dora economou
UNDER WESTERN EYES, Studio closing party, January 2017
Over the volcano Last Spring I made a long trip to the East. First I visited Thailand where my brother currently lives and works, I went to Cambodia to see the Angkor temples, then I passed on to Japan and I crossed the country by train from South to North. I was on the road for five weeks, I saw, heard, tasted and smelled many new things, some of them felt strangely familiar but not quite the same. The plastic chairs in Bangkok were a bit different from the ones back home, the cicadas in the Cambodian jungle sung a different song, fried fish in Japan had a different taste. In the beginning of the fifth week I reached Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands, and visited Jigokudani, or Hell’s Valley as it’s appropriately named because of hot steam vents, sulphurous streams and other intense volcanic activity it displays. The smell of sulphur was exactly the same as the one I remembered from Nissyros and for the first and only time during the trip I felt like home. I prepared the trip the way I’d prepare an art work. I made a list with references, materials and points of interest to my practice (the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok which houses the statue of the deity with the four faces that answers prayers and where a bomb exploited in 2015 killing and injuring many, the 1000 origami crane tribute at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Usuki stone Buddhas carved from soft volcanic rock from nearby Mt Aso, the sun rising from the Pacific, etc.). I compared and combined train and plane itineraries, google maps forecasts, tripadvisor tips, booking.com offers, drew points, connected them together and laid out a route on a piece of paper. Then I set out to crosscheck it. But first, I went to Nissyros and worked on an in situ installation at the STERNA studio in Eborios. I visited Nissyros for the first time in June 2015 when I was invited to participated in the project “at the Baths”. Since then, I come back on a regular basis both physically and metaphorically. Many of the materials and the obsessions I carry on to my work are routed here. The fat oak leaves that against the light look like vampire bats, the rattling cobbles, holy cows, soft pumice stone a bread knife can go through, yellow sulphur that eats away cotton fibre.. These are some of the things that planted the seed that brought me all the way to the far East. Same as every artwork, the installation at the studio was like a mathematical equation that had to be solved. A molded cement staircase connects the ground floor to the bedroom upstairs creating an oblong gorge that disrupts the first floor. For security reasons, the border of the gorge had to be made visible. The studio is quite compact, the install had to have some practical use so as to add to not to take up more of the tight space. I also wanted to take under consideration the special geography of the location, the designated perpendicular gap is boxed in a structure that stands on the verge of the caldera. I thought of a sulphur-yellow hammock suspended over the hole over the volcano. I watched youtube tutorials demonstrating different weaves and ways to hang a hammock, I compared and combined and came up with a design. I work with youtube tutorials a lot lately, I’m interested in the act of copying, the connotations, symbolism and rules the practise has
in relation to Eastern traditions and religions as opposed to the plurality, abundance and loose reliability of tips and treatments exchanged among the members of the world wide web. In this context, what can be thought of as original or attributed to personal expression. I chose a weave and practised it in front of the screen till I could do it by heart. I started weaving to see how it will come up and what it will look like made by my hands. I called the piece “Over the Volcano” a consistent but predictable title. Years ago, not long before I visited Nissyros for the first time, I made a piece I named “Under the Volcano”. I had a beautiful big crystal vase which slipped my hands and smashed on the black marble floor of the studio I had back then. The scattered crystals looked like the galaxy, I didn’t have the heart to throw them away so I swept them under my working bench. They stayed there for a long time. One day I was loitering around the studio, the sparkling glass under the bench caught my eye and I thought the arrangement can make a piece and immediately the title “Under the Volcano” came to mind -of course I was also referencing the popular book. When I decide to show the piece in public, instead of moving the actual bench to the gallery I made a 1:1 duplicate in cardboard and laid the crystals underneath. I suspect that -quite rightfullywhoever saw it probably thought the cardboard copy was the piece. But for me the gist of the piece was the broken vase swept underneath. Once, I was chatting with my teacher in NY about ways to make better use of space in the studio and she suggested that I should manage the room under the tables. I believe her advise was quite poetic committed to stuff that we cannot afford either to deal with or part with and we cramp and hide under the bed, under the table, under the staircase till further notice. When I was given the opportunity to work on a permanent installation in a studio in Nissyros -and after having walked on the crater and heard and felt the core of the earth boiling under the skin- I considered it my task to reverse, at least formally, the process and bring something overhead. For a few days twice a year, if you watch the sunset from Hohlaki beach in Madraki, you will see the sun diving straight into the water. This year I visited Nissyros twice, first in early April before my long trip to prepare the piece in the studio, and again now, six months later, by the end of Summer. I was fortunate to catch the days the sun sets in the sea both times. In the past, I had shot pictures and video of these sunsets, reversed the footage and presented it as the sun rising from the Pacific. In May I was in Okinawa where I witnessed the sun rising from the Ocean for real. But before that, and again now, from the studio balcony in Eborios I saw the sun rising behind the Datca peninsula behind which stretches the East. Eborios, September 2018.
