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Katerina Apostolidou’s video installation Common Grounds (2018), conceptually nestles among the school’s chemistry laboratory and the library of the 251 Air Force General Hospital, which preceded the school and since 1976 is situated in the area of Katehaki. Disorientating the viewer with the use of images from both locations, the artist puts weight on the meaning of remembrance and its perpetuation through physical and non-physical space. Subconscious ties between realms constantly arise; the school lab could be the hospital’s clinical lab and, similarly, the hospital’s library could be that of the school’s. The reversing of spatial individuality and function does not only distract our perception of reality, but it also detaches us from the seeming objectivity of geography. It fleetingly contrives a common place where two domains merge together producing an intricate memory detection system. The female voiceover, belonging to a former member of staff of the Air Force Hospital when it was still based in this building, takes us on a journey of evocation. Traversing across realities progressively reveals the factual identity of sites, which are still attached to a mutual and shared history. Books belonging to the previous premises of the hospital are now safeguarded at its current venue. Going back, forth and back again over time, Apostolidou utilises those books to highlight a taxonomy of self, commingled with the utopian realisation about the knowledge of time.

(Text by Kostas Prapoglou from the digital catalogue of the exhibition Shell// the Politics of Being.)

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I’ll never be like you. I change all the time explores the limits and consequences of technological modernity in relation to human psychology as well as the concept of confinement and social stigmatization.

The work time (2023) takes place in the open-air theatre located inside the Dromokaiteion Psychiatric Hospital of Attica on Iera Odos (“The Sacred Way”), the main artery that connected Athens with Eleusis and the Thriasian Plain since antiquity whose history goes back to antiquity and Greek mythology.

Today it is largely an industrial area, hosting some of Greece’s major industrial facilities, such as its largest oil refineries and steel mills, as well as being rapidly being transformed into a logistics hub.

In 1961, the psychiatrist George Lyketsos staged Aeschylus’ ancient tragedy Prometheus  Βound  in the open air theatre of the Psychiatric Hospital (built in 1958), performed by the inmates.

This connection between the ancient Promethean myth and the psychotherapeutic process was the starting point for linking  the symbolic figure of Prometheus with the identity of the city of Eleusis from antiquity to the present day .

The video posits, on the one hand, the tragic hero of Aeschylus, who in Greek mythology has a dual origin and role, as the benefactor of humanity, god of arts, fire, potter and metallurgist, but also as the cause of man’s suffering whose rebellion and punishment are linked to themes of disobedience and conflict and on the other hand, Eleusis with its emblematic archaeological history, and its industrial past and present.

The emblematic references to antiquity and the deluge of industrial development seem to be the two faces of Elefsina, which from the late 19th and most of the 20th century was well aware of the extortionate consequences of its industrialization.

Fragments  from different texts are heard such as Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound – but also from Kafka, Heiner Müller, John Christopher Müller, Kerenyi, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Bergman (Personna), Zamyatin, as well as industrial memories of Eleusinian workers and excerpts of a dialogue with a bot.

The video weaves  a poetic correlation  of the outdoor theatre and readings  from this combination of literary, philosophical and cinematic references.

Through an elliptical visual narrative, between the space and two female figures – a parallel connection to Demeter and Persephone or  Elisabeth and Alma from Ingmar Bergman’s  film Persona –  a multiple field of interpretation, identification  – social as well as personal –  is opened up  through time in which the different faces of Eleusis past, present and the potential future, emerge.

The complex narrative, complemented by a polyphonic chorus** and the music of Thodoris Rellos outline  the two faces of Elefsina, the primordial and the contemporary which  intersect and merge.

As is the case with Demeter and Persephone or with Alma and Elizabeth in Persona.

Kerenyi speaks of one and the same person when he refers to Demeter and Persephone, the daughter who becomes mother and daughter again, in the perpetual natural law.

This dual relationship also reverts to the image of the film that is divided into two parts and again becomes one as the narrative progresses.

The title of the play, a phrase from Alma the young nurse to Elizabeth, the famous actress who chooses silence, metaphorically recognizes in the identification of the two women the two faces of Eleusis and brings the question to the present reality, to new challenges.

The “Promethean” Eleusis has felt in her body the unanswered “empty” imprint of the industrial development of the last century and the “shame” when the Promethean gift turned into punishment and destruction, into amnesia and obscurity.

In the play, the screen of the theatre functions as a mirror of the other world where the Acheron, the turbulent waters in the cistern of the Old Olive Factory that lead the gaze both down and up, and the coming of spring that welcomes Persephone with swallows every year…

There is also a re-enactment of the scene at the end of Bergman’s film in which the phrase I will never be like you, I am constantly changing, ending  with a whisper,  the word Nothing, open to all that can possibly occur…

 

*The title is issued from Ingmar Bergman’s script for the  film Persona (1966).

