A talk with curator Evagoria Dapola about her inspiration behind the exhibition Everything I touch turns into me.

When ancient objects exit their flows, they are transformed, becoming visible, familiar, autonomous. When we interact with them, we re-think gazes, gestures and behaviours and create new functions. In an ever-ending archipelago of protocols of handling, working, and owning artefacts, this exhibition proposes a radical non-use. Exploring the diagonal commonhold of gestures and artefacts as objects of necropolitical desire, the exhibition functions as a parasitic council that suggests alternative gestures, new forms of movements, stares and thoughts etched on gestures of handle, care, love and sharing. A rhizome of non-proprietary uses, it summarizes a long research on how gesture, language and value intersect, influenced by Latour’s?Berlin Key.Reframing the value of gesture and its embodiment, it?urges us to grant no one narrative or discursive practice a preferential role, by reinforcing the idea of incessant metamorphosis by the means of gesture. It highlights an inverted gesture that portrays ecstasy instead of reverence.?This creates and augments a series of singular environments and personal perspectives for engaging antiquity as gestural, liquid, performative and heterogeneous, rather than fixed and mono-cultural.

space52 had a talk with Evagoria Dapola about her?inspiration behind the exhibition Everything I touch turns into me, and how the participating artists embody and express the idea of artifacts and gestures becoming "visible, familiar, autonomous". The exhibition was?hosted at Space52.

Curator: Evagoria Dapola

Participating Artists:?Kostis Velonis, Elli Antoniou, Phanos Kyriacou, Socratis Socratous, Dimitris?Kontodimos, Dionisis Christofilogiannis

Photo curtesy:???Pantelis Vitaliotis Magneto

Evagoria, could you delve into the underlying inspiration behind the exhibition "Everything I Touch Turns Into Me"? How do the participating artists embody and express the idea of artifacts and gestures becoming "visible, familiar, autonomous"?

I was always fascinated by gesture, as a space for attunement.[1] Most of my personal curatorial and academic research revolves around notions found in theory of affect, phenomenology, visual politics and semiotics. Rooting from a deep understanding of relational aesthetics and phenomenological, sociological, performative and physical understandings of gesture, this exhibition frames a long research on gesture as a means of knowing the world.The participating artists approach these ideas through distinct viewpoints,? through multi-layered, ambient and cerebral artworks, touching on subjects of handling, activating and de-activating, creating engineered events, visual analogues, psychological experiences felt or mediated through the gestural language and paralanguage. Kostis Velonis makes visible the hidden structural building materials and objects that are scattered and discarded, invisible in plain sight, in Athen’s road and city works, creating brutal yet meditative gestures. Phanos Kyriacou gathers autonomous objects and materials, combines them with meditated casts and familiar structures and assembles a buddy system, through a meditation on distinct materialities that come together revealing the softest, most intimate, and smallest gestures. Elli Antoniou makes visible her gesture through a process of non etching, but rather a drawing on a harsh metallic material, making the process itself autonomous and the work refusing categorization. Socratis Socratous, brings forefront forensic morbid gestures, making visible and autonomous taxonomies of pain. Dionisis Christofilogiannis makes skinnings of familiar tools and objects found in an artist studio, making the otherwise unnoticed tools visible, while at the same time skinning ancient architecture structures taken out of their antiquity contexts, becoming autonomous. Dimitris Kontodimos transforms his own iterations of archaeological fragments, taking them out of their original context creating processes of commodification, through neoliberal consumption economies.[1] Attunement is the reactiveness we have to another person. It is the process by which we form relationships. In this context, I use attunement as reactiveness we have towards anything in the Anthropocene.

Read the full interview here