OVER THE VOLCANO 2018, Polyester cord, iron, 200 x 200 cm
Stephanos crater, Nissyros, Greece
Jigokudani, Hokkaido, Japan
UNDER THE VOLCANO 2014, KAPAmount, wood, crystal, 82 x 125 x 81 cm
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. I picked up the crystal vase we liked to use instead of a donation box, but it slipped and crashed on the marbles in the floor spattering a thousand raindrops across the kitchen –fresh as if issued to children on the beach. How lucky to experience matter built to host water revealing evidence of thirst encrypted within its molecular structure. I swept the particles under my working bench, said I’d bring them outside later. Tables are key landmarks on the psychogeography of the studio. I load a lot of stuff under them leaving the plots in between clear for narratives to be performed. The frames are gradually dressed into solid precipice. Most of my materials I collect from the street. Most of my friends do so too. Often, we come across the same things but we came from different places, headed to different ends. Occasionally, we arrive at the same place simultaneously and have to sit on each other’s lap. Around town, the inside and the outside are never comprehensively designated. I have to open the window and walk back into the room so as to get outside. I don’t go out scavenging for things, they find me. But it takes a certain learned skill to get to recognize them: City girl sauntering the city plains - on lazy legs and distracted eyes- reaping the crops. Trials leave traces of memories on matter. In crime series, the forensic surgeon reconstructs the crime and recovers the murderer by tracing evidence of the lethal weapon on the tissue around the wound. Technically, there can be no murder without a body, but I could be a murderer without committing a crime. Οne early spring evening of 2009, we found ourselves in a debased resort planted in the Romanian part of the Transylvanian Alps. The light was outstanding -too strong for our eyes, too weak for the camera lens though -, disclosing in color the zombie edifice and follies. We didn’t bring any significant mementos back. As it’s often the case, there was too much spare space in our luggage to choose wisely. But we carried the scent of the name and promised to use it one day. The time has come. Please, give me PREDEAL. Athens, May 2014
“Please, give me PREDEAL!” ends the press release for Dora Economou’s show, PREDEAL, up this summer at the Athens gallery Breeder [13 June-31 July 2014]. This at first abstract word greets us upon pushing open the gallery’s heavy iron door. Drawn up to the word, we are doubly required not to step on a plasticine piece entitled Cold Earth resting pseudo-camouflaged on the ground, its marbled stone-shapes slightly raised against a fleshly, fingerprinted gray frame. ‘PREDEAL’ graces a modest-sized rectangular LED sign, mounted on a beam structuring the gallery’s top floor where the office peeks out. We discover that in fact there is no light -- the word is carefully spaced out using a pink-reddish nail varnish. This disjuncture feels apt: it reflects the ambiguity of ‘predeal’ as well as our own corporeal incapacity to look up and down at the same time.
