Lavrion, on the coast of Attica, has been an important mining centre for three thousand years. The silver that paid for ancient Athens political and economic hegemony was mined there ahd in more recent times lead, manganese and cadmium have been the principal ores extracted. Today the mines are abandoned and the industrial buildings are derelict. Strapatsakis video installation, with its enclosed metal housing and two small vertically – angled video screens is redoient of that history, with the abstract video images sparking and glittering in many colours, like metallic ore and mineral crystals, atmospheric of past tradition and the beauty that was based upon it. The metal structure we enter to view the videos recreates the underground passageways peopled by generations of miners. The screens glitter, as we imagine metallic ores would do, with images shot on video in the mines and then montaged at the editing desk with further images of minerals shot at the Museum in Lavrion and combined with images painted in pastels on stainless steel. The resulting footage, with an atmospheric musical score by Haris Xanthoudakis, combines a wealth of historical, mythological and socio-political ideas with the aesthetic simplicity of a kaleidoscopic presentation of colour. Strapatsakis’ work as a video artist and as a painter has explored the histories and cultures that border the Mediterranean, reworking the archaelogical, cultural and architectural monuments into electronically processed images for today. This metamorphosis of past culture and history is filtered through and interwined with the interaction of the underworld, the earth and the skies and their respective manifestations and representations, as in Hesiod’s telling of the creation story. This interplay of the three “worlds” is also mirrored by the range of settings in which Strapatsakis’ installations are created, from underground basements and artificial structures to light, airy and exterior sites.
Roger Wollen
Curator 1998
Marianna Strapatsakis, a Greek artist that seems to have made a serious commitment to video art, one which in fact goes back to as early as the 70s, is currently organizing an exhibition titled Underground Routes-Lavrion, which features video installation and painting on steel foil. But as things in the visual world rarely occur in a haphazard, fragmentary manner, I should like to take this opportunity to remind readers of the artist’s previous work, Ghosts of the Mediterranean or Reflections of the Past, before moving on to the present exhibition. This older work again consisted of a video installation, created against the setting of the island of Aegina, in which water and the vestiges of the ancient Greek world suggestively coexisted in images flowing through the installation’s monitors. When considering an artist’s work, it is important to remember – if, that is, we are susceptible to the vice of interpreting what we see on the spot, rather than enjoying whatever ephemeral relationship may form between us and the work at the given moment – that we need to reflect upon it in hindsight, from a distance afforded by the lapse of time. As far as Strapatsakis’ Ghosts of the Mediterranean is concerned, what to my mind still remains as a dominant impression, reaching out to me over this distance, is an image of sheer transparency. On the contrary, this recent work (and I hope this will still be the case a few years from now) comes across as “representation” of a sense of materiality instilled in the video image. It is therefore appropriate to speak of the second part of a trilogy: first, there was water; now, there is the earth – before the artist goes on to discuss death or life in the next stage of the work’s development. These few remarks made so far concern the image’s content. In terms of the work’s arrangement, now, it is interesting to note how this corresponds to spaces both on and underneath the earth’s surface; how it captures light and ensnares sound. The work – the video projection, that is – is not viewed at eye level. Rather, viewers have to lower their gaze into two funnel-like constructions. They are thus urged to enter the core of the image; in other words, they are urged to enter the mining tunnel. At the same time, they are driven to discover a new way of viewing. Conversely, one might also remark that Strapatsakis’ unorthodox arrangement of her monitors goes a step further in the direction of exploring external elements such as pertain to the form of the video installation. The black box – the darkened space within which lurks the video image – is also quite compelling, both in terms of its inward and outward features. The texture of the steel foil – of a “painting” that is the result of random oxidation – serves to dialectically arrange wall-mounted pictorial surfaces. An imprint of life in the underground tunnels is preserved in the artifact produced by nature’s painting activity. What is also preserved is the sense of Marianna Strapatsakis’ consistency, of her unfailing commitment to her practice, which almost guarantees a successful follow-up in the future.
