Eleni Tzirtzilaki | Exhibition at the Old School of Kastro, Sifnos 

12 – 17 July 2025 

Red is the color of despair. So Eleni Tzirtzilakis’ paintings tell us, and we should believe them, as they come from a deep fond, both dreamy and nightmarish, coming from the bowels of the psyche, of earthy psyche, of psychic earth. They talk to the words, they gesture to sea, boats, animals, suggest elongated vampiric images, ghoulish forms stretched like rubber that find no respite in the words. The landscape is a constant unrest, a stormy sea, a bloodscape, a fractured, fantasmatic, female, exhausting womanscape. The colors seep into the paper, setting and upsetting the body, become blots of gardens, fields, birds of prey. Cormorants and sly seagulls, poised and aggressive, bury themselves in the pelvis, dig deeply into the womb, pull the flesh, pull away the memory of the body, exile it.

There is a constant, draining expectation percolating from the bodies, these chimeric naked bodies, half woman half animal. Maybe a donkey, the animal of patience? Maybe a dog, the animal of devoted obedience? Both of them frequently wounded, always patient animals, animals of companionship. Haunting. They chase after the gaze like ghosts, they live in ponds of blood, cry out to the blood, as do the poppies, and the roosters, and the cats who are always there, present, at the site of an erotic stroke. Humans, and animals, and birds, and flowers, all together. Women, maybe children, too, maybe men, also, se touchent, they touch each other, kiss, smell each other, caress each other, with no melodrama, no nostalgia, no compass other than the rare, miniscule narratives strewn here and there on some paintings.

They bring to mind Anna Kindyni’s latter-day “Έρωτες.” Angelic women, some naked, others draped in gossamer, painted in crushed and muted reds, all of them standing, all of them in motion, their eyes turned to flight. And they also bring to mind the hungry children of Käthe Kollwitz, pulling on their mother’s apron in Interwar famished Germany, sketched in charcoal that now, looking at them through Eleni’s red despair, I wonder if, maybe, if they weren’t drawn in charcoal, would they be red? Eleni Tzirtzilaki shows us how despair can be strawberry red, can be surrounded by flowers, by the sea, by cats, by a kiss, and despite all that softness still and again throw us to the depths of desperation. Her bodies are often sitting or reclining, as if taunting or purposefully ignoring an apparent and imminently oncoming act that could be violence, or delight, or maybe even pleasure. And they stick their tongue out at it.

Is it a sob? A silent cry? A kiss? A kiss of recognition? Of passion? Of painful separation? What are those breasts, the genitalia, the skeletal and disincarnated extremities, the birds with the massive beaks and the red poppies and the purple wild peas? We don’t know. Nothing tells us. But whatever they might be and whatever it is that we are seeing now for the first time, will forever forth be living in our frontal lobe, will remain nearly seared on our retina, a daimonion sitting on our shoulder, keeping us in a constant state of alert.

Neni Panourgiá, Leros, 5 July, 2025

Neni Panourgiá was born in Athens. She is an anthropologist, Associate Professor and Academic Adviser at the Justice-in-Education Initiative, Columbia University in New York.

HILLS AND FIELDS

11-16 Μay 2022

performance-workshops-discussions-readings-walks

Filopappou Hill/Pedion tou Areos/Stefi Hill/Lycabettus Hill/Polytechnic Street/ EIGHT / ΤΟ ΟΧΤΩ

A peripatetic public program on Hills and Fields of Athens invite us  to examine together the ephemeral habitations in public space under the current circumstances and explore the possibilities for intervention, resistance and joy. To reflect upon the emergent urban geographies and hegemonies and rethinking the relationship between art practice and mental health, architecture and pedagogy, poetry and urban praxis. A call for impromptu collective explorations in the public and in-between spaces of the city.

5:00 – 8:00 pm PEDIO TOU AREOS

Short talks for our lives in the city. Have you ever tried to hide? (workshop) 
Idea & Creation: Eleni Tzirtzilaki
Meeting Point: Entrance to the park from Alexandras, Statue of Athina
*Registration is necessary at 8eightathens@gmail.com

Wednesday, October 17 at 18:00
Athens School of Architecture, Averof wing, amphitheatre A002

We invite you to the presentation-event of the bilingual edition Nomadic Architecture. Walking through Fragile Landscapes (futura, 2018) that will take place on Wednesday, October 17, at 6pm, in the Averof wing of the Athens School of Architecture (amphitheatre A002).

