Space52 had a talk with curator Evagoria Dapola about her inspiration behind the exhibition Everything I touch turns into me, and how the participating artists embody and express the idea of artifacts and gestures becoming "visible, familiar, autonomous"

an interview between Space52 and Evagoria Dapola.

Curator: Evagoria Dapola @scale_appropiate
Participating Artists: Kostis Velonis, Elli Antoniou, Phanos Kyriacou, Socratis Socratous, Dimitris Kontodimos, Dionisis Christofilogiannis
Photo curtesy: © Pantelis Vitaliotis Magneto

When ancient objects exit their flows, they are transformed, becoming visible, familiar, autonomous. When we interact with them, we re-think gazes, gestures and behaviours and create new functions. In an ever-ending archipelago of protocols of handling, working, and owning artefacts, this exhibition proposes a radical non-use. Exploring the diagonal commonhold of gestures and artefacts as objects of necropolitical desire, the exhibition functions as a parasitic council that suggests alternative gestures, new forms of movements, stares and thoughts etched on gestures of handle, care, love and sharing. A rhizome of non-proprietary uses, it summarizes a long research on how gesture, language and value intersect, influenced by Latour’s Berlin Key.Reframing the value of gesture and its embodiment, it urges us to grant no one narrative or discursive practice a preferential role, by reinforcing the idea of incessant metamorphosis by the means of gesture. It highlights an inverted gesture that portrays ecstasy instead of reverence. This creates and augments a series of singular environments and personal perspectives for engaging antiquity as gestural, liquid, performative and heterogeneous, rather than fixed and mono–cultural.

Space52 had a talk with Evagoria Dapola about her inspiration behind the exhibition Everything I touch turns into me, and how the participating artists embody and express the idea of artifacts and gestures becoming "visible, familiar, autonomous". The exhibition was hosted at Space52.

Evagoria, could you delve into the underlying inspiration behind the exhibition "Everything I Touch Turns Into Me"? How do the participating artists embody and express the idea of artifacts and gestures becoming "visible, familiar, autonomous"?

I was always fascinated by gesture, as a space for attunement.[1] Most of my personal curatorial and academic research revolves around notions found in theory of affect, phenomenology, visual politics and semiotics. Rooting from a deep understanding of relational aesthetics and phenomenological, sociological, performative and physical understandings of gesture, this exhibition frames a long research on gesture as a means of knowing the world.
​
The participating artists approach these ideas through distinct viewpoints,  through multi-layered, ambient and cerebral artworks, touching on subjects of handling, activating and de-activating, creating engineered events, visual analogues, psychological experiences felt or mediated through the gestural language and paralanguage. Kostis Velonis makes visible the hidden structural building materials and objects that are scattered and discarded, invisible in plain sight, in Athen’s road and city works, creating brutal yet meditative gestures. Phanos Kyriacou gathers autonomous objects and materials, combines them with meditated casts and familiar structures and assembles a buddy system, through a meditation on distinct materialities that come together revealing the softest, most intimate, and smallest gestures. Elli Antoniou makes visible her gesture through a process of non etching, but rather a drawing on a harsh metallic material, making the process itself autonomous and the work refusing categorization. Socratis Socratous, brings forefront forensic morbid gestures, making visible and autonomous taxonomies of pain. Dionisis Christofilogiannis makes skinnings of familiar tools and objects found in an artist studio, making the otherwise unnoticed tools visible, while at the same time skinning ancient architecture structures taken out of their antiquity contexts, becoming autonomous. Dimitris Kontodimos transforms his own iterations of archaeological fragments, taking them out of their original context creating processes of commodification, through neoliberal consumption economies.

[1] Attunement is the reactiveness we have to another person. It is the process by which we form relationships. In this context, I use attunement as reactiveness we have towards anything in the Anthropocene.

You've mentioned Bruno Latour's influence on the curatorial approach, particularly referencing the "Berlin Key". How does Latour’s theory integrate into the way the exhibition challenges and redefines the relationship between humans and artifacts?

