By Apostolis Artinos
The place of origin also always remains the point of one's departure even if the latter will never physically take place, an out-of-reach homecoming, because we always end up going back. But where? Ulysses for example is not identified with his return to his homeland but rather with his wanderings. Ulysses is his own odyssey. Even when he finally returns home "for one night only" he acts as a stranger in a place which he no longer recognizes nor in which he is recognized by anybody. It is the disillusionment which will create the impetus for his subsequent departure. As what we’re looking for in our homecomings is not the place itself but the reflection of our reveries, its lost aura-not the aura of its material aspect, but that of the ephemeral, relative to our surroundings throughout time. Thus it remains our nostalgic place, our nostalgic point-in-time; what has fled from us rather than what was left behind. It is the psychic load of our childhood, our first fears, our first bursts of desire, our expectations, our first death-aware-nesses. It is the indeterminable we carry within us, not the one pinpointed on the map. Our homecoming is recognized in a very esoteric way from afar. The closer you get to it, the more its unfamiliarity is recognized. Once again the example of Ulysses who recognizes his island as his boat brings him closer to shore, but, soon, as he sets foot on dry land, everything appears alien to him. The unfamiliarity of reality which is a product of fantasy, that of daydreaming, of the spectral horizon which awakens and shelters us wherever another time-line appears, the time of our return. We return to it through time but to a different point-in-time. To an instant which denigrates time, defames it, deflects it beyond time, within the eternal moment of its daydream; to a moment which extends and lasts upon the trace of things. By the way, how long did Ulysses’ night spent with Penelope last; to what degree was it extended by his tales? Those words that memorialize events deeply etch on the soft surface of psychic strength. Words that belong to a number of languages. The example of Aeneas, as Cassin reminds us, whilst he was forbidden the use of the Greek language at the place of his Latin exile. "Homer's Ullysses and Ulysses of Joyce. The Odyssey remains forever a linguistic Odyssey" (as J. Kounellis used to say), a linguistic displacement from one's familiar tongue to that belonging to the Οther, from words spoken to those not spoken. The sharing of the new language may shield the wanderer in his new destination by unlocking for him the promise of, but not the welcoming door of hospitality. That impressive polyglottism of the immigrant, which is his door to the customs of the Οther. The new language of the displaced which happens to be the language of a distorted repatriation, the assumption of an identity; over and against the language we undertake, there always is a language which resists, that which has engaged us first and foremost. A written language, our mother tongue, which is our only home-reckoning. But, at the same time, a language in exile, one tongue among the languages, which endures its own loss, carries its private homesickness. A language which belongs to us of course, but which on the other hand “we do not own” as pointed out by Derrida and just as we do not own it, it gives us free range to traverse it, while it does not belong to us. And in that particular non-possibility, the exiled see to their roots, in all possible strong and weak restructurings.
The foreigner’s question will always remain a difficult one, in fact, a scandal, which no cosmopolitanism will be able to address; a question that urgently poses the whole issue of hospitality. The Other always stands by me, literally across the threshold; having firstly been exiled from his own doorsill. A life spent from threshold to threshold, according to the Jewish poet Paul Celan, that great stranger, a strider of many thresholds as well as that of his own language, the tongue of his fathers, thanks to the German language, the one owned by the Οther, the absolute other in his case. But “the essence of the language” is in Levinas’ own words “friendship and hospitality”. It is the stranger’s share in the Other’s language, as well as the acknowledgement of the language itself, his availability to accept the idiom of the other, his vocalization, his contrition. The realization of hospitality takes place in the openness of the language, its separateness as well as in the host’s language. The unconditional hospitality, that of open doors which does not question anything nor awaits an answer in any language, is a condition which is inscribed in its poetics, according to Derrida, therefore its own weakness. The stranger’s separateness, language and poetic language in its excessiveness is the very same gesture of friendship.
In the exhibition entitled ex-pats, two artists, Despina Meimaroglou and Eleni Mylonas explore the loss of the birthplace and the mnemonic spectrum that that loss gives rise to.
In 2009 Despina Meimaroglou returns after many years to her hometown Al-Minia in Upper Egypt in order to visit her family’s home. It is a return to a trace which transfixes and disappoints her being deeply. Not because she could not locate the house or because it now belongs to its new inhabitants, but because of the lost experience, the experience of those years, the years of her youth. It is not about the place itself -it never was. It was simply about its experience. An experience which has less to do with the place and its materiality than with the expectations which that particular environment in a broader sense inspires. Returning, years later she molds a house-replica in clay. Soul House is the house that belongs to her soul. It is that which the ancient Egyptians created and were buried along with, in order for their soul –upon its return to the world- to be able to identify its original referral. And so it becomes an anchorage to the memory. With the help of her friend art-professor Wael Sabour, Meimaroglou records the contemporary surroundings of her hometown as well as those of her family-home; a mapping which will serve as the material of her own re-casting. Around that model of nostalgia a series of video projections and objects are abandoned to their spectral discoveries. In the first video-projection, a boat pounds against the rocks of the wharf; an image that sets the tone for the narration of the entire installation. A boat tested through the course of history; the past which is being consumed in the contemporary, turbulent everyday-life. In “Encounter”, the second video-projection of the installation, human history is encapsulated in its own deep folds. In a scene which does not just belong to the city itself and its inhabitants but also to the unique being, who overwhelmed by self-emotions seems to escape the sphere of history, although proven to finally be its savior. The story of an encounter and a promise which was given for a shared lifetime between two people, Penelope and Apostolos, the artist’s parents. Narrations of memories that remain hovering, frail, like the boat seized by the waves. At present too by the waves of oblivion, someone’s memory, the personal, the one that ends up becoming at some point one’s un consumed silence. An anguished silence that diffuses its scent to what has been and will never be again. “Oh, Apostolos…” we hear at some point in the video. The sight of him at the tram’s point of departure in Alexandria of 1942. The first encounter. A memory which keeps returning, repeatedly. A memory that awaits its final expression, its weaker silence. A verbal memory. Allegories of the real. Personal stories; one’s own emotions, interfusing in the city streets with the motion of others without intermixing. Tinted by the public sphere, though formalized and ionized within their hiding places. Resembling therefore to outwardly emotions. Desolate versions. Transformations of loneliness. But at the end it’s always the city; its streets, the tramway’s takeoff, the transient vision through the window, the promise given at a coffee shop. The traces left by human stories engraved on the relief of the city and on the buildings they once inhabited. Time-traces which are not erased, just accumulated, becoming symbols. All awakenings of a downfall which exposes their marks, their subsisted traces. Awakenings in a state of perpetual anticipation. Meimaroglou’s work reaches its climax in the final video-projection of her installation. The artist processes a video-footage taken by Wael Sabour showing the descent of the staircase from her parental home. In her interpretation that descent takes a slow hypnotizing rhythm, intended to be a descent into Hades (Νέκυια). And just before reaching the clearance of the building’s entrance a girl’s recitation of a lullaby is heard. If you intend returning somewhere, there is nowhere else to return to but there: to the parental stillness of your words. Meimaroglou’s Soul House is the destination of an impossible return, the parentage starting-point of all possible and impossible reenactments, the prime light which will draft its shadow; because the birthplace will never take place again. That was it, right from the start, a place of loss, finally the place of death.