During the discussion, the following will speak: Gigi Argyropoulou (PhD in Theory of Art, director, curator), Daphne Vitali (art historian, curator EMST), Katerina Nasioka (sociologist), Nikos Kazeros (architect), Eleni Tzirtzilaki (PhD in architecture, community artist). The discussion will be coordinated by Pegi Zali (architect).

The launch will be accompanied by the video made for the event-performance “Exile Europa” (Christina Thomopoulou, Dimitris Samir, Eleni Tzirtzilaki, Stefanos Chandelis), the sound material of the “Home as a Fabric” (Maria Mantzari, Eleni Tzirtzilaki), and material from the “Nomadic/Topos/Athina” (Maro Zaxarogianni). Anna Tsouloufi, Eleni Vafiadi  Fani Sofologi and Angelos Skourtis will participate.

The book Nomadic Architecture. Walking through Fragile Landscapes is an archive of the actions of the Nomadic Architecture network, from 2006 up to today, through photographic material, texts and maps. The documentation material is interrupted by texts that aim at tracing the methodology and the practices of Nomadic Architecture: “A Change Made by Walking. Walking as an Artistic and Political Tool” by Daphne Vitali, “A Small Mountain of Soil” by Sophia Vyzoviti, “From Five Fingers to Nomadic Architecture Network” by Pagona Zali, “Notes on the Nomadic Architecture Actions” by Nina Pappa, “To Walk under the Trees” by Angelos Skourtis, “Walking on Shifting Grounds. Nomadism, Migration and Commons in Nomadic Architecture’s Actions” by Sevie Tsampalla, “Flesh, Stone and Contemporary Artistic Parctices” by Eva Fotiadi, the introductory text by Eleni Tzirtzilaki “Encounterings of Bodies. Like Fireflies That Survive”, as well as a discussion among Eleni Tzirtzilaki, Jilly Traganou, and Nikos Kazeros under the title “Life Jackets”.

The choice of the Athens School of Architecture for the book launch marks our wish to point to the fact that Architecture may be expressed variously and that it has to be present in all the events taking place in the city, dynamically and collectively, giving its support against the vulnerability that emerges in it. The actions of the Nomadic Architecture are being realized crossing this public space and urban voids and connect each body with the city soil-urban soil and other bodies. They lurk between architecture and art, appropriating elements of urban geography, anthropology, social sciences. Its practices include silent walking, the participation in squats of empty spaces in the city, testimonies and the connection of past situations with the present, they also regard the preparation of food, the creation of a garden or playing with the communities of people who inhabit a certain area, immigrants, women, children, as well as encounterings for the investigation of the crucial notion of home, as, e.g., in “Home as a Fabric”.

During this process, the significance of the participation of the bodies is very important: the actions are like flashes of light, flares in the dark, and the spirit companionship created each and every time is unique. These actions wish to constitute a promise of solidarity and reconciliation within social limitations, exclusions, precariousness and the conditions of social cannibalism that emerge.

With the publication of this book an era is coming to its end and a new one begins. Athens is changing – fear and violence being installed and the society gradually giving in to fascism. All we can do is to answer in our proper way, exploring new artistic practices. The encounterings of bodies in the city –the commons– acquire a particular significance.

On Friday, December 18, 2015 at 20:30 we invite you to the presentation of the documentary: “Partisan Nitsa – Eleni Papayiannakis, called Electra. Women branches”
at EXILE ROOM, 12 Athinas St. Monastiraki.

As Walter Benjamin wrote in Theses on the Philosophy of History, “the authentic image of the past passes fleetingly”. The past can be perceived only as an image sparkling at the moment of its recognition and then is lost forever. “The truth will not escape us”.

Her image is only a family photo with which, as well as with the photo of her brother, we grew up. In the documentary, her image is recognized through the testimonies of her comrades and her sister’s, through the visit at the place, through books about the Civil War, through archival research. On the occasion of her own story, we can recognize the stories of other women who came to the Mountain, driven by deep desire, and who participated in the impossible Revolution which was the Civil War, and thus conquered equality and freedom. Continue reading