Paky Vlassopoulou is taking part in this year’s edition of the Thessaloniki Biennale with the installation I Have Seen the Moon Rise on Both the Left and Right Side of the Sky, at the Eptapyrgio Fortress, mostly known by its Ottoman name, Yedi Kule. Situated at the north-eastern corner of Thessaloniki, within the city’s Acropolis, it consists of two sections: the Byzantine fortress, which features ten towers, and the more recent prison structures, that were built along both sides of the fortress’s walls. Vlassopoulou intentionally chooses to work with both the exterior and interior spaces of the site: the corridor leading to the visiting room of the former prison, and one of the ten towers. The title of her work, is borrowed from the autobiographical book by the Kurdish-Iranian writer and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani, in which the author recounts his journey, in 2013, alongside other refugees from Indonesia to the Australian external territory of Christmas Island, resulting in Boochani’s four years imprisonment in a migrant detention facility on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.
Vlassopoulou’s sculptures explore notions of utility and physicality. She is concerned with the construction of knowledge, historicity, ruins, and anti-monumentalism, as well as with the role of care and hospitality. Her latest work, presented at the Yedi Kule touches on all these interests. The plasterboards set up by the artist create a sense of entrapment and disorientation. The writings on the temporary walls, along the external corridor, refer to the engraved words in the cells of Eptapyrgio, but also to the various markings on trees and benches which serve as presence-declarations. The ceramic spoons and forks, displayed in the enclosed space of the tower, represent a crucial technology for survival. By virtue of their varying sizes, Vlassopoulou suggests their multiple uses, these eating-utensils can also open wedges: for salvation, helping a prison mate widen a window slit; open a door slightly ajar; who knows, even transform inside into outside.
The slit seen in the panel Vlassopoulou created inside the tower is not accidental. Based on the architectural designs of the federal prisons of Chicago, completed in the mid-1970s, Vlassopoulou recreates the minimal opening of the cells’ windows. Slits, in the skyscraper-type correctional institution, are only 2,1 meters-high and feature an opening just 130 mm wide on the concrete walls. This opening is narrow enough to make additional bars redundant, but also wide enough to allow natural light to pass through. Her own constructions are supported by the existing wall. She is interested in this leaning on, this point of contact. Her work does not occupy the space, but instead relies on it. Like the former refugees from Asia Minor, who in order to avoid the construction of an extra wall, built their houses parasitically onto the pre-existing walls of the Yedi Kule. Their need was primarily utilitarian in nature, but privacy was assimilated into the collective, like in a panopticon, often in a coercive way.
A thin straight white neon lamp shines bright on the walls of the fortress. Vlassopoulou once again references the slit window openings of the US federal prison. Another landmark, this time the slip of light is visible not from the inside of a prison cell, but from afar. Is this artificial light―under natural viewing conditions―there to guide or disorientate us? Vlassopoulou, asks us to reflect upon what it means to be incarcerated, uprooted, disoriented, alienated, while also confronting us with the notion of selective memory: what we remember and what we allow ourselves to forget.
* As a reminder and a token of solidarity, Vlassopoulou has included in the biennial catalogue, Blaž Rojs’s poster for the “Now You See Me Moria Action Book” initiative, which began as a small collective and grew into a citizens’ movement demanding fundamental reforms in European migration policy.
