2018-2019

A Climate
Challenge:
Platform
of Events

research program

credits

Visual Artists Association Members
of the Board of Directors 2018-2020:
Dr Monika Asimenou
Othonas Charalambous
Ismini Haholiadou
Kyriakos Theocharous
Evagoras Vanezis
program selection, coordination

Evagoras Vanezis
Lizzy Ioannidou
Eleni Antoniou (Chapter 2)
translation of texts

Ismini Haholiadou
Mikaella Melanidou
Sofia Georgiou
Alexandra Panayi (Chapter 2)
Mirka Koutsouri (Chapter 3)
photography

Myria Konnari
art direction of poster & catalogue

Cultural Services of the Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sport and Youth
supporter

The program A Climate Challenge of Visual Artists Association Cyprus for 2019,
was conceived by the board of directors with the mission of providing an engaging, collaborative platform for contributing to the manifold conversations happening around one of the most pressing issues of our times, that of climate change. The question and task we set was "how can art, as an extended field of action, raise awareness and help to better envisage and act upon a sustainable and ecologically fair present and future?".
The platform aimed to explore how art sensitizes and is sensitized by contemporary environmental issues. The notion of environment, the conditions of coexistence, current ecological concerns, how a collective body shapes its enveloping space, and how this space configures the identity of community, constituted the main research tenets. The program focused on collaborative and process-driven approaches to production. Through workshops, exhibitions, and a residency program, we have attempted to involve varying audiences and bring together multiple perspectives, in order to probe new sensibilities and possible paths of engagement.

Chapter One

Inter-Weaving

Basketry and straw weaving workshop with Alexandra Pampouka

10.11 + 17.11 + 24.11 + 08.12.2018

The workshop Inter-Weaving proposed an artistic approach towards weaving with plants and also the simulation of these techniques with the human body. The participants came into contact with weaving techniques through experiential processes and exercises. Observing the weaving techniques, they had the chance to make their own deductions on what constitutes a team. At the end of the workshop, a presentation and an exhibition of participants’ work took place.

Theatre and
climate change

A three day theatre worksho with Maria Varnakkidou and Kyros Papavassiliou

09 + 10 + 11.07.2019

The workshop offered to the participants the chance to explore their bodies in relation to space and nature. It was suitable for anyone interested in developing their creative expression, movement, and transformation through theatre whilst simultaneously connecting to the natural and social environment. During the workshop, improvisational theatrical exercises were implemented that focused on the three levels of bodily awareness: bodily, emotional, spiritual. The exercises explored how these three levels can be affected by the environment, which is now facing climate change. Beyond its practical scope, the workshop aimed at the familiarisation of the participants with contemporary dramaturgy, aiming to affect them in order to develop theatrical material related to nature and the climate crisis.

Servus.at
Research Lab

residency program

11-26.07.2019

Christina Gruber
Antonio Zingaro
Davide Bevillacqua
(servus.at team)
participating artists

Following the objective of the platform for the creation of culture and awareness around the issue of climate change, the team Servus.at (Christina Gruber, Antonio Zingaro, and Davide Bevillacqua) presented lectures, gave workshops, and conducted research around the techno-logical infrastructure of Cyprus. They urged the public to visit them at the space of Phytorio to share ideas, worries, and creative solutions around the issue of climate change. On Thursday, July 11th, the team conducted a workshop focusing on the subject of Digital Greenwashing, i.e. the ways in which different companies use the rhetoric that is being developed around the protection of the environment as a shallow, moralizing marketing tool. The goal of the team is to develop ideas and tools of critical engagement through creative practices. Such a practice is that Christina Gruber. Starting from an imaginary framework that allows her to visualize the symbiosis of the planet with technology, she presented Digital Clouds: No Water. No Cloud, on Thursday 18th June. On Wednesday 25th July, the team presented an archive of the conversations that took place as well as the ways in which they developed the conceptual and practical networks between the themes they examined.

