Chrysi Papadaki
Visual Artist
"Garden"
Installation | Audio recording | Text
Athens, 2021
The carpet, consisting of paper birds, is the result of an exercise of calm and relaxation that I repeated for about three months during the Covid -19 quarantine. I repeat a specific origami design of a bird called an Albatross. I chose the Albatross because I have associated it with my grandfather. I chose the albatrosses as a symbol of the journey which connects my grandfather's web printing when he was on the ships with the stories I read in the book "Stories about Plants" by Yannis Manetas ("Περί φυτών αφηγήματα", Γιάννης Μανέτας, Πανεπιστημικές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης, Απρίλιοσ 2015),about how the exploitation of plants by humans influenced history.
Many of the papers before folding them I had drawn them or printed photographs from the period 2019-2021 and the rest was from any kind of paper i had at home .
A surface, placed on the floor, from which you must keep a distance so that it does not disintegrate. It will crumple if you step on it. Take a distance from yourself. And place your thoughts and experiences there, organized, all together in company. Look at them but do not step on them. If you want to take one to observe it, you should do so politely without the others moving. Because then you have to start over again
The surface, made up of paper birds, is the result of an exercise in calmness and relaxation that I have been repeating for the last three months. I am repeating a specific origami design of a bird called an Albatross. I chose the Albatross because I have associated it with my grandfather.
"Garden", installation, paper,115x96x4,5cm, 2021
"I think of the Albatrosses.
The mosaic, the unit.
They have a shape.
I want to put various things inside this repeating shape.
I feel that the process of making (paper folding) the Albatrosses is my own release.
As if I am touching somewhere everything I have seen, read, heard during this time.
I leave them to the Albatrosses that live with each other so that I can calm down, so that I don't ruminate on them inside me.
I read that these birds live with one partner for their entire lives and that they lay an egg with each sexual encounter.They make transoceanic voyages, have the largest wingspan and, without spending any of their energy, travel enormous distances with their wings locked open.
Maybe I would like what I'm learning to leave and come back again, not to remain still inside me. I don't know what I like about these birds. Maybe they attract me because I first heard them from my grandfather who has traveled the world and evolved on ships. Many of the stories he has told me scare me. When he first told me about the Albatrosses, he said that they followed the ship from America to Japan and without touching land they would return again following another ship. "They sleep while they fly" he told me. And I thought "But don't they get tired?".
The ones I have made don't fly, but they pretend to fly. Again an imitation of nature. They are not real. Like the flowers on the tiles, on the jewelry, on the paintings, like the gardens that people make to enjoy themselves, to feel familiarity with nature, protection and security. I think that gardens travel me. I had many ideas when I was little playing in my grandmothers' gardens."