In Eleni Mylonas’ case there exist two kinds of nostalgia. Nostalgia for Oneself and nostalgia for the Other. One ’s self traced within the experience of the Other. A returning Ulysses and a Ulysses ready to depart once again. A subject exposed to his openness, to the odyssey of his wanderings to even more remote shores to the indefinability of the unknown. A movement which strains its subject, the hovering during his returns. That winged foot of Hermes, a sculpture by Eleni Mylonas which introduces the meaning of the exhibition. The wing-sandaled Hermes, the god of transfers, of journeys, of populations in motion, a strider over borders. A sculpture made of stone and wings annotating that particular human perpetual motion as well as the transient traces of his wandering. But in this case we are not facing God’s ethereal footprint with its light trace, as he tiptoes on earth, but a heavy, rough footprintwhich at the same time testifies the heavy ecologic impression of the artist’s perpetual moves. In another work in the exhibit belonging to Eleni Mylonas, Ave Maria, a three channel video installation reveals accurately the repetitious movement in the places of nostalgia. The at-home which is no longer a rooting, but a re-habitation, a metastatic present-tense which continuously accomplishes itself. In that duration there is no time or space for melancholy, although its mnemonics always hang-around. The foreign place becomes familiar; it becomes the point of return. A home in every land. A cosmopolitan notion which disposes the idea of the place of origin in its inhibited attestations and openings. The subject of that rousing present is re-born each time and dedicates itself to its new rooting, its new linguistic-expressions. In Ave Maria there are resplendencies of both world-stages. On one hand there is the island of Aegina, Mylonas’ refuge while in Greece, and on the other hand New York which is her place of residence and work. The whole video-projection consists of a succession of images of those impossible residencies, of places that cannot accommodate us. What it surely brings up is the time consumed from one place to the other. The sea of Aegina from the head of a ship, the seagulls, followed by scenes capturing the neurotic rhythms of the New York subway. Then Aegina again on a rainy day, the humidity of memories, interjected by snapshots of news covering bombings in Iraq, a burning Ku Klux Klan cross and a waterside at night in its mirage, then back to the New York subway where the strings of a Chinese musician perform the Ave Mariaand where in another corner the same song is sung, this time by an young Italian tenor followed by a scene of an animal carcass hit by waves in the shore, in an isolated Aegina beach just a few days before the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the grim prelude to a tragedy that was to become a tragedy of unprecedented universal dimensions, again the sea , always the sea, the odyssey of all those images. Eleni Mylonas’ Ave Mariaconsists of a sequence of realities that although very different from each other manage to form a coherent unit by drawing on human experience. A series of contradictions that expose the differences in our world but at the same time form its collective memory. The contemporary environment of globalization, with its media aesthetics and its cultural hegemony, establishes the sharing of a de-territorialized expectation. The subject of globalization, of the domination of the Web and its cultural relativism, does not refer to genealogical and geographical origins, but to a potentially transcendent exit from any difference, from any exception. But the homeland, the land of the mother-tongue, that shore of Aegina, will continue to always bear the parasite of a melancholic flash back. Instants of an unproductive time which is not consumed in the place of oneself but in the ground of our ecstatic-condition, on the threshold of our exit, on the exact time of our departure, from the first minute on.
The birthplace remains the place of my very own death. That small cemetery, in the midst of a verdant olive grove, whose murmur attests to the silence of my own people. I belong to where I do not yet belong. To the place where I will be able to (not) return.
The birthplace remains the place of my very own death. That small cemetery, in the midst of a verdant olive grove, whose murmur attests to the silence of my own people. I belong to where I do not yet belong. To the place where I will be able to (not) return.
EX-PATS, Museum Alex Mylona, 5 May – 30 July, 2017, Athens
Photos:Andrey Tarkovsky, Nostalgia / Despina Meimaroglou, Reconstruction of Paradise, 1995 – 2017 / Eleni Mylonas, Ave Maria, Video-still, 2016.
Photos:Andrey Tarkovsky, Nostalgia / Despina Meimaroglou, Reconstruction of Paradise, 1995 – 2017 / Eleni Mylonas, Ave Maria, Video-still, 2016.