Chapter Two

Innovative
Flow Solutions
/ Head and
Hand series

Solo exhibition by Kyriaki Costa

Opening 02.11.2019
Duration 02-29.11.2019

What is the role of the human against the flow of time and therefore the natural fluidity of the environment? The project Head and Hand could be described as a study on the maintenance and the redefinition of space. Kyriaki Costa points out details in the urban environment of Cyprus that need restoration and repairs them with the help of a group of technicians. With the main source of inspiration being the natural and the man-made deterioration of the urban space, the artist asks the technicians to take care of the object that is under “study” in any way they want to and in that way tries to bring to the surface a more personal view on what it means to interact with what surrounds you. The initial idea for this exhibition revolved around the observation of the corrosion of the stone wall of Phytorio, which was built by Neoptolemos Michaelides. The -unsuccessful- attempt of its maintenance, led the artist to the “building” of an Interactive-Artistic action. Specifically, the interest of the artist turns to the observation of the “craftsmen”, the people, and the technicians acting in public, structured environments. Τhe aim of Head and Hand is to deal with the space, its feeling, its reincorporation in the contemporary environment, and how through the repair of the place, the urban space is interrogated and redefined. The exhibition takes place within the framework of the platform A Climate Challenge, a research program that explores the ways in which art sensitizes and is sensitized by contemporary environmental issues.

Hand and Head walking

(You are welcome to bring your own dog along too)

workshop/open discussion with Kyriaki Costa, in collaboration with Sofia Eliza Bouratsi

14.12.2019

Artist – researcher Kyriaki Costa, in collaboration with art theorist and independent curator Sofia Eliza Bouratsi, conducted the workshop/open discussion Hand and Head walking (You are welcome to bring your own dog along too), in an effort to develop a project that deals with the poetic familiarization of public space, by locating all those points of the urban environment which feed and attract thoughts regarding the ways with which a contemporary citizen is able to connect with their town. Walking is an important practice, a technique through which we are able to experience a place. By examining tools such as observation, cartography, and free association and thinking, we are experimenting with a practice that can be used as the first step for one to realize how they see and how they interpret the public space through their everyday walks. During the meetup, we explored the care network of our town, focusing on concerns regarding the architectural urban details, the restoration and repair, abandonment, lack of water, access to water, as well as the imaginary that always and inevitably tags along with our relationship with the world that surrounds us. "Hand and Head walking (You are welcome to bring your own dog along too)" was connected to Kyriaki Costa’s exhibition Innovative Flow Solutions/ Head and Hand series and was theoretically contextualized by Sofia Eliza Bouratsi, who discussed and posed questions around the thematics of everyday rituals in the public space, the meaning of walking as a practice and an aesthetic experience, the familiarization with the urban landscape as a necessary requirement for its care.

Chapter Three

...νida digna
de ser vivida

Group show and performances

Opening 21.12.2019
Duration 21.12.2019-22.01.2020

Marietta Mavrokordatou
Korallia Stergides
participant artists

Savvas Hadjixenophontos, founder of Fornelia Ovens
Michalis Tapakoudis, founder of Gigantas Antaios Compressed Earth Blocks
collaborators

Peter Eramian
curator

Are we ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together?*

A life, that is, worthy of being lived.**

The occasion brings together works by artists Marietta Mavrokordatou and Korallia Stergides alongside the entrepreneurial initiatives Fornelia Ovens and Gigantas Antaios Compressed Earth Blocks. This crossover proposes a speculative revaluation of the significance of earth and sun, two nonhuman agencies inextricably enmeshed with human culture, towards the potential of new regimes of perception and technologies in reconfiguring the ecologies to which we belong. During the opening Savvas Hadjixenophontos, founder of Fornelia Ovens, and Michalis Tapakoudis, founder of Gigantas Antaios Compressed Earth Blocks, will be presenting and demonstrating their respective technologies.

A reading by Marietta Mavrokordatou and lecture-performance by Korallia Stergides will follow.

* Bruno Latour quoted by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter.
** Silvia Federici referring to the Spanish phrase "vida digna de ser vivida" in Re-enchanting the World.

Celestial Circles

a workshop with Rachel Pimm

22.01.2020

A Climate Challenge platform, invited artist/researcher Rachel Pimm directed an image & text collage/physics co-making workshop, together with Marietta Mavrokordatou, Korallia Stergides, and Peter Eramian, in which different universes were combined collaboratively to create new transits. Rotations, remixes, and eclipses paralleled equations, mathematical constants, and astrological positions. All were welcome to bring images/texts in either digital/print form that represented their selected universes.