Economou’s sculptures are made mostly of trash she finds around Athens. We find nearly the whole spectrum of industrial detritus on the pieces hanging, mounted and spaced throughout the two floors of the exhibition: wood, aluminum foil, KAPAfix foam and packing tape to name a few. Nothing comes readymade and even the qualifier ‘assisted’ does not find semantic ease. Rather a careful translation occurs between the functional potential of these materials and the sculptural form they find with new narratives inscribed but never totally sublimated. Preclimax, for instance, names a flattened piece of lead the size of a large dinner plate that a friend’s motorcycle crossed over several times. The piece hangs between different lives: its industrial, non-art function and eventual status as refuse, the constructed situation of its transformation under the crushing touch of the wheel – not-yet art and no longer simply non-art – and its unstable presentation as art here. PREDEAL was one of my first experiences as a foreigner in Athens. Economou’s works followed me around out of the gallery like an ancient chorus. I found her faded A4 printouts of sunflower vases in the sun-paled trash tucked neatly, like my own body, in rocky cruising beach crags. Only speculative pre-deals, such as the planned seaside development of the periphery, seemed to take place behind empty office facades – far from economic actuality. Preclimax took on a different weight after discovering the preserved gate crushed by the AMX 30 tank that violently repressed the 1973 Polytechniou student strike. Cold Earth reemerged crossing the slippery rocks of the Parthenon – watching my step while being drawn upwards to the city panorama. PREDEAL patiently attends to the impossibility of totally experiencing a city amidst testimonies to its wholeness, eyes ever torn between part and whole. The hanging piece Each Eye Reproduced the Entire Animal encapsulates this doubled, dialectical edge of Economou’s economy of sight. An unfurled 35mm film-roll, each frame an eye, weaves through yellowed foam to morph it into an intestine-like consistency. Like the faded A4 printouts of the two sunflower still-lifes, the only other photographic images found in PREDEAL are exposed slightly out of reach, in negative. Economou’s sculptural materials are not made up to be something they are not nor are they simply presented as-is. One strategy is to artistically reproduce found objects rather than just re-(un)use them. For instance, the foam KAPAmount rectangular frames structuring The Sleeping Gypsy and Under the Volcano are modeled after surgical tables found in the artist’s studio, a former surgery. Both have smaller adjacent sidekicks – Giselle poses next to The Sleeping Gypsy and The Healer aligns with a pile of crystal placed underneath the frame of Under the Volcano. Thin-framed and white, these smaller pieces evoke the architectural periphery of the window shutter – a liminal yet still taxable square inch of property, a decorative detail yet functional necessity that either lets in or keeps out the city. The strength of PREDEAL is that, like the movement of a restless window-shutter, it flexes in and out of shaped and ‘raw’ materials, between the wider historical conditions found around every corner by the kinship circle of Athenian artists (that at times, Economou writes, “have to sit on each other’s laps”) and the artist’s own cultivated sensory attention to form, able as it is to display art-as-tension, as an ever contradictory pre-deal. Anna De Filippi
UNDER WESTERN EYES, Studio closing party, January 2017
Tonight is the longest night of the year. I promised myself I’ll sleep in my bed. Most nights I sleep in the black couch, under the window, in the living room, in my flat in Kypseli. My head lays North facing South. Now that I’m leaving the studio, I’ll have to move my working table, under the window, in the living room, in my flat in Kypseli. The black couch will go next to the wall on the left facing the window, my head laying East facing West. I’d like to work out a different arrangement so that the couch stays under the window, but my flat in Kypseli is already so full of old works, bits and pieces that it doesn’t seem feasible. I own the flat in Kypseli. When you have a house of your own you are blessed and damned never to throw anything away and not to sleep in your bed. The studio lays next to the American embassy in Athens. It’s a semi-basement, from the window I can see the feet of the guard. The first piece I made in the studio was two large scale collages featuring a blown up image of the Hiroshima bomb. Each collage consisted of 200 sulfurous yellow A4 printouts. When I took down the piece -so as to free space to make new pieces- I put the 400 sheets on a rack next to packs of printouts of the Kypseli fanzine we used to publish with a group of friends in 2013. When I decided to leave the studio and move everything to the flat in Kypseli, I got particularly anxious with the amount of paper. Because everywhere in the flat I have already hoarded tons of paper that I’m reluctant to throw away -a lot of plastic supermarket bags too, but those thankfully disintegrate by themselves. When I started thinking of leaving the studio it was June, it was the shortest night of the year, I was by the sea, and someone mentioned the Thousand Origami Cranes legend. In September, I walked in the studio next to the American embassy, I picked up a yellow sheet from the rack and started folding. I folded a few every day and the process constituted a good buy note to the space that accommodated me and my stuff for many years. Tonight is the longest night, the sea has gone cold, but I have folded 1000 Origami Cranes. Athens, December 21 2016
