Candles, cotton and tears

2018

The sculptural landscape by Giorgos Palamaris, Candles,Cotton and Tears (2018), features a conglomeration of objects dispersed around a classroom. Exploring the traces of rearrangement and reorganisation of the building’s space – still visible on the subdivision floor imprints – the artist constructs an arena where objects turn into hybrid forms. Reminiscent of disarticulated bodies, his sculptures are, in fact, fragments of items that once used to be alive in this place and are now metamorphosed into fossilised moments in time. Reflecting upon the practices of medicine and religion over the care and healing of the body and soul, Palamaris equates the building’s body with the human body. He conceives both as living organisms that need to be looked after and sustained. The process of upcycling that outlines the exhibited works, connotes the pervasive obligation to salvage and defend our architectural heritage. At times of societal crisis, economic dystopia andemotional fragility, Candles, Cotton and Tears is also a commentary on the luck of thousands of urban monuments in central Athens that remain idle and gradually fall into decay and disintegration. The employment of a collection of materials that echo a former use and a previous life, leads to the re-birth of objects that are not just carriers of memory, but they also emotionally benefit from each other. The interchange between terms of being and non-being, asserts the rotation of life infused with a positive viewpoint and faith in the virtues of humanity.

Dr Kostas Prapoglou, curator