Giorgos Papadatos, Big red stage for minor action, 2021
Giorgos Papadatos, Big red stage for minor action, Soft Protocols, Counter Publics, 2021
Giorgos Papadatos, Big red stage for minor action, Soft Protocols, Counter Publics, 2021
Vocabulary of Washing
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, Vocabulary of washing, 2021 |
Minor Rituals 2021
Giorgos Papadatos, Minor Ritual 1, Public Graveyard, Kerameikos, Athens, 2021 |
Giorgos Papadatos, Minor Ritual 1, Public Graveyard, Kerameikos, Athens, 2021 |
Stages for minor actions 2019
Stages for minor actions, wood, photo prints, fabric, dimensions variable, 2020 |
No-one has ever lived in the past. No-one will ever live in the future. The present is
the form of all life.
With this aphorism, the A60 in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville epitomizes the supremacy of totalitarian power that occurs through dehistoricization, through the collective loss of the ability to organize the past and the future, through the rupture of being as a historical continuity and a future possibility.
The present is the form of all life, photo print, canson paper, 20x30cm,2020 |
Solid modernity excludes potentiality, it envisions only final solutions. Of course in the case of Alphaville the final solution is positive with the triumph of poetry.
In liquid modernity, on the contrary, the present is an intermediate, the shaping of power relations happens through a constant negotiation; it is a constant failure and at the same time a constant pursuit. With this as a starting point, the installation negotiates the concept of the intermediate time-space.
Stages for minor actions is a recent “chapter” of an ongoing project Notes on a Transitional Monument (2012-) launched with a collaboration with Société Réaliste. Its basic conceptual axis explores the constituents of the concept of a monument as a statement of power. It seeks to minimize and undermine them by focusing on the paradoxical relationship of the terms transition-monument.
It is spatially materialized through site-specific installations consisting of fragments, random finds, photographs and texts organized in flexible and unstable modular structures. In each new assemblage of them, the memory of the former is partially reconstructed, as a comment on history, as a continuous construction.
In this version of the project, the "transitional monuments" are stages using the dual meaning of the word in English, (performative platform) and (step of a process). They are accompanied by visual instructions that have the role of incomplete, allusive scores, scripts for possible (or not) action.
The final form of the installations is therefore under negotiation until their final viewing, but also during the exhibition, in an attempt to explore the intermediate space, the transition space that the conflict opens up, which itself constitutes a monument in and of itself that is constantly in the process of becoming.
Giorgos Papadatos, The present is the form of all life, wood, photo print, sting, 20x30cm, 2020 |
Notes on a monument to unintentional profoundness 2018
Giorgos Papadatos , Everything saved must be lost , (Memorial on accidental profoundness) , wood ,fabric , photo , folders , dim variable , 2018 |
Giorgos Papadatos, Everything saved must be lost , installation, wood, textile, alluminium, dimensions variable, 2018 detail |
Notes on an outcast monument 2017
The main
conceptual axis in the artistic practice of Giorgos Papadatos is the exploration of the human condition and the ways it
is determined by the mix of social and historical institutions.
Papadatos
makes a caustic comment on the arbitrary, often contradictory logic behind the
concepts of authority, economy, functionality and productivity. Using various
media, the artist builds ephemeral structures, undermining and ultimately
deconstructing the notion of monumentality and by extension that of authority.
Eschewing all manner of lyrical approach, the form of
his installations tends towards rationalism. He does not
seek to charge the viewer emotionally. His installations often work as a grid
in which space not only interacts but becomes part of the in-situ artistic
intervention. In this way his works act as an arbitrary, non-functional and
non-habitable platform, demonstrating and censuring the conventions of the
concepts under scrutiny, reorganising their forms or creating ecosystems with
the potential for intermediary or transitional experiences, social spaces and
historical intermissions.
His Transitional monuments series is a
project in progress since 2012, consistent in its conceptual field and method
of production.