REASSEMBLY @ Tinos Quarry Platform, Tinos 05.07.17-31.10.17 The work of Greek artist D ora Economouspeaks to culturally and geographically specific representations of gender and feminism. Economou broadly combines modernist European sculptural practices with influences ranging from the “women’s work” movement of the 1970s to the kinds of paper folding found in Japanese origami. In H er Greatest Misses (2017) Economou points to competing layers of cerebral and somatic labor involved in paper folding practices through references to gendered embodiment. Economou stages a series of large-scale folded paper works stretching across the floor of the gallery, which, according to the artist, “takes up almost as much space as the spread out surface of my skin would.” Economou describes the process of learning origami techniques by watching YouTube tutorials, noting that such videos typically isolate the tutor’s hands thus obscuring gender. In the context of R eassembly ’s focus on musicality, Economou’s work recalls Fluxus artist and composer Ben Patterson whose paper-based performances invoked issues around race within a highly Eurocentric artistic movement. Here Economou similarly reinscribes the (gendered) body through the geometric folds of her contoured white surfaces. G. Douglas Barrett (abstract from the introductory brochure for the show REASSEMBLY @ Tinos Quarry Platform, Tinos, 05.07.17-31.10.17)
Every origami starts with a mountain or valley fold. Subsequently, “mountains” are turned into “valleys” and vice versa, the sea breaths in and breaths out, the road rises and falls. I had successfully completed Kawasaki’s (Japanese master paperfolder) spiral snail twice in the past. Following step by step a YouTube tutorial. As in most videos of this kind, all you can see on the screen is a pair of hands working around a tiny piece of paper, I cannot tell the sex or origin of the instructor. I’m working arms and legs surrounded by a piece of paper that takes up almost as much space as the spread out surface of my skin would. A friend once commented that this would be a considerable piece of land if it was stretched sufficiently. It took my five attempts to correctly fold the spiral this time. The misses turned out beautiful and very expressionistic. I want to fold another one and then unfold it and even it out to trace the marks and distress on the material. Most of Kasahara’s (Other Japanese master paperfolder) animals begin with the bird base. The bird base is also the starting point for the crane model. I have folded 1000 origami cranes. Supposedly, I’m granted longevity and a wish. I’m hoarding the animals compulsively remembering Yannoulis Chalepa’s (Greek Sculptor born in Pyrgos, Tinos) delirious compositions. Tinos, June 2017
MIRANDA 2018, Paper, variable dimensions @ Geometries, Athens Agricultural University
Dora Economou’s work bewilders with its intense simplicity and sublime plainness: skulls fashioned in a child-like manner, plainly folded curtains and artless origami. Economou’s work is inspired by the work of a ferocious commentator of modernity, José Guadalupe Posada, a Nineteenth century Mexican printmaker and engraver, known for the depiction of skulls, calaveras, and skeletons. A calavera is a representation of a human skull and it is often applied to decorative or edible handmade skulls made from either sugar or clay which are used in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) and the Roman Catholic holiday All Souls’ Day. These skulls engage in an endless Danse Macabre, which accounts for the satirical acuteness and the political and cultural urgency of a critic of modernity. Skulls are also often visible in still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age in the first half of the Seventeenth century. They are visual cues of the frenzy and violence of life, which is contrasted with the often frivolous and lush representations of wealth. Economou employs this vanitas motive in her sculptures, however, with a touch of sophisticated wit. The artist’s paper sculptures are just imperfect and irregular multiples, individualized copies of a generic original. As a matter of fact, they appear to be rather ‘expressionistic’ – as Economou maintains. Conversely, the paper skull cannot be taken literally as an actual manifestation of the inevitability of death and as an appeal to consider mortality. In fact, these skulls are rather mockups of how art always exhorts the viewer to consider and contemplate. Economou adores this kind of mock-ups. This