the singer and the armchair

A new "double" novel written in Greek and published by ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΓΡΑ in Athens. The story can be projected to the changes of a single room that changes shape and content when different furniture are moved in or out. Plans of the 4 versions of the room are included. The cover maybe represents a fifth version of the room idealized. Ἡ Τραγουδίστρια καὶ ἡ πολυθρόνα. * ** *** **** *****

inhabited observatory

Ethel Baraona Pohl's post about the inhabited observatory proposes a reading of the particular building as a constructed balance between the banality of some existing material and the unpredictable distorting power of this same banality. The gap between banality and the visionary character of its distortions can be crucial in this era that may not envisage creativity as a set of ex nihilo extraordinary constructions but in the contrary as a set of unpredictable interpretations of the déjà vu.
An inhabitation of the space between banality and unpredictability, between norm and exception is a possible background to think again on architecture. The inhabited observatory is proposed as such a building: its parts could be encountered fragments of existing buildings, found all over Greece; the building could be read as an accumulation of small storehouses, water tanks, ruined secondary spaces in the countryside; never erected yet with such a voluntary arrogance this semi-ruined material is supposed to transform abstract insignificant finds to a house and a monument. The possibility of an inhabitation of this construction is thus meant to suggest a monumental look to vanishing, unimportant building fragments, never proposed as self sufficient architectonic matter. In the same time the inhabited observatory questions about writing (as a usually forgotten possibility of architecture) and about the constitution of an "empty" area through a construction of its center.

found in Andy Cropy's blip collection

city floor works

Munich asphalt and pavements, details, 2009.

cabin monument

A particular naming can transform a find to something we used to call a "work of art". The name for this conceptual construction would be "Gaze Monument". We name "Gaze Monuments" conscious transpositions of objects to unexpected areas. Sudden descriptions that are proved similar to constructions. Some things (that could already be writings) explode and reach areas "in which they don't belong"; they then are structurally formed as "gaze monuments". Either provocatively, as here for instance, or silently, objects can be proved the testimonies of "other discourses". The object, an action, a composition or any element installing reality "as such" can undertake the role of a particular definitive transformation. The work of this transformation would be a conscious change of meaning of the element. A Gaze Monument would than be the disturber that disarranges the symbolic order of things. Showing it as a non ordinary piece may already formulate a sabotage strategy.

A metaphoric structure could be for example obvious in the "cabin monument", found during a walk in Munich, 2009: it maybe expresses the possibility of different inhabitations proposed for a stable marble basis. The piece can be shown as an open possibility of hosting whatever statue in the same place. A possibility of a monumentality for replacement could be at stake. We can remember Lenin's first politics of monuments that prescribed wooden sculptures or provisional honorary sculptures for the acts or the heroes of the revolution.
Is the Cabin Monument an empty monument or does it shape the structure of the monumental? The Cabin Monument could be presented for instance as a quest for investigation about the ethical construction of memory. From another point of view the Cabin Monument pose this inverse question: can we think of ethics without memory? Can a provisional monumentality form an enough strong foundation for future ethics? Can ethics exist without a strong, monumental, symbolic order? The Cabin Monument could be a paradoxical word, pronounced in a non existing language or it could function as a particular question; as a destabilizing fragment of reality, in the same time obviously included in reality's most banal side. The transformation of some forgotten objects into important things is a silent work; it is the production of a particular recognition or a perverse reference that can substitute the work of art with a construction of the gaze. Such constructions, such intellectual distortions can form a series of steps in a city level. The city would then be an idiosyncratic museum of banality. Nevertheless such a museum is more a museum of seeing. A "gaze monument" would mark a responsibility for seeing. In the same time it does not require more creative energy then the distorting power of any intellectual occupancy.