Last May, while in Athens, I went with Maria Thalia Carras to visit the site where Locus Athens, the curatorial agency she directs with Sofia Tournikiotis, was organizing its next exhibition: a passengers' terminal in the port of Piraeus from where tourists board their cruises to travel around the Mediterranean. I was surprised by the location: they couldn’t have chosen a more characterless place. The port station is what's Marc Auge called a 'non-place', a generic space for the transit and circulation of passengers, but also a space of parenthesis, of a shared solitude and of a shared identity as tourists. If Athens is the city where it’s impossible to ignore the presence of the Acropolis, and where there’s always a connection with the origins of Western civilization, then choosing to do an exhibition in Piraeus is an attempt to escape this weight of history through the non-place. If recent contemporary aesthetic production in Athens has been marked in most cases by a fascination with neo-figuration or with the destruction, fracture and fragmentation of these figurations, the fact that the exhibition happens in a non-place opens the door for other types of discourses to be presented and examined.

Since it was founded in 2004, Locus Athens has had a nonspace, and organized exhibitions, events, talks and publications without having a physical exhibition location. This has given them the flexibility to adapt their projects to the context and to create a critical dialogue with and within Athens. Past projects have included: a video-tea night, a book on art for children, an exhibition in which Dan Perjovschi drew on the walls of a school, a publication and a series of performances by Greek artists including Poka-Yio and Yorgos Sapountzis in different public spaces in Athens, the production of Los Super Elegantes’‘Nothing Really Matters’ video and a concert with them on the rooftop of a hotel where they performed an aquatic ballet, a demonstration against abstract public sculpture in Athens together with a celebration of the Greek moustache, among other things.

Back in Athens in September, I took a taxi to the ferry station where the exhibition was taking place.Upon entering the station,my first stop was the cafe, where a group of people were gathered. To my surprise, they were not art people watching an art video, but normal users, mostly port workers having dinner and watching the news. I continued towards the station’s lobby. There, in a shop called Heaven on Earth, Aleksandra Mir was continuing her investigation into tourism and the production of multiples, by inserting a series of tourist products designed by her which made reference and played with travelers’ expectations of the Greekland: bags with images of the Three Graces, t-shirts printed with a design of two classical men wrestling for Justice, and mugs reading 'I love Greece'.

Inside the passengers’ terminal, in the hall where tourists wait in line for their passports to be stamped before boarding the cruise, there are two works that totally modify the space (which before only had some posters promoting tourism to the Greek Islands), transforming, through interventions, the 'non-place' into a place. These works provide decoration, distraction and comfort for the tourist, returning him from the abstract non place to the sensation of being somewhere else. Olaf Nicolai has covered the columns and the passport control booths with posters with the colours of the rainbow blurring into each other. With this he has transformed an aggressive surveillance point into a friendly place. Meanwhile, Nikos Alexiou has created a curtain that runs all along the space, next to the luggage conveyor belt. The curtain is made of tablecloths from tavernas sewn together and dyed in the different tones and shades of the Greek sea and sky.The curtain anticipates the shining reflections of the sea and sky. Both posters and curtain act like hypnotic mantras in which the mind can get lost, escaping the boredom of waiting in the terminal. Nearby a work by Ian Kier, a giant inflatable plastic ball covered with gold liked the one used in Greek icons, waits for bored tourists to come and play with it.

Three other works avoid the tourist's desire for escapism and further reveal the fissures of the non-place, creating connections and providing for a critical dialogue with more subtle and hidden, yet still present, layers in the passengers’ terminal. It is in the empty space of the non-place where the mind searches for understandable signs in order to orientate itself, it might be also here where the mind is more receptive to codified messages. In the background one can hear the lyrics "Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true…". The soundtrack for the terminal and the exhibition was part of Christodoulos Panayiotou's video documentation of his performance "To Be Willing to March into Hell for a Heavenly Cause", which took place a few days before the opening of the exhibition on a boat leaving Piraeus Port, where handsome Danish singer Kristian Finne Kristensen sang seven songs from American musicals produced during the Cold War. All the songs, including "The sun will come out tomorrow" from Annie, "When you walk through a storm" from Carousel, "Somewhere over the rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz, sang about a better future through climatological metaphors. The work was complemented by screenings of American utopian musicals on ships traveling from the port. The songs and musicals reminds us of the romantic and comforting power of Cold War era feel-good propaganda, so different from today's media fascination with celebrities, the preoccupation with global warming and the dramas, tragedies, kidnappings and murders of normal people, used to distract people from the bigger picture of today's hot and holy war.

From the ceiling of the terminal hang Carolina Caycedo’s flags, created out of the crossover of different national identities. While some of the flags allude to her own identity as a British citizen born of Colombian parents, or as a Colombian married to a Puerto Rican, others are a direct comment on the Greece’s political and territorial context, specifically a Greek Albanian and a Greek-Turkish-Cypriot flag. The fact that the flags are hung in a real space, and not in the safe white space of a gallery or a museum, provokes an instant reaction. Caycedo’s flags are immediately torn down and confiscated by the hot-but-tough military guards in charge of the security of the port.



Caycedo's flags remind us of art's potential effect on the outside world. In a highly nationalistic Greek context, these kind of art games are seen as a violation of the nation's sovereignty and a sign of disrespect towards the national symbols. Needless to say, the attempts to exhibit or recover the flags were ineffective. Words exchanged with the passionate military guards remind the curators that there is only one Greek flag, and that in the past Albanians have raped Greek women.The response by one of the curators, that in the past Greek men have also raped Albanian woman, seems to have no effect on the military.

The last work of the exhibition is a slide show narrative presented as vacation diaporama. A project by Mario Garcia Torres, "What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger" is an homage to Martin Kippenberger's relationship with the Greek island of Syros. The narrative begins in a kind of naïve tone, telling us about the islands and who Kippenberger was, a reminder that the immediate public of the exhibition is not an art public, but a general public,many of whom might never have entered a contemporary art museum nor know nor be interested in who Kippenberger was. Like the tourists and travelers searching for escape in the Greek islands, it was there where Kippenberger liberated himself. In Syros he established MOMAS, The Museum of Modern Art Syros,which he founded in 1993 in the structure of an abandoned and unfinished cement abattoir. Kippenberger was the director and curator of MOMAS and he invited his friends Ulrich Strotjohann, Johannes Wohnseifer, Stephen Prina, Cosima Von Bonin, Christopher Williams, Michel Majerus, Heimo Zobernig, and Christopher Wool to exhibit there. As in other projects, Garcia Torres here re-examines past narratives in order to expand their meaning and make them relevant to contemporary culture and a larger realm. For this exhibition, in Kippenberger style, he produced a series of posters, which were pasted around Athens, and in which he stands next to the sea pointing towards the museum inviting people to his exhibition. With this, Garcia Torres reactivated MOMAS, now transformed into a waste water treatment plant, and also exhibited some early works he hadn’t previously made together with other pieces related to museum stories.

Contrary to what the name suggests, in Disco Coppertone there’s no reflecting disco ball or sun protection lotion. Disco Coppertone offers no art escapism through holiday evasion, but provides, by transforming a non-place into a temporary exhibition space, a space of transition and thought on the role of art, institutions, public and artists… all this happening before one boards a cruise or returns to Athens to view more ruins.


Disco Coppertone, Piraeus Port, Athens.

September 7, 2007, to October 12, 2007.