is visible, for instance, in her love for traditional Japanese origami (from ori meaning “folding”, and kami meaning “paper”). This technique transforms a flat sheet square of paper into a finished sculpture through folding and sculpting techniques. No tearing or gluing is allowed. The best-known origami model is the Japanese paper crane, and Economou has devoted some of her time in making thousands of such cranes. It should be noted that making endless copies and surrogates constitutes a standard practice of the recent work of Economou. She is inspired, for instance, from these small mounds with the name fujizuka, which represent Mount Fuji, and were very popular during the Edo period. These ersatz mountains commonly found in and around Tokyo are usually around three meters high, and replicate the ten stations on Fuji itself, from the foot of the mountain to the summit. Pilgrims who were unable to climb Mount Fuji would ascend one of these surrogates instead. This practice poses a serious question regarding the value of reality and authenticity. The artist’s arrangements defy the idea of originality or even composition, which supposedly let beauty to triumph through the depths of the formless. Economou’s sculptures resemble rather such naturally shaped rocks of an awkward asymmetry, known in China as scholar stones or viewing stones – an inducement of thinking. Her work renders visible the emerging and immersing, the mental space between there it is and there it is not. In this regard, she sides rather with the way of thinking of the Orient or the Pre-Socratic philosophy in ancient Greek, which values process over outcome. Uncovering the flux of life is done however not with the utopian pathos of a modernist, but with the restricted self-irony and the allegoric scepticism of a contemporary. Sotirios Bahtsetzis (Press release for the show MOUNTAINS & VALLEYS @ Françoise Heitsch, Munich, 10.11.16-12.12.16)
The Day I Kept Missing Mt Fuji I mistreat the shoes I wear. Hardly does a pair survive me for more than a season. Sometimes –especially during the Summer months- I go through three or even four pairs. It doesn’t have to do with the quality of the shoes. I always buy descent brands from designated stores. The left shoe goes first. I don’t know if it is due to the way I walk or the streets I walk. At 11 am on Monday mornings I take a Shiatsu session with Konstadina. She’s got the gift. She tells me my left leg collaborates best, however, my left shoulder blade nurtures a company of evil turtles. Her studio is situated close to my old studio. On Monday mornings, I take a walk to my old haunts. From home to there I walk downhill through flat roads often flooded. Bad for the shoes. I first cross the local train lines and then I cross the national railway lines. Every road along the railway line is named Thessaloniki’s and further on Konstadinoupoleos. Such a banal concept but it makes my eyes water every time. For different reasons. From home to my new studio I walk uphill. I first climb Strefi Hill then I climb Lycabetous Hill. Bad for the shoes. The new studio –which is not so new anymore- is right next to the American Embassy which is closer to being in the States that I have been for a while. The American Embassy is in a nice neighborhood in Athens. You can tell a nice neighborhood by the care they put on the things they discard. They fix the cut branches into neat bouquets. My friend Kostas helped me carry a few of them down to the new studio. I loved my underground garden. But I’m afraid They Live. How long does it take to go to the other side of the world these days?
-How Old are you? -17. -How Long have you been 17? -A While. So Do ask me the Important Question. WHAT DO WE EAT? I eat meats. I like things that once walked and I like things that once swam. I enjoy scaling them, I enjoy gutting them, I enjoy cooking them and I enjoy having them. I don’t like things that once flew. I’m afraid of birds. I eat tomatoes; I love lettuces, cucumbers, garlics, eggplants, parsleys, artichokes, mints, cabbages, corianders, and greens. I’m not too fond of peppers but they come in colors. Not too fond on potatoes but they grow underground and are firm. The tastier vegetables are the ugliest. There are two exceptions I’m conscious of: carrots and zucchinis. I love their flowers. My mom says the secret to tasty food is abundance of onions. Bread, rice, fats and pastas are filling and comforting. I’m not into sweets but do get cravings, I don’t particularly care for fruit but I like siting their names: cherries, oranges, apples and bananas, papayas, apples, passions and pines, apricots, peaches, grapes and figs, melons, pears and waters. However, everything is better with salt. Today, I turn Forty-two. I will be Forty-two for a while. On this date in Turkey on Nine Five am they all pause for sixty seconds. To honor their Ataturk who died on the date on Nine Five am a while ago. I don’t think they’ve liked him very much for a while now. I have a weak spot for blue eyed guys. I’ve only ever seen black and white pictures of him though. The left sandal I bought last Easter in Naples