‘Our brains, after all, / are always at work on some quivers / of self-organisation, however faint, / and it is from this that an order / arises, in places beautiful / and comforting, though more cruel, too, / than the previous state of ignorance.’
— WG Sebald, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht

‘When we created cities, we invented a new jungle — but have yet to become its inhabitants … we are still living in exile.’
— Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Haї


On the occasion of Yorgos Sapountzis’ solo show in Loraini Alimantiri Gazonrouge, we come into close contact with a core element of the artist work — the constant preoccupation with the role monumental sculpture plays within public space, which works as the starting point for a discourse on the influence collective memory has on the urban fabric. The ontology of the monument, as a solid, immortal embodiment of certain historical values, is now redrawn anew. The centre of the show is the installation Charleroi, shown in the 4th Biennial of Moving Image, 2009. The bygone lux of Charleroi is appropriated by the contemporary city of Mechelen and its monuments, creating a paradox on where and when these statues were erected.

Growing up in a place imbued with the strong precence of a stupendous past, where every concept, every idea was translated into sculpture, Sapountzis manipulates sculpture as a vehicle in his research on the building of memory, collective and self-conscious. Public sculpture in western societies, whether it is a modern art piece set within classical surroundings or the opposite, it is absorbed into the idealisation of the past embodying sociocultural ideals that no longer prevail as such. On the contrary, Sapountzis’ actions, whether they refer to public presentations of his ephemeral structures or to personal mappings of the urban cultural landscape, unlike those of an obsolete language of signs, they focus on the architecture of everyday life as well as on a strong desire to decode and deconstruct the term ‘everyday’. Likewise the juxtaposition of the two Belgian cities, Charleroi and Mechelen, seems to deprive public sculpture from its two buttresses, namely, geographical and temporal perspective.

Chuck Close, alongside Anish Kapoor, believes that sculpture comprises ‘real space’ just as our bodies do and we relate to it just as we relate to each other. At the same time, the strong physicality of Sapountzis’ performances, the way he moves around space, running back and forth, or climbing on monument plinths, how he uses his body as ‘living sculpture’, that suggests a playful and a pagan act simultaneously and weaves a grid on top of which his ideas will be explored. No matter how impromtu and temporary the actions might seem, they occupy the space nonchalantly, creating a sense of revolting against, which remains resonant long after the performance is over. His ease in moving around topoi, across the ideas and idols of historical memory, approximates the term of the ‘homo viator’ as coined by Nicolas Bourriaud. At the same time, when historical emblems are displaced, when their dialectic gets broken, they become travellers themselves across a dynamic circuit of Foucault ‘heterotopias’.

In the one of the two videos of the exhibition, the artist is joined with a group of young locals in an attempt to place a new statue in the city. Once again in his artistic oeuvre, the artist joins forces with others in the creation of a ‘communal’ work of art which takes place at night. If, for Hawthorne moonlight itself is sculpture, for Sapountzis the urban nightscape draws an allure as the permanence of the fixtures of architectural masses in broad daylight seems to dissolve at dusk. The buildings then loose their imposing solidity in favour of a more spectral ambience coming strangely into life, weaving the flickering outline of the city’s breathing skin and looking under it, and thus altering both their intentions and our expectations towards a more subjective understanding of all human universes that constitute reality. Artificial light and the way it is blend into the narrative shines on the complexity of contemporary life shaped by the information deluge of mass media, one of the main social comments that lie in the heart of the earlier After Electricity installation.

The open reading of a traditionally ‘closed’ platform for displaying culture such as a museum, in this case the Museum of Cycladic Art, was the theme for his nominated work for the DESTE Prize last year The Heritage of its Architecture. The powerful juxtapositions, such as outside/inside, monumental/ephemeral, public/intimate, remembering/living, transport the museum to an in-between place charged with enough tension, thus stretching all limits in the construction of a situation that will address reality from a new perspective. By forming space through the negation of it, image out of the absence of image, the work becomes the void, like a human tapestry of annulment of all things said and done, yet open for re-evaluation. The lack of linear narrative and any form of closed reading, anchors on Bock, Nauman, Fluxus, Duchamp, relating the artist to the tradition of great appropriators who reinvented space for thought for the viewer.

In an interview for Untitled magazine, Jonathan Meese voted for a less perfect but more imaginative approach to making art against the extreme specialisation and the painstaking ‘bureaucracy’ in the expression of a concept. Sapountzis, too, is at total ease in using any medium available to art now. For his part it is precisely that it is important to keep up the level of potential in all fields. He is doing so by borrowing ammunition from the visual language of Modernism, using various found and ephemeral material, such as wood, cloth or newspapers, in order to make basic, laconic structures that demand, rather than interpret space. If we are to agree with Sartre in that for sculpture to become visible has to entail the notion of the elimination of its surroundings — that is ‘to sculpt is to take the fat off space’ — Sapountzis examines the option whether it is possible for a non-monumental sculpture, which itself has become ‘minimised’, to exist in the public arena. In the recent solo show at MUSAC, Spain, the quixotic frailty of his sculptures, the way they stand ethereal and insinuated against the solid architectural framework, readdress the city as a heterogeneous ‘work in progress’, while they rebuke the finality that characterise all objects.

As his work is evolving, the immediacy of the early performances has given space to a more reflective mood, showing his need to study and firmly act upon the utopia of matter, found in the relics where every history builds on top of the other, constantly unveiling grandiose structures that monopolise common memory, but at the end of the day just adding another mute object to the world. Sapountzis would rather opt for matter over mind. The kind of matter, however, that has a strong lived-in aesthetic written on it, that is.


Yorgos Sapountzis’ solo show Charleroi at Loraini Alimantiri Gazon Rouge, Athens, runs from 12 November 12 2010 to 15 January 2011.