| SACRED WAY/ IERA ODOS The road from Athens to Eleusina Lizzie Calligas - what comes to light by Claire MacDonald To be interested in the nature of site, space, time and the body is uniquely complex for a Greek artist. Lizzie Calligas, whose work Iera Odos-Sacred Way is documented on the following pages, has talked about the conundrum of making art in a country in which the practices of travel, migration and pilgrimage that have marked its history are powerfully present in the every day life of its people, and yet equally almost absent from its contemporary art. She has talked as well of the unsettled reaction of foreign curators to work like hers which seems not be be authentically ‘Greek’ within the pictorial and classical terms in which the west still views Greece; as if its ancientness and its timeless landscape are known qualities, while its recent history and its present actuality - its factories, its ports, its cities, its slums, its hospitals, and roads, its urban culture - are all but invisible to the eye. There has been little analysis of Greek culture in the post-modern, or perhaps even post-colonial, terms which might provide a counter viewpoint. The conundrum for an artist like Calligas is how to engage with the continuities and disruptions of Greece’s historical identity through its modernity, since it is only through the contemporary, and the range of practices open to the contemporary artist, that she can also engage with its past. I first met Lizzie Calligas in 1989 at an exhibition of her photographic series ‘My Body, Your Body’ at Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, where I was shortly to take over as artistic director. Large scale images had been constructed using slide projections and photography to create visual metaphors of a female body emerging from darkness into light. They were immensely tactile and unsettlingly erotic. Looking back at my own inarticulate, highly emotional response, I see it now as a reaction to my experience of Greece as a foreigner with a half-Greek daughter, connected to in and yet outside a culture that I have more recently begin to understand through its art, artists and writers. The images moved me, less from sentiment than from some much deeper, inchoate feeling of recognition. I met her again when I was living in Athens for some months later that year. She had produced a book of photographs, ‘Site and Sight’, that recorded the transformation of a modern Greek ruin - an abandoned 1940s factory - into a gallery space. As an introduction the writer George Tzirtzilakis had written a ‘Glossary of False Terms’, an essay in English that playfully associated some of Lizzie Calligas’s own points of reference - the mark, the patch, the trace, the ruin. Calligas had chosen to photograph the ruins of a contemporary factory in the centre of a city devoted to the preservation of classical ruins, and through choosing a site also being transformed symbolically from a place of commercial production to a space devoted to Art, she focused on the nature of artistic production itself. There have been many other works and projects since which show that over the past fifteen years or so her work has been akin to that of a visual essayist, picking up on points of reference within the present and illuminating deeper, older ideas. In 1992 I wrote about her installation ‘Stigma’, a large scale photographic projection of the female body on which a tiny mark - on a hand that seems to be sheltering a pregnant body - appears. The meanings associated with the mark turn on the multiple meanings of ‘stigma’ in Greek and English. They include a blemish, and also the point where the ovary discharges an egg, but also, in Greek, a stigma is a spatial term, a point of reckoning for ships at sea. The presence of highly emotive but abstract imagery, visual play and punning, connects the visual image to narrative. Her images seem almost literally to float below the level of words and to bring language, with all its dream associations, to light. Last year, in her house on Spetses, she showed me a huge black and white photograph that looked like a close up of the surface of the skin, textured and very dark with some kind of very small scar running part way across it. The surface seemed to sparkle a little, or maybe it looked furrowed, like a ploughed field viewed from very far away. In fact it was the sea, photographed from the balcony of her house in the middle of the day in high summer with a swimmer scoring its surface texture, pulling at the water, marking a way across it. There is a time of day on the Greek islands when light seems almost to become dark. So light that one cannot see, and so hot one has to sleep, so that the brightest part of the day feels like night, and the dark, which is a release after the heat of the day, like day-time. Again the work feels both abstract and figurative, and it associates facets of cultural signification - the mark of the swimmer across the surface of the sea is also a mark of bodily presence on the skin of an abstract print which is also, literally, a field of vision; it associates the sea with the body, as if the sea were the body of a culture which has been defined historically by its presence on and by the sea, since Hellenistic culture was itself fluidly defined, based in the presence of the Greek language in the countries bordering the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Through the production of highly varied works using photography, drawing, video, installation and occasionally writing and painting, her field of vision has enlarged to throw light on the complexities of Greek cultural experience, and centrally on the cultural experience of women, fed as that still is by those dreams lodged in the unconscious of the European mind - the Greek myths. Her work is a decades long visual meditation on the nature of land, body, language and context. The work which is documented here began in 1993. It is an ongoing, process-based investigation of myth, history and modernity based on walking an ancient Athenian road - the Iera Odos or Sacred Way leading to Eleusina, the site where Kore, later called Persephone, was abducted by Hades and taken to Tartarus, the underworld, and also the site where her mother, Demeter, began to search for her. In the story, Kore is finally allowed above ground again, but because she has eaten the seeds of a pomegranate, has to return to the underworld for three months of the year, where she becomes Persephone Queen of Tartarus. The myth gave rise to the Hellenic cult of the Eleusinian mysteries in which thousands of people walked to Eleusina every year - at the autumn equinox - to be inducted into the rite. According to Calligas’s researches it was one of the most important and widespread cults of classical times, and took place every year for over two thousand years with participants from all over the Hellenic world, including women, slaves and Roman Empowers. According to Robert Graves, the story is a pre-Hellenic narrative of death and regeneration, a matriarchal, agricultural myth of seasonal renewal. The road remains, running through Athens and out to the south-west, ending in what is now one of the poorest, most industrial and most polluted parts of Athens. If Athens is a city that many western Europeans find difficult it is often because its particular kind of modernity is so challenging. To be in a city which flaunts its ancientness to foreign eyes, and to be confronted with the chaotic signage of modernism, unplanned sprawling and the ‘nefos’, the cloud of smog which is literally poisoning the city in places, feels paradoxical - but in walking the road, describing it visually, collecting images of its signs and adding in the comments and stories of other walkers, most of them ancient, Calligas creates an artistic and social practice which allows the ancient and the contemporary to be included in the same visual and narrative space. The project invites both response and participation - in fact Calligas hopes to walk the road again with a group. The work has become a point of reckoning, or in Greek a ‘stigma’, in relation to which other associations, debates, ideas and possibilities emerge, not least, the significance of Lizzie Calligas’s own body of work. |