The final
form of the artist’s installations often remains negotiable until their final
viewing. They have been shown in different versions and thematic approaches
that constitute chapters in the same story and adapt themselves to the in-situ
circumstances. The comprise photographs, drawings, small sculptures, fragments
and adaptable wood structures that operate in a modular way. Texts and
aphorisms often convey an ironic, metaphorical mood in the works of Papadatos
and are directly linked to historical events by way of critiquing what
transpired. A typical example from the series is the Notes for a banished
monument, in which the phrases written on shards from vessels make a clear
reference to the practice of ostracism in ancient Greece. The work traces the
oxymoron in the fact that while contemporary society needs and extols critical
thinking as a narrative, at the same time it neutralises and ostracises it as a
practical possibility.
The works
in the Transitional monuments series act as latter-day, ephemeral
‘popular’ monuments without the ‘heavy’, ‘fixed’ form of historical monuments
that are symbols of institutional leadership. Clearly referencing Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid
Modernity, 2000), these fragile structures criticise and subvert the
monumental expressions of power in an attempt to explore the intermediary,
transitional space.
Artemis
Potamianou, Theorimata, Deductive and Axiomatic systems, AICA - EMST 2018
Translation
from Greek Tony Moser
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, Notes on an outcast monument 2017 |
Transitional monument for the future (Repubblica di Napoli in grayscale)
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, “ Transitional monument for the future (Repubblica di Napoli in grayscale), 2016 |
The work is an altar-monument (altarino) dedicated to a
city-circumstance in which I happened to traverse one of my three youths and to
which I have no wish to return.
The monument is aesthetically optimized. Without the baroque realisms
which this city deserves (grey is perennially safe and never ludicrous).
And naturally is is transitional and ephemeral like all honest
monuments.
It moves between two basic principles.
The text by Paolo Virno The horror of homelands and part of the film Youth
by Paolo Sorentino, who is the same age as me, where the double appears of the
retired Diego Maradona, a monument of himself, doing soccer practice with
time's ball and answering that he belongs not to youth but to the future.
So, then, using as tools the concepts of monument-youth-horror of
homelands, with the aid of the deified Diego Maradona and with the help of the
small oxymorons which make up our present, the work aspires to function
subversively, even ironically, in relation to the concepts of
return-memory-homeland- pubescence etc and think of the future which is the
homeland of us all.
Giorgos Papadatos, Nice Athens, Feb 2016
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, “ Transitional monument for the future (Repubblica di Napoli in grayscale), 2016 |
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, “ Transitional monument for the future (Repubblica di Napoli in grayscale), 2016 |
Radical Resort L.t.d
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, Radical Resort L.t.d, 2014 |
Five square meters for all
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, five square meters for all, 2014
|
Giorgos Papadatos, five square meters for all, 2014
|
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, five square meters for all, 2014
|
Notes on a transitional monument
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, notes on a transitional monument, photocopied portrait of Jürgen Habermas ,wood,cord,photocopy, 30x25x20, 2013
|
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, notes on a transitional monument, photocopied portraits of Noam Chomsky,wood,rock,tend etc 2012
|
![]() |
Giorgos Papadatos, notes on a transitional monument, photocopied portraits of Ranciere,Chomsky,
|
Notes on trapping 1B, 2010
35X50 cm
marker on paper
|
![]() |
Thinking system with mouse trap, 2010
Dim 70X30X15 cm
wood, print, metal mouse trap
|
![]() |
Noam Chomsky – David Barsamian, Propaganda and the public mind, 2001
Cornell Capa, Old prospector with bear trap used for trapping, 1947
|
![]() |
Bear trap, primitive deadfall instructions
|
![]() |
Siberian bow trap
|
![]() |
vietnamese human traps
|
The houses of the guards of water, air, fields etc
( a mausoleum for illuminism )
![]() |
The house of guards of the flights (after Dennis Oppenheim),
marker on paper,
dim 50X70 cm, 2011
|
![]() |
The house of the guard of water, 2009
Wood, print, roofmate
Dim 90x80x35 cm
|
![]() |
Houses of guards, 2009
Marker and pencil on paper
Dim 50x70 each
|
![]() |
Yona Friedman, Spatial City, 1960
Frank Lloyd Wright, Sketches for Boadacre City, 1932
Paul Maymont, Ville Flottante, 1960
|