is already on its way. The right one doesn’t look that grand either. After all, the only reason they made it this long is that I hardly wore them at all last Summer. I walked Pompeii and climbed Mt Vesuvius on a pair of boots. A heroic pair, made it through two Winters and three cities, bought them with my mom at Spiliopoulos in Monastiraki, the store doesn’t exist anymore unfortunately, my mom’s eye for shopping is uncanny, I’m not too bad myself, but that was a supernatural pair of boots. I left them in Naples, they deserved to go honorably in a place that touched me and not to be condemned to eternal rot on a back shelve in a back room in my house on Koliatsou Square. Three Winters ago, I found myself in Munich for the first time. In one of the big city museums, there happened to be a show about the ancient city of Pompeii. The curatorial line could be said to have been as follows: let’s assume that on the moment the Mountain erupted and the lava caught up with the city and the people, it didn’t quite terminate them, instead it had them locked forever inside a still solid moment. Let’s assume that we are now melting down the surrounding matter, turn the time around and there emerge the tools, the locations and their users. It was a very luxurious, expensive and intimidating show, fragments of materials, artefacts and apparatus mounted on superbly crafted pedestals of thick black Plexiglas, intentionally back-lit so as to appear floating in a holy sci-fi perpetuity. I was much affected by the walk in the frozen paradise and partly baffled and I promised myself to visit the actual Pompeii site as soon as possible. After all it is situated both geographically and culturally closer to home. As a matter of fact, I had visited Pompeii back in 1995 with the Athens School of Fine Arts. But the only images I could bring back to mind were fayum mummy portraits and marqueteries. Made no sense - these things couldn’t have been there-
and made even less sense that I would have forgotten. Pompeii was not what I expected. Amnesiac imaginations molded by a Bavarian utopia; it felt awkward to be walking around a place that was very much like a Summer in the Island; very familiar, harshly lit, very comforting and very mundane. Just before I got there this time, sometime in early spring, they had reopened the Villa of Mysteries; had been closed for twenty years and it was twenty years ago that I was there for the first time. The wall paintings, earthly color outlines of mental box interiors, had registered in my head as evidence of the warmth of woods. And then I found myself back in the square room with the wedding preparations scene; a circle of women, so beautiful, so still, so eternal and so sad. Like Lot’s Wives turning into tears of salt just in case they didn’t look back in time.
“My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.” The second pair of sandals I bought with Anastasia late last Summer before I left for Istanbul still stands. Although they are very stylish in an Italian sort of way, I didn’t wear them at all that Summer. I tried once but they cut my ankles badly. I suppose my feet had grown soft by the sea and the Volcanoes. But this Summer, after I massaged them for a long time with moisturizing lotion, they feel comfortable and reliable. I brought them with me to Japan, them and the new pair of boots I bought in Milan in Christmas. The older pair I bought with my mom in Athens were also Italian. The younger pair are even nicer but I’m afraid the skin is too thin and the beautiful weaved pattern at the back won’t last. But I had them on me one of the days I kept missing Mt Fuji and since the Summer in Athens lasts for a very long time they can rest to see another Winter. As for the sandals I bought with Anastasia, they had a hard time two rainy days in the dry gardens of Kyoto, but the sidewalks in Japan were immaculate and it felt normal to go down and wipe my shoes clean frequently with a tissue that I kept in my bag because I never found a bin to throw it away. Because I was careful not to abuse them on the hard streets of Athens on the way back, they also made Prague. The weather was nice; I climbed to the castle and visited the houses of the Czech Cubists with the Origami facades. I even brought them back to Nissyros together with a pair of trainers that smelled of Sulphur from the year before. The trainers didn’t make a second Summer in the Volcano, I hang them from the ceiling at the Old Baths. They said they will reconstruct the Old Baths during the Winter but I have a feeling next Summer my shoes will still be there. Unless a cow gets to them first. There were too many cows on the island. The island is small and round, a perfect little planet swimming in the sea. She can’t help worrying that the cows will eat it away. They will grow too heavy for the earth to support them and the crust will crack letting hell loose. But the locals don’t seem to worry. The herds roam free munching at the shrubs, a holy population of Baobabs appropriating the effect of a meteor. They don’t milk them but they cut them for the Sunday feast. In Tokyo I sampled every part of a pig. We just missed the cherry blossoms. Missing Fuji though, I climbed higher and got to see a couple of trees that still bore flowers. They love the cherry blossoms but they’re not crazy about fruit. However, our host in Kyoto brought us strawberries, water and beer. Agnieska told me that Mt Fuji reveals itself to you when you
