TOIXNOS (Wall-TRACE)

Athens, 2023

« Here, the skeleton corresponds to a nest in the innermost, safest space of the home, in a shelter – a talisman. Yet the skeleton also reminds us of the invisible displacement of a generation, the violent gentrification of the neighborhood. Collectif MASI’s artistic practice assiduously explores the built and the inhabited in interaction with public space. It’s an art of the field, a tangible collective imprint. »

STEFANIA ORFANIDOU
Curator

What traces does a wall leave? Despite the elementary parts, the body of a city. The shadow, the hug; that once provided in her bits and traces that compile the totality of a wall, a home, a place.

What is the physical body of a city but the bricks, cement and every substance that is found in modern architecture-infrastructure.

The building blocks of a shelter, that can sustain numerous lives in it’s embrace.

Like a vessel.

A destined spatial capacity that leaves a pre-destined space within it to exist, with anything that happens to fill it’s receptive belly. Like a mother in pregnancy, and as she feeds her children inside her invisible eternal womb inside the house she herself made, before during and after the pregnancy. Just like that, a city, a vessel of vessels, a mother to/for/of relating walls.

All the parts that consist her; tools, mechanisms, defining components just like the organs and body parts, which without those, the function of the total sum fails.

Here we see an MRI of the city’s micro/macro cosmic space. A literal metaphor of that body, of which executive parts, as objects are so familiar that we glide by indiffirently. As useless definitely, trash in the overall toxified body of a cityscape. Maybe they are all too familiar to us because they are integrated in our consciousness

therefore of our body.

Just like the bed, it’s skeleton, the vessel that holds us each night as it allows us to fade into a different dimension. To release worries and burdens of our intangible and tangible bodies, for a few hours per day, on another body.. it’s hug, inside a bulding for the lucky ones.. inside the city’s abode.

How many times have we seen a bed, a pipe, rocks, planks of wood in our passing!

So many keys, pivotal construction ingredients of a room, a wall, buildings, a town. And yet they are approached as undesirable objects, foreign bodies on the pavement.

Which in itself comprises a painting, an x-ray window to the insides of a city, specifically the skeleton traces of this one.

Mosaic pieces, different metal bits, glass, stone etc.

Daphne Nitsou 2023 © Dawndeamon