the love boat

An art show @ Athens Municipal Garbage Trucks’ Depot

Concept and curated by Naira Stergiou & Eriphyli Veneri

Supported by City of Athens’ Europe Direct

Iera Odos 151, Athens

Department of Cleaning and Recycling

Municipality of Athens / Municipal Garbage Trucks’ Depot

18 - 20.09.2020

We invite you for a unique onboard experience of romance, blue waters, music and sunset on the maiden voyage of “The Love Boat“. Our mission is to provide our passengers with high quality services for their ultimate relaxation. Exclusively for this September's inaugural trip, our venture will be the fantastic unknown and its exotic, unexplored destinations. A three-night cruise that will make you explore and rejuvenate... Your senses will be stimulated through the wandering in the multiple levels of the hyper-modern ship and its advanced facilities. Take delight in the unique amenities of the specially designed pool area, the beauty & spa club, the ballroom, the shopping center. Enjoy unique tastes of international cuisines and delicious cocktails and leave it to our qualified staff for a journey of style, luxury and pure comfort.

Departure from Pier 151 of Iera Odos Street in the center of Athens. Musical departure accompanied by the City of Athens' Philarmonic Orchestra. Our crew wishes you in advance a pleasant stay!

GENERAL PHOTOS / VIEWS:

THE ARTWORKS:

Marilena Aligizaki

We Used to Have A Wonderful Time

video, 10’, 2020

Most of the trips I have taken so far were with my parents, during my childhood. The reason for these family vacations was that my mother, patient with lymphoma at the time, had to travel abroad very often for examinations and treatment. In “We used to have a wonderful time”, all these trips merge into one in an attempt to make a synthesis of all these ambiguous polyphonic stories. Stories of tenderness and challenges, exploring new places and addressing difficulties. Palimpsest memories that exist through fuelling each other.

Kostis Velonis

Charon's Boat

sculptural installation, steel, garbage truck, dimensions variable, 2020

Charon, the ferryman of Hades with oar at hand, is here transformed into a garbage truck that grabs and carries the urban waste of a functional universe that ejects the materiality of detritus. The installation replaces the puddle of Charon with an oblong hook, that picks the trash, literally, the dead objects destined to darkness. The picking hook is attached to the rubbish truck functioning as an extension of the vehicle. The world of mythology is employed here in activating contemporary issues around waste management and its ecological applications. Object world has the right to oblivion.

Eriphyli Veneri

The Mermaid Massacres. Sushi, Maki, Nigiri

sculptural installation, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2020

The metaphorical death of magical thinking and overrichness in free-floating imagination. A rite of passage in the form of an aestheticised slaughtering, or else, the interference of the mundane with the mythical and para-mythical towards rationalisation, deconstruction, destruction and real truth. Grow up already.

Campus Novel

D-growth

video loop, 2020

“D-growth” is the visual interpretation of an idiosyncratic approach on the cocept of surplus and the notion of left over. The video draws upon a series of quotations from Serge Latouche essay Vers une société d'abondance frugale. The actual form of these quotations is being shaped by a certain contradiction between meaning content and image. The chosen size, type and colour of the lettering constallations make references to the popular aesthetics founded by the visual language of consuming, branding and advertising but also by visual poetry, lettrism and narrative art.

Errands

Ballad of the Rubbish

action, installation, 2020

A rubbish truck moves around the city and transmits popular songs that refer to the garbage in their lyrics. The vehicle is turned to a moving speaker that carries around music histories that relate to the process of rubbish collecting. The piece is presented as a public action as well as installation in the exhibition space.

Florent Frizet

Untitled

oil pastel on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

IWANTMORE

performance (performed by Christina Reinhardt), 2020

Everything comes from the feeling of expenditure, exhausted bodies keep trying to stand. The dancer faces the crowd and the painting. A silent dialogue about desire and its geometries.

Greece is for Lovers

The Harder They Come

edition of swivel stools, steel, marble, 2014

The swivel stools consist of a tripod base made of powder coated reinforced steel bars, while large marble pebbles have been used for the adjustable height seat. The pebble „seats” were discovered in the picturesque resort of Damouchari in Pelion. The beach there is fully covered in these flat rounded marble slabs, smoothed out by the waves’ endless churning over the years. Rumour has it that the pebbles are remnants of an antique marble quarry that got discarded into the sea, off the cliffs nearby. The visual language we wished to recreate was that of the mundane, impromptu self assembled objects, found all over Greece.

Lakis & Aris Ionas / The Callas

Prayer

video loop, 1', 2011

It’s the back side of a human body. It moves slightly while breathing. It’s a rhythm. It’s a landscape, like staring at the horizon line or at a trippy sunset. It’s zoomed in like an ancient marble fragment. It’s a dirty motherly icon calling you for a prayer.

Yorgia Karidi

I Was Fooled On A Sweet Sun-Up

performance, 18', 2020

Are words of songs poems? Songs are like seagulls. They fly chasing waves or something in the trash. Basically looking for food. For thought. Do we need songs to live?

Margarita Bofiliou

I Got Into Her Abruptly. She Was Deep and Blue

digital print on canvas, iron, rope, dimensions variable, 2020

The work resembles a pair of sunglasses composed of iron and digital prints of drawings. They draw from the condition of leisure and the tender moment of seeking love but at the same time they undermine them due to form and content.

Valinia Svoronou

Ornament Bearer I &II

sculptures, vegan leather, silk prints, treated bronze knots, dimensions variable, 2018

“Ornament Bearer” I & II are works comprised of silk prints portraying parts of the artist studio and living space put together with dark sculptures reproducing the architectural features of The Coronet as soft curving forms - malleable to context; as a metaphor to think across the precarity of architecture, inhabitance and modalities of labor.

Eric Stephany

Το Είδωλο στην Προβολή

installation, marble, neon, mirror, dimensions variable, 2020

Eric Stephany presents pieces from his last body of work including marble sculptures and neons, which are an attempt to define love through paradoxical definitions expressed in sculptural, linguistic, and performative forms.

Naira Stergiou

OMG, Den Ine Agapi Auto Pou Zoume Aka Mikros Titanikos

sculptural installation, mixed material, dimensions variable, 2020

“If someone decomposes the journey, they will see a moutza, a neckless and strawberries, meaning that if you put those together you can do it again”. And the question, ladies and gentelemen, is, do you want to do it again?

Iris Touliatou

Housework

concentrated smell of hygiene (1940-2020), soap bubbles, 2020

The work discusses economies of work and care, as they are represented by the olfactory definitions of clean in the last 80 years. From rose to pine and citrus, from ammonia to sea breeze and destination scents, the molecules diffused are dense as the real time and value of long and hard labor and fleeting like one hot summer afternoon in the countryside.