Just For Today - 27 october

The welcoming translation workshop, 'Pages from my garden', conducted by Athens-based artists Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis (a.k.a. VASKOS), explored the limits of a common language, of translatability, but also of our ability to access historical documents with a poetic and improvisational way. VASKOS used for this purpose the manifesto written by Raymond Duncan in 1947, entitled Actionalism. Attempts to transfer Duncan’s rather cryptic language to the Greek, proved to be an apt way to critically examine notions, meanings and disparate tools of approaching our common understanding of the text. Later on and in a less dialogic setting, the presentation 'The Exhibition as a Garden' by Greek professor Marlen Mouliou explored the centrality of the museum and some contemporary approaches of museology as ways to engage in communal projects. This indeed academic and formal presentation was fruitfully renegotiated when entering the exhibition space for the opening of 'Aura”' by Spain-based duo rosanayaris and Spanish collective Nyamnyam. It felt more like a working room that exhibits part of the creative process and base material from the making of Omen, a road movie directed by the same artists. The fragments exhibited were to be reassembled in the projection of the movie, for the closing of the first day. Omen is a kind of visual diary, unfolding in 25 "rhapsodies", following the traces of the Duncans’ first trip from Brindisi to Athens in 1903. The movie, without the rigid structure of a script, is suggested like a filmic hypertext, in which experiences of the present are juxtaposed with passages from Homer’s Odyssey, Raymond’s astrological map and parts of his 1955 interview to Orson Wells. Could their itinerary, over 100 years old, be thought of as a palimpsest, an opportunity to elaborate the abundance or precarity of time and the multiple stories within it?