︎︎︎

2016-2017

MO.17:
Young Artists
From Cyprus

research program

credits

Maria Loizidou
Natalie Yiaxi
planning and organization

Julia Geerlings
Emily Gray
Charis Kanellopoulou
Evagoras Vanezis
curators

Chrystèle Moulun Casanova
Christopher Marinos
Maria Petrides
Socrates Socratous
invited guests and speakers

Tina Pandi
researcher-collaborator

Leontios Toumpouris
Evagoras Vanezis
coordination

Nicos Stephou
design

Nicholas Chrysanthou
web developer

Maria Petrides
editing and translating

The Visual Artists and
Art Theorists Association – phytorio
sponsor

Cultural Services, Ministry of Education
and Culture, Sport and Youth
supporter

The project ΜΟ.17: Young artists from Cyprus has been designed right from the outset as an open process that attempts to activate artistic and critical potentiality, to empower smaller groups, and to allow voices that are just emerging to be heard. The work of the younger generation of Cypriot artists constitutes a privileged field of research, as it largely remains unknown and unexplored, theoretically and curatorially, not only for young artists who have just begun their quest but also for preceding generations.

The project focuses on an in-the-process artistic reality, seeking to explore the dynamics and vitality of the younger generation of Cypriot artists, active both in Cyprus and outside. In a fluid landscape of intense sociopolitical transformations, this research attends to new perspectives, experiences, languages, and possibilities, and to processes that shape the artistic present. It wonders about the trends and practices, experiments and pursuits, experimentations and orientations of young artists. Without predisposing conclusions or imposing a priori readings or predefined and closed formations, the project ΜΟ.17 asks about the unique features of contemporary artistic activity in Cyprus. Namely, how experiences of displacement, nomadic mobility, and practices of convergence between the local and global shape an artistic reality, both local and, at once, beyond the local. How do young artists position themselves in relation to issues around history, politics, and collective memory? Which concerns are central to a search and redefinition of an artistic identity? What do new artistic practices of exchange and self-organizing approaches in times of recession look like? The main focal point of MO.17 is to conduct field research. It is structured in sections and/or stages that are, on the one hand, distinct, and on the other, permeate each other, working as a mental map that determines different stages of the research process, the subject, the objectives, the methodology, the limitations and the possibilities in a dialectical and interchanging formation.

Adopting a research orientation, MO.17 aims to surpass the short-lived character that respective curatorial undertakings which focus on momentum, usually have. It also seeks to create a foundation for research, which will constantly evolve and move beyond its moment of implementation, opening into the future.

Tina Pandi
art historian, curator at the collections department of the
National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens

Project Timeline

Modus Operandi 2017 (MO.17), dealt with emerging artists under the age of 35, and during their early professional stage. It aimed to present a matrix of practices, as well as their connections to local culture and the world, as they currently stand, and to create the conditions for an animated and potentially, expanding archive that documents today, as well as in the long run, the artistic vigour of local artists. Taking the form of a publication, website and exhibitions, it allowed anyone interested, on either a local or international level, to connect directly with artists whose work resonated with their interests. Consequently, the archive offers an overview of an emerging art scene in Cyprus, creating a place for meetings, discussion and exchange.

October 2016

Meetings with art historian, Tina Pandi, research collaborator of MO.17. Composition of research proposal and presentation, open to the public,
at Phytorio. The suggestions and proposals of the participants are documented, and discussion begins about how the programme and its scheduling will proceed.

December 2016

Open call to young artists from Cyprus. Design of an online platform for the submission of material coordinated by our colleague, Evagoras Vanezis. Research and processing/preparation of material by Maria Loizidou, Evagoras Vanezis, Natalie Yiaxi.

May-July 2017

Coordination: Maria Loizidou, Evagoras Vanezis, Natalie Yiaxi.

Invitation to curators: Emily Gray, Glasgow, Julia Geerlings, Paris, Charis Kanellopoulou, Athens, and Evagoras Vanezis, Nicosia.

At this first stage, the curators processed the material and then visited Nicosia to meet the artists at Phytorio. For the artists not living in Cyprus, online meetings were arranged.

During their stay in Cyprus, the curators visited the exhibition venues selected in Nicosia: Thkio Ppalies, Garage, Korai, Neoterismoi Toumazou, and Phytorio.

Through the communication of curators, the artists they met, and the work artists submitted through the online platform, the curators arrive at the sections and subjects.

The distribution of artists and spaces develops, without being strictly defined or to the exclusion of other orientations.

In addition, after an invitation by the Association, art historian Christopher Marinos, Athens, visits Phytorio in June and meets and talks with the artists of MO.17.

September-October 2017

Theorists visit, discussions and collaborations with other institutions and art spaces on issues that concern MO.17 occur:

Maria Petrides
Independent writer & editor

Chrystèle Moulun Casanova
(in collaboration with Artseen) Art Director and Founder of Element.a, Paris

Socratis Socratous
Visual Artist

The online archive of MO.17 is completed and presented. The two publications of MO.17, designed by Nico Stephou, are launched at Phytorio.Since October 2017, Leontios Toumpouris has been the coordinator of the project.Workshop and Exhibition openings.