least expect it. I believe she meant to make me feel better for the day we set off together to Lake Hakone and half way there I got off and turned back. It was a clear day and I wasted it. I didn’t know how uncommon a clear day is in Japan. The next days, I looked for it and missed it repeatedly. I tried to approach it from Lake Kawaguchi on the North. From its sore one can witness the Fuji view which prints on their banknote. On a clear day that is. But it wasn’t a clear day and neither was I. I wasn’t stingy this time, I rode the tourist cart, I bought a ticket to the Panorama and I sat on a bench for hours staring at the white light. Waiting for the Ghost Volcano to appear. I swear I did get a glimpse of the snowcapped peak. Practically nothing was printed on film. A fingerprint lays where the peak should have been. But I shot a picture of a monkey on the last cherry blossom. When I went closer, she came closer. I got scared and ran. On my last day in Tokyo I started off early to make as many temples as possible, and maybe, if I got lucky, catch them cut the tuna. It was a rainy day but suddenly the sky opened up to the brightest day yet. I moved fast, didn’t get too lost following the metro exit signs, got to the top of the Municipality Building in Shinjuku and shot a dissent picture of Mt Fuji on the West. But the best picture I shot from the plane window on the way out of Japan. I really wanted to see a Fujizuka. I found out about them by chance. They are scale models of Mt Fuji made of rock and earth from the actual Mt Fuji. You climb the Fujizuka, your feet touching on Mt Fuji material and you look at Mt Fuji. There are but a couple left. The one I tracked down was under reconstruction. I shot a picture from afar. But on the way to the airport I saw from the bus window a Mt Fuji scale model on the entrance to Disneyland. My friend Andreas actually climbed Mt Fuji. He sent pictures. He told me about the Day He Saw The Pacific Ocean. I can’t remember clearly the day I saw the Pacific Ocean. It was a very long time ago during a family trip to visit relatives in LA. I couldn’t have seen Mt Fuji from the Other Side. It was too far away and Mauna Loa would have blocked the view anyway. Volcanos come in numbers and in sizes. I once found myself in the Netherlands. First I visited Manolis in Amsterdam, then Vaso in Rotterdam. It was during the longest day of the year. I watched the sunset and not long afterwards I watched the sunrise. I felt as sad as the Little Prince did the Day He Watched Too Many Sunsets. “the scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies: a poet’s extravagance which as quite often mirrors truth but upside down and backward since the mirror’s unwitting manipulator busy in his preoccupation has forgotten that the back of it is glass too: because if they only did, instead of which yesterday’s sunset and yesterday’s tea both are inextricable from the scattered indestructible uninfusable grounds blown through the endless corridors of tomorrow, into the shoes we will have to walk in and even the sheets we will have (or try) to sleep between: because you escape nothing, you free nothing; the pursuer is what is doing the running: no fleeing nor repudiation nor for this moment more even urgency anywhere in the room or outside it either above or below or before or behind the tiny myriad beast sounds and the vast systole and diastole of summer night.”
There were Three Volcanos in The Little Prince’s Island. There are three craters in Nissyros. The Netherlands are as flat as a crater and they tilt. From the plane window it reminded me of South Crete. Full of Hothouses. I walked on a pair of platform sandals that I got from a random store on Patission St. They looked cool, Red White and Blue, tall, fake leather. They didn’t last, but this Summer I bought a pair of flip flops at a store on Ag. Konstadinou that resembles them on a way. I wish I bought a pair of flip flops in Japan. I wish I asked how they call the flip flops in Japan. We call them Sayonara. Keep forgetting to check out why. Sounds like a bad joke from an old Greek movie. The flip flops from Ag. Konstadinou I brought with me to Mykonos. It was the beginning of the season and I watched the Seasonal Workers plant the Sea Umbrellas and lay out the Sea Beds. From Little Venice I shot the same picture my father used to shoot, the sun diving directly into the sea, with the exact same camera: A YASHIKA FRII with a ZEISS 1,4/50 lenses which once upon a time my father had bought on a trip to Japan. Many years later I brought that same camera back to Tokyo. And I tried to shoot a picture of Mt Fuji. Dora Economou Athens, 24 October 2016 *The citations come from the movie “Twilight 2008” and William Faulkner’s “Light in August” and “Intruder in the Dust” respectively.
