INTERVIEW WITH ZAFOS XAGORARIS
by Matteo Binci
1) In 1948, Greece was in the midst of “the Civil War” (1946 - 1949), fought between the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) - the military branch of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) - backed by Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria and the Greek government army backed by Great Britain and the United States of America.
1948 is also the year in which the Venice Biennale reopened after many years due to the conflicts of the Second World War. In the same year, the Greek Pavilion was entrusted to the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim to exhibit her private collection. The assignment was entrusted by the general secretary of the Biennale, Rodolfo Pallucchini. There were 136 artworks and the setting had been designed by the distinguished Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa.
For the first time, the most important New York artists of the future decades landed in Venice, alongside Cubists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Futurists and Abstract Expressionists. The exhibition was interpreted as one of the most important moments for modern art exhibition history.
The last year the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice dedicated a retrospective to the pavilion, on the occasion of its seventieth anniversary. In 2019 one can find a white architrave, surmounted by off-white flags, engraved with a specific year: 1948 at the Greek Pavilion entrance.
Could you tell us about your site-specific project The Concession (2018 - 2019) on the facade of the pavilion, visible but at the same time silent, and how do you evoke the history of Guggenheim?
Zafos Xagoraris, The Concession, installation of a reconstructed Makronisos gate in the entrance of the Greek pavilion, 10m X 12.5m X3m, 58th Venice Biennale, 2019.
The Concession focuses on these two contradictory, simultaneous events. The outdoor part of the installation is a reconstructed gate of a concentration camp during the Greek civil war with approximate dimensions of 10m X 12.5m X 3m which is installed at the entrance of the pavilion, altering its architectural design (please see the image above). Since the pavilion is listed, we had to avoid using screws or nails, therefore we designed a temporary system of clamps to hold the structure on the existing building.
The history of the institution is relevant today, besides the context of the exhibition, the visitors or the space itself. Of course, the history of Peggy Guggenheim and the Venice Biennale after WWII are closely related.
Gražina Subelytė addressed this topic in her exhibition last year and also in her text included in the publication of the Greek participation in the 58th Biennale, curated by Katerina Tselou. However, at the same time we could also observe the gradual gap created between Modernism and reality or the increasing distance between an art show and the tragedy of a war.
Describing her experience after the 1948 exhibition, Peggy Guggenheim wrote: “I felt as though I were a new European country” (Out of this Century, Confessions of an Art Addict, the Autobiography of Peggy Guggenheim, Deutsch, London, 1979).
2) Inside the pavilion, one discovers a series of documentary photos from 1948 exhibition, to which are added images from the prisoner camps built during “the Civil War”. It is possible to see soldiers and civilian’s intent on reconstructing miniature models of ancient temples. There is also a reconstruction of a temple that surmounts the architecture of the Greek pavilion. What is the relationship between the two stories and how do art, politics, history and the present time intertwine with each other?
Zafos Xagoraris, The Concession, 2019. Installation, dimensions variable, archival material, hybrid building consisting of an acropolis from Makronisos and the Greek Pavilion (display case design: Katerina Stefanidaki). Pavilion of Greece at the 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Photograph by Stefanos Chandelis.
My intent was to focus on civil war: I used the indicative example of Makronisos, a concentration camp, a small prison – island, where soldiers and civilians were forced to follow a program of rehabilitation. Propaganda photos and films (one could see relevant footage in the Greek pavilion watching The Mouth by Eva Stefani) show cheerful inmates creating copies of ancient temples or sculptures as a way of “reconfirming” their national identity by hiding the many violent incidents happened inside the concentration camp.
Zafos Xagoraris, The Concession, 2019. Installation, dimensions variable, archival material, hybrid building consisting of an acropolis from Makronisos and the Greek Pavilion (display case design: Katerina Stefanidaki). Pavilion of Greece at the 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Photograph by Stefanos Chandelis.
The silence and the non-functioning mode of the pavilion, by the side of the impossibility of exhibiting let Typalde Forestis, the Greek consul in Venice, to concede the space for the 1948’s presentation of the Guggenheim’s collection. The two contradictory stories and their arbitrary architectural symbols collide violently creating two double buildings: the camouflaged gate embedded in the actual entrance of the pavilion and a reconstructed Makronisos temple presented next to the archival material indoors, together with a small three-dimensional portrait of Peggy Guggenheim sitting on the stairs of the Greek pavilion.
3) In your artistic practice, you often resort to past stories as starting points and reflections, but you have rarely exposed archival materials directly. These images, which can be interpreted in a divergent manner maintain an ambiguous character and appropriate to the archives…
Zafos Xagoraris, The Concession, 2019. Installation, dimensions variable, archival material, hybrid building consisting of an acropolis from Makronisos and the Greek Pavilion (display case design: Katerina Stefanidaki). Pavilion of Greece at the 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Photograph by Ugo Carmeni.
The display case (designed by the artist Katerina Stefanidaki) includes archival material from the Contemporary Social History Archives and the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive in Athens, the Biennale’s Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Archives in Venice and finally, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives in New York. Most of the photos depict the exhibited artworks (we can see a sculpture by Antoine Pevsner next to an ancient temple), so the idea of them taking the traditional position of an exhibit seemed proper. Talking about the ways and places of display, one should also consider the decision of installing the Peggy Guggenheim collection in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, symbolically close to the Accademia, as well as the relevant Clement Greenberg’s later writings about how Pollock’s paintings live and die in the same context as Rembrandt’s or Titian’s.
4) Referring now to your experience in sound art, I would like to ask you about the artworks The Welcoming Gate (2017), made for documenta 14 in Kassel, and Cyprus (2003 - 2005), one of the first sound installations in Cyprus. In the former, the sound recordings produced by Greek soldiers in the Görlitz German prisoner camp during the 1910s are disseminated, while in the latter, the faint sound of the villages of the island of Cyprus which were evacuated after the 1974 Turkish invasion, is amplified. In both works, the use of sound has a strong historical, narrative and political component...
Some historical events are important to us, since they are able to answer urgent questions about our lives and sometimes the past seems important for our future. At the same time, sound fills easily open spaces and is able to imitate aspects of a past event accurately.
Zafos Xagoraris, The Welcoming Gate, outdoor sound installation, documenta 14, Kassel, 2017.
A sign with the inscription XAIPETE! (pronounced herete in Greek) meaning HELLO! was placed at the exit of the underground train station in Kassel. This Welcoming Gate was a reconstruction of the entrance of a camp in Görlitz, where from 1916 to 1919 approximately 7.000 Greek soldiers were confined after their surrender to the German forces. Since Greece was at the moment neutral to the war, these soldiers had a bizarre status, being at the same time guests and prisoners. Loudspeakers attached to the sign transmitted some of the first recordings of Greek music carried out in Görlitz. This relocated gate apart from reviving an historical event, attempts to discuss the reality here and now: the context of documenta and the various sociopolitical relationships between center and periphery.
Zafos Xagoraris, Amp, temporary installation of sound amplifying system, Agios Sozomenos, Cyprus, 2005.
You are right about the origin of this work. From 2003 to 2005, I installed temporarily audio amplification devices in abandoned villages in Cyprus, in order to enhance the existing silence turning whispering sounds into noise. This brief animation of the villages reminds us of their past, but at the same time it’s a call to action.