**Participation of the Center for  Mental Health Korydallos, Dromokaiteio Psychiatric Hospital.

Ten days in a Mad House examines the use of psychiatry to pathologise female nonconformity throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The four murals of  𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 appropriate and transform the language of psychiatry. Based on questionable symptoms used to forcefully commit women to psychiatric asylums (𝘏𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘢, 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘶𝘴, 𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨_𝘔𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯), the handwriting in each mural repeats and loops upon itself, the symptoms bursting out of the confines of the patient case file to transfigure into images of wild beasts upon the wall. The fourth phrase 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 is recorded as a reason of discharge  in   the archives of Dromokaiteion Hospital.

 

Through the act of writing, the murals pay tribute to the memory of the women who were violently detained for failing to conform to the standards of ‘normalcy’ within a patriarchal society – but also to all women around the world suffering under the current rise of gender-based violence. At the same time, the murals are a reminder of the marginalisation of female voices throughout history, as women have often resorted to expressing themselves through illegible manuscripts in response to a world which would rather they remained politically and socially invisible.

The title 𝘛𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦 refers to the book written by journalist Elisabeth Jane Cochrane under the pen name Nellie Bly in 1887. In this book she describes her experience in the Blackwell Island asylum, where, on a mission for the New York World newspaper, she was hospitalised under pretence of insanity and discovered the horrific living conditions therein.

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The video records the courtyard of the former Corfu psychiatric hospital.  Through the dialogue of the double projections and the sound of the  two parallel narrations It suggests the impossibility to find a balance between the ‘normal’ and  the ‘non normal’. While imprinting the inability of the two different worlds to coincide it  implies that a transition  to a state of self-determination is possible.

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In If you will only remember to keep your eyes open… Rosa Luxembourg’s phrases from Letters from prison to her friend Sonia Liebknecht written between 1917-1918 are related to images from a stadium situated in a suburban forest north of Athens. In these letters, R. L. describes with great sensitivity and in great detail the surrounding nature, birds, insects, trees, clouds, “simply life itself”.
During one calendar year, I tried to record through a persistent observation the neglected forest as the seasons changed, keeping always in mind these letters and what I imagined would be her own gaze. Through it, I saw the abandoned stadium as a metaphor for an inner space, a space of transformation, where a change is possible.

In the work Doorcats, four drawings, executed by both hands simultaneously are recorded in real time. The ‘animated’ drawings repeat the same pattern, the image of a door indicating a space of confinement while it is being transformed into a cat’s head. This unexpected transformation reminding Kafka’s novel suggests the desire for resistance to any form of manipulation through the reference to the traits of these animals which represent independence and freedom.

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In the work In Between the phrases being written on the screen describe the ‘writer’, a torture machine that ‘engraves’ on the body of the condemned the law they have broken in Kafka’s ” Penal Colony” inventing a kind of ‘riddle’.
Between two chests
A wheel with teeth
Two needles for the feet
For the head only one
The law wraps the body like a belt

The work “In between” negotiates the notion of punishment through writing and drawing. It investigates the point where the act of writing becomes drawing and vice versa.
The hands that appear on the four sides of the screen write towards both directions . The markers look like needles that weave, embroider, write, with quick movements as if they are executing a program.
As the words become a drawing through an exhaustive repetition, the drawing becomes the framework of a field where the viewer is invited to project his own images. it becomes the frame of an imaginary artwork.
The act of writing, traditionally iconoclastic recorded by the camera lens, is annuled and restored to the image.

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Through the act of drawing, the artist’s hand follows the course that a couple of black fish follow as they move in the water. In the ambiguous image, the lines seem to follow and dictate the paths of the fish and vice versa.
In Tracing Tracks, the image of the fish and its relation to the act of drawing is used as an allegory. It ultimately questions whether we make our own choices or if our goals and course in life are predetermined. The repetition of this action is similar to a kind of self-punishment as the question is repeated constantly without answer.

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The Hotel borrows elements from the vocabulary of cinema but with the clear intention of eliminating narrative. The central space of an abandoned hotel (Hotel Triton in Andros, built by the famous Greek modernist architect Aris Konstantinidis) is transformed through digital manipulation. The walls and other parts of the building are removed and re-placed behind the openings, blocking the view to the landscape, as well as blocking the exits. The building is thus denied its original function and is instead ‘turned inwards’. In the beginning of the video the viewer witnesses the space being flooded while numerous pieces of furniture literally sink into the image – throughout the duration of the work – provoking a feeling of suffocation and relief. A timeless feeling lends the space another dimension, one that relates more to inner human states.

 

Sample video:
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The House, takes place in an abandoned house that was used as a nursery school for several years. The video examines the ways the history of a space is manipulated, through its different functions and – in a metaphorical sense – the way in which our individual memory ‘manipulates’ our own personal history. The camera explores the interior of the house until it reaches the small central room. There, the space slowly begins to fill up with water. In the flooded room one can observe cups, teapots and an endless series of tea sets incessantly sink into the flooded space, thus transforming it into an imaginary, uncanny, and restless landscape.