visual topos and creating allusions of a continuously renewed geography, the artists participating in this exhibition are recapitulating – each of them in the context of his or her own perspective – versions of the heterotopic convention. They are creating, in other words, their own eccentric deviations from “natural” laws, moving towards a plane of illusion. It is on this plane that memories are allowed to be accumulated, reorganized, stripped of their outer shell. These are ideal rafts on impossible seas, chimerical lines of navigation sailed by transoceanic specters, reading primers in code – in foreign languages, perhaps in languages completely unknown.

In a city where the waters still maintain the reminiscence of the lukewarm stream of the primary source, the gaze determines an imaginary passage which appears as an ascending movement towards the mountain that stands across, following the sea spume from the coast of Thermaikos to Olympos.  The reminders of this course compose the places-islands of the structural landscape, which brace – in the diverse historical phases of the city – the fluidity of the movement towards a heterotopical, disordered “city”.          

In the need to materialize this condition, the monumental space of the Alatza Imaret is renovated, rediscovering its character of tolerance and its “religious” function (the concept of ‘religious’ functions in reverse as a point of reference for secret prayers, not for conventional religious activity); it also regenerates itself through aesthetic, political and moral events. The works of art release a dynamic which seeks open and multiple readings, assimilating the historical aspect of the space itself. These works also poeticaly convey a new order of new forms and sensations, signals of a new world or of a chaos. In addition, they serve as journals recording the artist’s quest, the findings of a re-creative reflection.

Eventually, nothing is described. The works are signatories to a new convention, the coexistence of various perceptions which subvert all our certainties and ideological positions.
To discover afresh what has already been discovered, buried beneath its practical or ideological uses; to excavate the depths of a sky pregnant with strange storms; to declare that the part is the Whole, relieved of the burdens of memory; to align memories and dreams – these are some of the ways one can inhabit the ephemeral world we have been given as a native land. The only true native land!

The English word ‘Recreation’ was chosen for the exhibition’s title, because it conveys with the greatest possible precision the concept of the creative process and praxis: re-creation and pleasure, maidservant and virgin. A retracing of our steps towards the inner core of art, an attempt to measure the “humidity of seeing”, the continual process of re-initiation and reinforcement from the sources.

Curated by: Thalea Stefanidou