Maria Marangou
Eleftherotypia, 6 February 1997
Following The Phantasms of the Mediterranean or Reflections of the Past (1989), the first part of a trilogy, a work that attempted to re-baptize, or reinvent, the ancient sanctuary of Athena Aphaia on the island of Aegina by using video, construction (columns made of Plexiglas) and painting on stainless steel foils to visually immerse its image into water, Marianna Strapatsakis presents the second part of that trilogy, which she titles Underground Routes – Lavrion. Currently on show at Medusa Art Space, the work in question consists of oil-pastel painting, printing on sheets of metal and an installation weighing a total of 1.500 kg. The work’s palette is captivating, as is the interplay of light and shadow, the arrangement of volume, the constant sense of motion intimated by alternating visual media, from the oil pastel to installation, which, though subtle in its setup, dominates the exhibition space. This is an impressive metal “chamber”, inviting one to enter it through its opening, to explore its interior, but more so to look even deeper inside it, to bend over two lopsided constructions of different height so that they may watch the flow of images on the video screens hidden within them: plasma-like forms, images of rocks, a motion that is slow at first, accelerating, intensifying along the way, picking up a pace that is almost fitful, spasmodic; colour and light, a metaphor for our lives; music created out of sounds ingeniously harmonized by Charis Xanthoudakis, who co-signs the video, together with Costas Deliyannis (photography) and Makis Faros (editing, special effects). It is interesting to see how the image of those initially recognizable rocks fades away, becomes unfamiliar, as it is gradually saturated by a shade of yellow that literally and metaphorically introduces the element of air, or by a deep blue slowly turning into black, allowing a few sporadic glints of light that recall the end of a life’s course, the moment life fades away, though still surrounded by light. And then there are the fascinating, esoteric sounds that carry the echo of the underground tunnels, the pulse of life once inhabiting them; that tell the story of Lavrion, that evoke the tragic quality of that site. Despite the jarring contrast between the “openness” of colour in the video and these obscure, eerie sounds, the latter do seem organic to the dark, silent, metal chamber, which brings to mind Barthe’s definition of the dark room.
Eleni Machaira
Ependytis, 15 February 1997
In her work “Secrets Passages-Lavrion”, Marianne Strapatsakis introduces us to the second part of a trilogy ih the process of creation. In this, her most recent narrative in image form, the protagonists are the Earth and one of the places where it was exploited at a very early date: Lavrio.The tunnels dug out of the solid body of the earth, the pits which still gape in the surface, and the subterranean life which, chthonic but marvellous, evolves in hiding beneath our feet and under the sun make up the field over which her restless gaze has wandered. The first part of the trilogy, in contrast, concerned the element of water and linked the act of creation to the physical space of Mediterranean civilisation: the sea. In that reconstruction of a cosmogony using the media of video film, water, plexiglas columns and stainless steel panels, all the components were concentrated in a construction in space. Materials, techniques, the image and the script were amalgamated with the central characters of that narrative: water, and the temple of Athena Aphaea on Aegina. In the strikingly sensitive reading of the work written in 1989 by art historian Andreas Ioannidis under the title “The Spectres of the Mediterranean, or, The Reflections of the Past”, attention was drawn to the continuous shift in perception of the creative concept from the “overthrow” of the forms and their historical references to their “restoration”. In Strapatsaki’s work, the history and image of the ancient temple were rebaptised in the water of which the wider physical and cultural landscape consisted, thus generating a new narrative about the unity of Nature and Art. Today, Marianne Strapatsakis is still gazing at, and exploring, the same bipolar unity: Nature and Art. In the mineral world guarded within the womb of the Earth, the movement of water is reconstructed in a stabilised form. It is through this solid space that, centuries ago, man began to build the itineraries of an artificial cosmos which, later, opened up and consolidated the routes and firm structures of the industrial era, reaching the point of wasteful exploitation of the material wealth bestowed upon him by the Earth. At that point in history, Nature and Technology parted company. In this buried history, Strapatsakis walks once more between the elements of Nature and the remains of a mortified life —led on by a curiosity most closely resembling that of the explorer. Here, inevitably, the artist and her act of reconstruction intersect with certain other courses taken by the history of interpreting the world. After observing water and fluidity, which as a natural state is inherent in the body and is reflected in the human mental functions, the artist’s eye has turned to the solid walls of the Earth’s hinterland. This brought her hard up against the solidified structure of things-of thougth, of the form of the word. Her wanderings in that place where Nature is to be read in its constant flow and also in the crystallised records of the flow itself inescapably leads our thoughts to the channels of the spirit as they opened up from Heraclitus to the Stoics. In the history of cvilisation, those —and other— viewpoints on the world have been the fixed points of reference for many different approaches. For art, they have been in various periods the object of fresh interpretations. The artist, bringing his gaze to a standstill and focusing his attention on a single specific aspect of the kosmos, seeks to crystallise that aspect in a script of some kind, in a unambiguous stucture and technique which —apart from their power of expression— will also convey a concept of the world correlated against a given historical point of view. For Marianne Strapatsakis, the work of art talks of the process of observation as if it were the act of mining a wealth of concepts and images lying somewhere in the depths, beneath all flat and linear forms of information. With spontaneous, almost erotic, passion, she penetrates into the elements of nature, into the sea, into the earth, into the structurers of civilisation, into the image of art, helping us “retrieve our senses”, as Susan Sontag so perceptively put it in 1964, in reference to the language of art and its reading in the culture of the present day. That is why, before proclaiming the superiority of a “new” viewpoint on the world, of a “new” reading of art, we should examine whether we are able “to see more, to hear more, to feel more”.* The course taken by Marianne Strapatsakis stimulates our sensibility in the direction of such a quest. Faced with the direction she has taken, interpretation is truly superfluous, and sight and script regain their power as purely creative acts. * (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1964).
