Common Grounds

Video:

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.)