thoughts about Ioannina city
Ioannina, 2.1.1999
allusion to the city
Iannena, 2.1.1999
Morning in the Its Calé, in bright sunshine and cold. The city lying quiet with its big open spaces, the mountain weightless, and essentially keeper of its own History, thread-bearing. In the Byzantine Museum the older the images the more convincing the art. The piety of faith and the veneration bring out art as such, an art which otherwise would be but applied dexterity – and that shows.
Athens, 15.2.1999
Morning in the street market of Ksenokratous. Stefanou proposed I had an exhibition in the Its Calé under the theme of the city. «Think it over». And the idea turning in my head.
«… a lake for the core
of her eyes and tread-worn castles
it’s Iannena whispering
in the snow and in bad weather
glass-clad and golden. »
***
Viniani, April 1999
Now this is no war. They destroy the cities of others, while they themselves are safe at bay, and civilization accepts it. “We are served handicapped freedom yet again”.
Excerpt from the artist’s diary.
The lines are from “Iannena, city of glass”, by Michalis Ganas, and from “According to the Sadducees”, by Michalis Katsaros.
curio for freedom and death
April 1999, with bombardments here further North, I saw crowds standing on bridges and squares wearing targets. My mind shadowed and my sight useless for painting, I carved the words on the wood like blind. Freedom or death. The meaning seized, empty words in our civilized world, stupid desideratum, if not the source of embarrassment. So let it make even downtrodden people vibrate and express peacefully their relentless, mute resistance, that bit of their soul which can not be bought by the handicapped freedom of commerce and consumption. And even if nowadays it seems hopeless, a dead body back from the Thermopylae and the Melians to the braves of Rigas, the resistance fighters up in the mountains, abnegation and bravery; for such price did they envision freedom for their race and for their land. On September 2003 I wrapped it up, like sacred remains or honest dead, with something like faded fragments of the Greek flag and on top of it I put, in the memory of its silent believers, ever-burning little flames to hide it away, in order to give it to the Greek Parliament, who wanted a work of mine for their collection.