MO:17 Publications

A. Artist’s Database Publication view
B. Exhibition Documentation and Texts view

Exhibitions and Events of Modus Operandi 2017: Young Artist from Cyprus

The Visual artists and art theorists association - phytorio presented a series of exhibitions as part of the program “MODUS OPERANDI 2017: Young Artists From Cyprus” (MO.17), in four artist-run spaces in Nicosia. After the successful launch of the online directory for young Cypriot artists www.momomo17.com (currently being updated), we continued the MO.17 program in collaboration with curators from Cyprus, Greece, Britain, and the Netherlands. The exhibition participants were artists from the MO.17 directory, expressing the artistic inquiries of an emerging generation of young Cypriot artists. All the exhibitions opened simultaneously on the 16th of October 2017, at art spaces Thkio Ppalies, Garage, Koraï, and Phytorio, with performances at Neoterismoi Toumazou project space.

Communicating Vessels

at Thkio Ppalies

Duration: 16-28 October 2017
Hours: Tue-Fri 17:00-20:00
Sat 11:00-17:00

Raissa Angeli
Peter Eramian
Maria Theodorou and Stephanie Stylianou (dia.gnosis)
Evi Pala
Michelle Padeli
Nayia Savva
Korallia Stergides
Maria Toumazou
Leontios Toumpouris
Michael Charalambous
Lilia Hadjigeorgiou
Dimitris Chimonas
participating artists

Julia Geerlings
curator

The exhibition borrows its title from the experiment of communicating vessels, where two or more containers filled with a liquid or gas have the same level if they are connected to each other. Sparked by the work Les Vases Communicants (1932) by French antifascist poet Andre Breton, the exhibition presents how young Cypriot artists participating in MO17 “communicate” with tradition, especially as it manifests through works in clay and ceramics.

Ecstatic Textures

at Garage

Duration: 16-28 October 2017
Hours: Tue-Fri 17:00-20:00
Sat 11:00-17:00

Evelyn Anastasiou
Maria Andreou,
Adonis Archontidis
Kyriakos Theocharous
Victoria Leonidou
Anastasia Mina
Panayiotis Mina
Sophia Papacosta
Anthi Pafiou
Marina Xenofontos
AnnaMaria Charalambous
participating artists

Evagoras Vanezis
curator

With the dynamic condensation of artistic creation at artist-run spaces—as well as other independent endeavours—as its starting point, the group exhibition Ecstatic Textures focuses on the sociopolitical dimension of production and exhibition conditions in Cyprus. The narration created through its overview emphasises the processes and materials used by artists; meanwhile, the presented practices negotiate aspects of the image-as-body and the nature of the object as a subject that speaks in a language without utterance—thus finding a place in aesthetic processes.

Displacement
As a State of Mind

at Koraï

Duration: 16-28 October 2017
Hours: Tue-Fri 17:00-20:00
Sat 11:00-17:00

Ioanna Apostolou
Lenia Georgiou
Efy Zeniou
Stelios Kallikinou
Demetra Kallitsi
Marios Constantinides
Eleni Mouzourou
Alexandra Pambouka
Yorgos Petrou
Eleni Phyla
Ismene Haholiadou
Stella Christofi
participating artists

Charis Kanellopoulou
curator

Through this exhibition we observe how, in a world where everything is moving rapidly and travel has become effortless, the concept of displacement has transformed from something painful into a way of life. The curator identifies Cypriot artists whose work has to do with dislocation, and the way it connects to loss, locality, memory and identity.

Beyond An
Event Horizon

at Phytorio

Duration: 16-28 October 2017
Hours: Tue-Fri 17:00-20:00
Sat 11:00-17:00

Adonis Archontides
Lara Sophie Benjamin
George Themistocleous
Maria Kofterou
Demetra Kallitsi
Eirene Constantinou
Victoria Leonidou
Anthi Pafiou
Alexandra Pambouka
Korallia Stergides
AnnaMaria Charalambous
Michael Charalambous
Ioanna Cheimona
participating artists

Emily Gray and Leontios Toumpouris
curators

The exhibition was built through a three-day interactive workshop, with the participation of young Cypriot artists from MO.17. How can we redefine the gallery as a space of fluid relationships and participatory, horizontal creation?