Efi Strouza
Critic and Art Historian
[…] this is a must-see exhibition: currently on show at Medusa Art Space, Marianna Strapatsakis’ new work explores the site of Lavrion. Already from the beginning of the 80s, the artist’s investigations seem to be focusing on the gradual distortions to which the image of various spaces is subject when reflected upon sheets of metal, upon flexible or otherwise adjustable stainless steel foils. We should also add that her practice involves an almost obsessive preoccupation with technology, evident as early as 1985 in both the transferring of such images on the television screen and the incorporation of video images and materials such as Plexiglas in works dealing with the mythological implications of water, which the artist presented in 1989 at Montpelier. In her exhibition at Medusa Art Space, one may witness the successive steps taken in her iconographic practice, from oil pastel drawings to video and on to images that employ stainless or oxidized metallic surfaces in place of the conventional canvas. We should also note that these instances of transition from one use of the image to the next, mediated by different technical means, appear to develop across the exhibition space into an array of different iconographic genres.
Emanuel Mavromatis
Kerdos, January 1997
In the strikingly sensitive reading of the work written in 1989 by art historian Andreas Ioannidis under the title “The Spectres of the Mediterranean, or, The Reflections of the Past”, attention was drawn to the continuous shift in perception of the creative concept from the “overthrow” of the forms and their historical references to their “restoration”. In Strapatsaki’s work, the history and image of the ancient temple were rebaptised in the water of which the wider physical and cultural landscape consisted, thus generating a new narrative about the unity of Nature and Art. Today, Marianne Strapatsakis is still gazing at, and exploring, the same bipolar unity: Nature and Art. In the mineral world guarded within the womb of the Earth, the movement of water is reconstructed in a stabilised form. It is through this solid space that, centuries ago, man began to build the itineraries of an artificial cosmos which, later, opened up and consolidated the routes and firm structures of the industrial era, reaching the point of wasteful exploitation of the material wealth bestowed upon him by the Earth.
At that point in history, Nature and Technology parted company. In this buried history, Strapatsakis walks once more between the elements of Nature and the remains of a mortified life —led on by a curiosity most closely resembling that of the explorer. Here, inevitably, the artist and her act of reconstruction intersect with certain other courses taken by the history of interpreting the world. After observing water and fluidity, which as a natural state is inherent in the body and is reflected in the human mental functions, the artist’s eye has turned to the solid walls of the Earth’s hinterland. This brought her hard up against the solidified structure of things-of thougth, of the form of the word. Her wanderings in that place where Nature is to be read in its constant flow and also in the crystallised records of the flow itself inescapably leads our thoughts to the channels of the spirit as they opened up from Heraclitus to the Stoics. In the history of cvilisation, those —and other— viewpoints on the world have been the fixed points of reference for many different approaches. For art, they have been in various periods the object of fresh interpretations. The artist, bringing his gaze to a standstill and focusing his attention on a single specific aspect of the kosmos, seeks to crystallise that aspect in a script of some kind, in a unambiguous stucture and technique which —apart from their power of expression— will also convey a concept of the world correlated against a given historical point of view
For Marianne Strapatsakis, the work of art talks of the process of observation as if it were the act of mining a wealth of concepts and images lying somewhere in the depths, beneath all flat and linear forms of information. With spontaneous, almost erotic, passion, she penetrates into the elements of nature, into the sea, into the earth, into the structurers of civilisation, into the image of art, helping us “retrieve our senses”, as Susan Sontag so perceptively put it in 1964, in reference to the language of art and its reading in the culture of the present day. That is why, before proclaiming the superiority of a “new” viewpoint on the world, of a “new” reading of art, we should examine whether we are able “to see more, to hear more, to feel more”.* The course taken by Marianne Strapatsakis stimulates our sensibility in the direction of such a quest. Faced with the direction she has taken, interpretation is truly superfluous, and sight and script regain their power as purely creative acts. * (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, 1964).
Efi Strouza Critic and Art Historian