Latour’s ‘Berlin Key’ reveals how social constraints force people to do whatever the object obliges them to do, therefore, the object becomes a sign, dictating what they will do. Latour mentions: “Objects are really the end result of a long process of negotiation between the material world, historical associations and people—who give things names and relationships.” I find myself fascinated by the ways Latour in his texts brings ‘agency’ forefront. Considering his texts, my approach is heavily influenced by the questions of control, access, trust, power, secrecy, and choice, both when confronting gesture and in considering artefacts or objects. Based on a phenomenology of gesture, the exhibition seeks to question the statuses of gestures and objects, considering the archaeological method. The exhibition thus leads us to reconsider our protocols of handling, our own agency and perceptions of liminal or transcending gesture. As Latour argues on how to do words with things, approaching gesture as a way of knowing the world, this exhibition also opens a discussion on the potential of gesture to be a way of unkowing it, or denaturalizing its productions.

The theme of gestural archaeology is central to the exhibition. Could you explain this concept further and discuss how it drives the interaction with ancient objects, rethinking their customary roles and significances?

The archaeology of gesture investigates the relationship between body, gesture and artefact. Looking at the normative and non-normative understandings of gesture, focusing on a process of intimate interaction, these ideas drive the interaction with (ancient) objects, as gestural techniques are social and communicative, even when that is not their intention. The archaeology of gesture, in the context of this exhibition, does not seek to make an accurate timeline of how gestures evolved and the connotations of this, but is rather an intimate look on the complex nature of gesture, a practice so universal yet so context-specific. On the other end, gestural archaeology, in the context of this exhibition, discusses how we mainly formulated our notions and understandings of antiquity and the world itself, based on gesture: how we handled objects.  Gestural archaeology here, is considering the ontological nature of ‘material culture’ within the historical field of archaeology itself. Like artefacts, gestures are ambiguous and multifaceted, not linear and binary. Reconsidering our interactions with ancient objects, these gestures are material discursive and boundary erasing practises, allowing for new readings and interactions with these objects and antiquity itself.

Each artist brings a unique perspective and methodology to the exhibition. Could you highlight how one or two of the artists, perhaps Kostis Velonis or Phanos Kyriacou, have approached the theme of "gestural antiquity" in their works?

Kostis Velonis and Phanos Kyriacou, within their distinct approaches seem to be asking: How do we make (archaeological) objects accountable for their languages, their positionings, their agencies? Their gestural works, seem to be loosely positioned at the intersection of communication and performance, transmission and transformation, creating a sense of acceleration, questioning positionality and endurance. Creating their individual gestural vocabularies, their installations question objects that seem to be exiting their cultural constraints, considering how their intelligibility shifts.

Kostis Velonis’ new series of site specific works are not just merely indicative of a shift in his practice, but also reveal his new interest in aggressive surfaces that control and reverse their initial impressions. Relating to their locality in Athens, they are responses to urban stratification, have their own lives and repair mechanisms, remaining in a constant state of possibility. Resembling contemporary synthetic excavations and reconstructions of remains of civilizations that possibly resemble our own in a parallel dimension, these structures feel as if they are in a perpetual state of reorganization.  Creating a cultural cosmology, referencing archaic structures, his three works appear to weave three chapters of a cosmological narrative of the sun, the giver and discoverer of new life.

Phanos Kyriacou focuses on the unique gestures dictated by a particular material or object, allowing himself to go where that takes him. Listening to the specialisms of working that material in what has been called ‘material gesture.’ Focusing on singular gestures dictated by his gathered or improvised materials, without disrupting their properties. Crafting alternative perceptions of objects and paradoxical gestures, his sculptures materialise ‘intercorporeality’. Encoded with traces of their maker’s unique perspective and ability to make visual poetry out of the smallest movements, tiniest interventions, deepest thoughts and most caring subversions, these works are striking reminders of the multitudes of gestures that go into the production of objects and artefacts, regardless of their later function.

This exhibition proposes a "radical non-use" of artifacts. How do you envision the future of interacting with cultural and historical artifacts, based on the insights and outcomes from this exhibition? What changes do you hope to inspire in both the artistic community and the public's engagement with antiquity?

Artefacts arguably are our companions as we try to understand the world, as they bridge our collective and singular past and the present. As much as gestures, they make their own meanings through they instinctive agency. We experience the vastest (cosmical) responses as outcomes of the stimulus of gesture. As we use artefacts and (non) objects, we prescribe them with meaning, whether we circulate or discard them. In our interplay of gestures, and more so gestural archaeologies, we bind them with historical and cultural conditions.  The radical non-use of artefacts relates to agency realism, considering how objects, bodies, gestures, are understood through practices of complex gestures and emerge through them. The objects, created to be used are radicalised through this elimination of their use, and their materialities actualize as distinct agents. These objects are liberated, subjected to new individuation and ethics of care.  This is the suggested potential of archaeology of gesture: inviting us to consider objects, matter, materials, gestures beyond our human subjectivity.