Life was created in the valleys.
It blew up on to the hills on the old terrors,
He had a dark idea that being so short,
so close to the earth and his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start.
And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.
And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.
Those with no work apart from their actual work
They tumbled in popularity like broken birds.
NATURALIST @ RIBOT arte contemporanea, Milan, 3.12.15 – 20.01.16 *The titles of the works come from four books that accompanied me during Summer and Fall 2015: “Where I lay dying” by William Faulkner, “The Time Regulation Institute” by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, “Revenge of the lawn” by Richard Brautigan and “Heart of darkness” by Joseph Conrad.
RETURN TO SENDER (II) 2014, Wood folding rule, garden wire, paper, variable dimensions
Dora Economou’s work composes an enigmatic manual of objects and images; a manual exploring their mechanisms of production as well as function; their relation to other objects and images, existing or potential. Her work poses the questions What are they? Where do they come from? How do they work? and answers them by suggesting tangible scenarios. The title A Modern Hug outlines essential elements of the artist’s research and practice. ‘A’ indicates the singularity of each work and its position in a continuous line of production. Moreover, ‘A’, as an indefinite article, does not circumscribe the work’s identity and permits multiple connotations. ‘Modern’ acknowledges the revolutionary outlook and formal radicalness of the vanguard movements of the 20th century. Furthermore, it alludes to the disclosure of materials, to the use and reference of industrial products. ‘Hug’ denotes the works’ scale in proportion to the body and the tool. It also signifies the physicality and subjectivity involved in the process which expands the ‘Modern’ industrialized and standardized forms of mass production. A Modern Hug is a complex and graceful embrace of objecthood. Dora Economou assembles, fragments, alters, and displays common industrial materials, found objects and images. Being a sculptor trained as painter, her works deal with matter as representation, with form as process, and with space as stage. The final form is abstract or often an inexact replica of massively produced objects. A prototype of something that is not unique, a facsimile of something that does not exist, or something new made out of something old raise ontological questions; reflect on materiality and immateriality, on substance and flux. This imitation of imitation, which according to Plato is twice removed from the truth, produces fake fakes which become originals. The process of repetition and the production through consecutive reproductions is an approach to the source, to the initial gesture. Dora Economou’s work operates by revealing the qualities of its components. What is at stake is neither the craftsmanship nor the use of the readymade, it is the interpretation of the act of seeing and making, the reinvention of a function. This inverted, self-reflective, almost counter-productive production process questions the use value of labor and leisure products, the artist and the viewer both as producers and consumers. Dora Economou’s work establishes a distance from the familiar object, image, environment and re-appropriates it as something else. It accomplishes a poetic rehabilitation as it shifts to another possible shape or purpose which things could have if they were not as they are, if they did not do what they actually do. But this is not only fiction; it happens as objects, images, and places evolve, become obsolete, even die. It happens when we try to figure out objects of ancient or foreign civilizations that do not circulate anymore or do not belong to our world at hand. The eye exist in the savage state, writes André Breton. In Dora Economou’s work what you see is not predefined, it is suspended, contradicted by a deep sense of black humor expressed with gentleness; it is challenged and, thus, challenging. Galini Notti (Press release for the show A MODERN HUG @ Françoise Heitsch, Munich, 23.01.14-29.03.14)
I WALK SLOWLY 2013, KAPA mount, rice paper, 200 x 70 x 15 cm
SKINNY VOICE 2010, Stiched fabric, variable dimensions
THE HORROR, THE HORROR 2018, Pumice, paint, variable dimensions