![]() ![]() Women remain at the center of this engendered crisis resulting from patriarchal and phallic values of greed, pillaging, and inconsequentiality. The artworks unveil their long-term effects on relationships and homes which are now characterized as destabilized, wrecked, or destroyed. For the artist, it is risible that an offense has no bearing or consequences in a relationship as risible is the notion that the economic crisis has had little impact on the conceptual and physical construction of the home on all levels of private and public engagement. The Mediterranean Garden pavilion acts, in the artist’s narrative, as a coded and decodable cabinet of curiosities and narratives in a game of reflections between the inside and the outside - challenging the idea of inconsequential actions and legacies between lovers or between the state and its citizens. Similar to ancient pre-written curses the writings painted on the sheets act as a container within which the viewers can insert their own narratives. The writings on the sheets are curses that can be addressed to anyone by substituting with a name of choice. The sheets and the writings upon them offer - in contradictory terms - both a visible public record of the violent oppression of living together and the hope for the possibilities offered by the re-acquisition of freedom. The dirty sheets, soiled with bodily fluids, are not only a record of a past relationship but also simulacra of a social and political collapse of wider relationships in the Mediterranean. These are objects that are disposed of, thrown out from the window of a private home onto the street. The remainders of the relationship are the artworks made of discarded sheets which bare the traces of the bodies and the now forgotten relationship. ![]() What is left of this relationship is on public display in the Mediterranean Garden pavilion within which Aceti, by engaging with the architectural elements, creates reflections of visible and invisible spaces tracing the lines between private, semi-private, semi-public, and public engagements. The artworks contain a frozen moment in which objects - once expressed as tangible metaphors of partnership and living in the home - are now being divided and discarded. In the imagined narrative of the artist, the lovers are parting ways. The people - conceived as one single feminine body - are imagined as a woman with matriarchal values of community, self-sacrifice, and support.” The nation-state - embodied in a physical person - is constructed and imagined as a selfish patriarchal, individualistic, and immature man. They are both leaving the roof under which they shared dreams, hopes, and cares. It is the aftermath of a quarrel and the lovers have separated. “It is the end of the relationship between two people, one of whom embodies the nation-state and the other the collective citizens. ![]() “I wanted to address this crisis as a breakup between lovers,” explains the artist. Through the metaphorical and physical act of ‘airing the dirty laundry,’ the artworks speak of engendered social frameworks, body conflicts, and political individual freedoms which have been dismantled and betrayed. ![]() Known internationally for his socio-political stances and performances that have taken places over the past thirty years, the artist has conceived a site-specific installation that engages directly with the theme of the Thessaloniki Biennale, Imagined Homes, and created a public window into the dismantling of contemporary society, its crisis and the consequences on the private home. Supported by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, the Mediterranean Garden pavilion on the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki has a contemporary art installation, Knock, Knock, Knocking by Lanfranco Aceti, curated by Camilla Boemio. ![]()
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