By Apostolis Artinos
During the quarantine imposed by Covid-19, Lizzie Calligas takes refuge in her safe old house in Spetses. She lives a slow and desirable life. She reads, goes on solitary walks with Coco (her dog) and takes care of her garden, where she picks flowers to decorate the house’s vases with. These flower vases she at times either photographs, or paints. They are mournful, dedicated to the unaccompanied dead of Covid-19. Unaccompanied. In the darkness of this particular moment, Calligas is looking for the minuscule light which marks the reliefs of things. Maybe she is also looking for a sliver of hope that there is a way out. This series of photographs where things, withstanding their weight, almost disappear in the minuteness of their existence Calligas titles Flowers of the Pandemic. A darkened, deadly atmosphere traces a familiar environment. A slow, almost still time reveals itself in the riveting moment of its captivating seduction. These images are characterised by a tender uncanniness, a tame mourning depositing its humidity.
The period of the pandemic presents a temporality of such a quality. You abandon yourself in a deceptive time span and linger in an unaspiring wait. Unconsciously, you become part of the frequency spectrum of the times and reveal yourself in your nakedness, your existential bleakness. It is precisely such fragmented times, ebullitions of our most anguished moments, that give rise to our images. The thing’s position, the event of its sublimation which is also the moment of its imprint and permanent inscription, is revealed within this abandonment, this weakness of the mind. This indentation is also the resolution of our continuation, the traumatic condition of our Being. Seen in this way images give life to our secret experience; but it is an experience that is testing.
A vase with flowers then, which is also a poetic act, an act of transformation. Flowers after all, have always been linguistic signals of a material refinement that gives birth to the immateriality of its idea within this world. They were, and continue to be, the ideal of the real, a poetical type within the field of our worldliness, and as such, the signs οf a transition and of a mental transcendence. The flowers, a subject Calligas loves and often returns to within her practice, re-surface in this series in an obsessive manner. The subject of her focus is the same vase and its time, rendered in multiple versions, oftentimes materialising as a diptych or a quadriptych in a mournful procession. Images come together in the dipole of a gesture that is at once synthetic and abstract. It is during this oscillation that things regain their anguished representational form, not in the conquered language of a technique but in a weak gesture which gives life to things and traces them at the same time. “I used to wake up at night”, Lizzie confided, “and went down to the studio to look for the right colour.” Images, including digital ones, are the palimpsest of themselves, an over and over again of their unfolding.
The
vases and their flowers are images which return, a return however, that as
Deleuze would put it is not the return of the same. Rather, that which returns
in these images, both in the paintings and the photographs by Calligas, is
nothing more than the possibility of their difference, the difference of the
emotional response they give rise to, and the momentary uniqueness of their
gesture. Calligas undertakes this work on a daily basis, photographs and paints
new flowers inside the same vases, daily inscriptions in a diary of mourning.
What we have here is a condition of expression, which we will later also
observe in the artist’s “bookmark” works, where the work
materialises in a secret, in-between space located after the subject but before
the work, exactly at the point where emotions call both—and with them also
their morality—forward.
In the series “dark” which consists of Calligas’s photographic works of that period, one is offered a glimpse of the world not illuminated in abundant light but in the distinctions of its darkness. It is precisely the gaze’s darkness that allows us to distinguish things and yields their representations. The thing that is being represented is also the thing that has been been surrendered to its shadows, to the half-light of its truth. In this unique loss, in the event of its withdrawal, its sublimation as Lacan would put it, the photograph makes the object come true. It is the night time as this was preserved in the act of romantic creation, this twilight of the world. What these images capture, what photography itself captures—if anything—is this distant echo which remains, the withdrawn trace of the world, or even better the trace of the withdrawn, the trace of withdrawal itself.
Calligas’s work, in all different stages of its manifestation consists of moments of glimmering. Isn’t this also the truth of Photography itself? After all, the flower is also the moment of its flowering; only moments later it too ceases to exist. An ephemeral life caught in the transient light that delineates it. We find ourselves before what Bachelard terms a “momentary metaphysics”, a privileged, unique moment when one becomes conscious of the world.Α revelatory, and perhaps also apocalyptic moment when the subject finds itself wide open in the face of its suspension, in the moment of its death; before a vision of the world that is impossible but also radiant, in this gift that is its image, a gift that the victims of the pandemic were deprived of in their heavily guarded last rite. There is a sense of alertness in this moment; the photographer’s disquieting gaze never rests. Since they belong to this poetic moment, the photographs in this series are also images of a deafening silence. What rescues the moment—or at least what salvages some part of it—is the click of the camera. This is why there is both something familiar and unfamiliar within the photographic image, because it captures the fleeting trace of our emotion, the memory of a deep, and now inaccessible, experience. The experience of the moment is not a moment of an experience but the entirety of the emotions it brought with it, which now also register onto this image, this mournful trace, itself a trace’s trace. This is the gift of the photographic image; this offering of a glimpse of time, smitten by its images, its revelatory, fairy-tale moments, the unique moments of its withdrawal.
In what I would say is a despairing manner, Calligas’s
flowers express the impossibility of return, the impossibility of a longed for
time, its farewell and the farewell also to a unique sense of clarity. They
singularly prove and bear witness to something: this poetic retrieval of the
gaze, a different way of considering it. It is in this inverse stimulation that
the gaze traces the inexperience of things rather than their localisation. The
inexperience of the world is its darkened form, not its ascribed image but the
rendition of this image. The revelatory power of the gaze lies in this sense of
blindness that characterises it, its invisibility, the darkness of its
consideration, this state of things that are not properly seen but are only
faintly visible as they await their image, their final, renunciatory form.
Calligas intensifies her poetic gaze, lays it open to the darkness of the Real
which surrounds her, abandons herself to its destiny and astonishingly, saves
herself.
An original
version of this text, written in June 2020, focused on Calligas’s series of
photographs of the flowers of the pandemic. On the 20th of March 2022 a fire
caused by a short circuit burned Calligas’s house on the island of Spetses to
the ground destroying all the files of her photographic works. Her paintings,
stored in an adjacent building were the only things that survived. Lizzie and
Coco—crucially them—also survived.
Translated from Greek by Irini Bachlitzanaki