This exhibition does not seek to change our agency towards artefacts, but to consider it in deep time. In places where the soil is rich in archaeological past, sometimes we construct grandiose narratives and refuse to move past them, to actually consider objects, gestures, narratives and outcomes  outside of post-archaeological sequences. Instead we commodify them, transforming them to fuel in a well-oiled capitalist machine of consumption towards waste, minimising them to aesthetics or ‘cores’, monetizing them as souvenirs or tourist traps. I can only be hopeful, that we can move past these practices, having a renewed interest in the phenomenology of such archaeologies, considering all their aspects, including the necropolitics at play. Hopefully, as this exhibition suggests, we have the ability to shift the archaeological discussion from practices of people in the past that focus on place, site, structure and religion, bringing a renewed interest in gesture. Transcending the ontological nature of ‘material culture’ imbuing it with notions borrowed from performance, archaeology and phenomenology, will allow us to achieve new understandings of what might not yet be certain. The artistic community and the artists’ engagement with archaeologies through normative and non-normative understandings of gestures, hold the ability to configure social realities, cultural identities, and human subjectivities. The artists’ embodied gestures of rhythmic and non-linear dematerialisation and the non-use of objects, bound archaeology with art, extending multi-platform approaches. They hint that the gesture of the future eventually turns invisible.

Finally, the exhibition features a diverse group of artists, each offering a unique lens on the exhibition's themes. Can you share how artists like Socratis Socratous, Dimitris Kontodimos, Elli Antoniou, and Dionisis Christofilogiannis specifically engage with the idea of reinterpreting and revitalizing ancient gestures and objects through their contemporary artistic practices? What distinct narratives or methods do they employ to enhance the dialogue around "Everything I Touch Turns Into Me"?

All the artists that participate in this exhibition, were chosen based on their practices that explore ways gestures become entangled, fluid, monumental and productive through their different modes of world making. Ellie Antoniou, Dionisis Christofilogiannis and Dimitris Kontodimos seem to be contemplating how archaeological and artistic practices employ improvised fluid gestures in their pursuit of memory keeping, creating markings of time. They reveal how time seems to be transforming metaphors into things, objects and gestures. The works of these artists appear to be sharing an interest in the haptic qualities of gestures, and they seem to be able to respond to their insatiable need for touch.  The ecstatic materialities of all these works, might be compensating for the lack of tactility in our contemporary lives. Activating our somatosensory hardware, these unique surfaces are marked by the physical bodily movements of the artists and their archaeologies manifest interactively. Socratis Socratous on the other hand, gives us access to unknown processes, where excavation and ruin take more morbid and horrific turns: he brings us along to the foresnic laboratory of Nicosia where human remains are excavated from mass graves, created 50 years ago as the after effect of the tragic 1974 Turkish invasion.

Elli, Kostis, Phanos and Dimitris share common threads beyond the conceptual and theoretical, as found materials in their works reveal how these artists are attentive to composition, connotations and internal and external logics of their surroundings. On the other hand, Dionisis and Socratis’ works are revealing the immaterial properties of their processes, urging us to pay attention to what is left outside of their compositional frame: in Socratis’s photos the human factor, the familiar intimate gesture of human presence in this morbid scene, whereas in Dionisis’ case, the absence of the very tools that have been skinned and reproduced via means of gesture. The practices of all the artists participating in the exhibition are blurring boundaries between art and life, persisting on art as mode of experiencing, gesturing but mostly paying attention and memory keeping. The constellation of works, in their vast majority new works either conceived out of conversations on the exhibition’s subject or first exhibited in this exhibition, become fragments and ruins themselves. As such “Everything I touch turns into me” softly gestures towards an intrinsic value of shifting perspective and gesture itself, while offering an expanded meditation on the tools of exploration of non-objects. The gestures in this exhibition appear to occupy the conceptual space of paradata, lending probity in the translations of objects in both art and archaeology.

---

This article about Space52 and their exhibition Everything I touch becomes me, curated by Evagoria Dapola takes part of the ARTICULATE PROMOTE Programme.