Dimitris Martidis, Here we are…Home at last_1

The installation may be perceived as a multimedia, oversized blueprint for a walled-in, transcendental urban planning.

The work appears to unfold around the notion of the impossibility of representation which is subverted from the outset by the means and ways in which it is rendered. Both the ability of drawing to convey with directness the artist’s poetic practice, and the contradiction implicit an any cartographic system of representation, place the works of the exhibition at once within and outside representation. The drawings find their conceptual reflection in the pages of the artist book, where the description of journeys and relocations and the alternating between the narrator’s voice and other voices, transports the viewer to a series of real places while simultaneously disturbing the feeling of conventional spatial movement. The inscription of Stalker’s voice in on the wall de-geometrizes the space and together with the reverberation of the phrase Here we are…Home at last, intensifies the viewers’ desire to trust in the cartography of “unattainable sites” and to head for certain “extinct destinations” of their own.

The same need for the reading and reconfiguring of places, occasions the per-version of Kalara’s gaze, by means of which she locates and traverses them. For as long as the locus is traversed, landscape looms as a write-off. There is an attempt here to render what eludes… The emerging works attempt to conceive the complex experience which occasions the practice of wandering inside the delirium of the Greek urban and peri-urban landscape. Thus, these inventions constitute the method by means of which artistic narrative in Kalara offers commentary on the nature of the non-being of representation.

Patricia Kolaiti, Here we are... Home at last_1

I would like to attempt a brief reading of the installation by Nadia Kalara ‘Here we are... Home at last’ as a study in the character and fragmentary geography of memory and its functions. The installation was housed in the space of CheapArt from 31/10 to 24/11/2013, on a 40x320cm 'page', laid on a zigzag surface and placed in counterpoint to the phrase by Stalker ‘Here we are... Home at last’, to comprise the first, and dominant, construction which the visitor encounters on entering the space. The embodied, spatial changing of position as the gaze moves up and down Kalara's undulating 'page', constructs a literality - rather than a metaphor – of a route that can be construed as a real, spatial moving around the context of the greek urban landscape and its environs, as much as it can be construed as a mental/psychological roaming in the private, intrasubjective space of memory. By means of the conjunction 'or', the disjunctive relationship between the laid out text that make up the content-landscape of the wavy page, breaks up the overall textual route into fragments which can be viewed either as excursions into a possible future or as alternative readings of what has already eventuated. Under this latter perspective, the disjunctive structure of the 'page' text, emerges as an allegorical reorganization of memory's content, a mental reconstruction and re-interpretation of lived experience. In terms of form, the segmented text of the 'page' fully accords with the fragmentary, apportioned and broken up character of the installation in toto. The 'fragment' is encountered in various scales: from the 'tiles' of the schematic representations of drawn street plans to the somewhat larger pieces making up a collection of abstract graphite and pencil drawings, to the maps (understood as reproductions of a part). Moreover, each individual drawing claims for itself the status of a piece of the jigsaw, the relationship of a part to a whole, by virtue of its inclusion in the wall-collage. Mnemonic ingredients all, these drawings are both containers and contained.The emerging hyponymic and meronymic relationships and the resultant fluctuation of the scale create the impression of a continuous zooming-in/zooming-out, which is in turn intensified by various devices; eg. the use of divergent representational codes from

drawing to drawing as well as within individual drawings, and the thematic selections (the zoom-in image of a well emerges from within a zoom-out, small scale street plan). To the same end, finally, a variety of means is employed for representing the object: Objects viewed from above or below, or cross-sections thereof, ones made visible only in part, or unfinished, objects which the viewer perceives as fleeting or blurred and others rendered in the greatest realistic detail. All these stratagems are made to serve as an allegory of the way in which memory chooses its scale(s), the degree of zoom-in/zoom-out by which it recalls the sensation, the object, the association of the object with the sensation, the insignificant and the signifying detail. The wall-collage (the memory-wall) is thus articulated through a succession of parts of fluctuating distinctiveness and impact, with a fluid, dynamic relationship to one another. This relationship reaches its greatest concentration at the 'exit', i.e. in the last (reading the wall from left to right) work of the wall-collage which is characterized by exceptional density in terms of content and technique. Exit with memory at its optimal concentration. Exit from what? The wall's composition? The operations of memory? Or, as Eleni Iliopoulou mentioned while examining this last work, from life itself?