ZAFOS XAGORARIS

CYPRUS

In Cyprus there exist a number of abandoned villages as a result of political decisions and events which began in 1963 and led up to the Turkish invasion in 1974. These villages used to have a Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, or mixed population. A series of sound installations have taken place in situ, in order to animate these deserted areas. The Amp, a mechanism comprising two speakers, an amplifier, a battery and a microphone, was installed in the center of each village, in a way that the almost non-existent sound of the place was enhanced and reproduced.

OTHER AMPS

TIDE BELL

The work Three Bells is composed of three in situ installations created by the artist within the context of the exhibition and will be realized simultaneously at three sites in the city:

National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
The National Observatory, Athens
Aghios Kosmas

The Three Bells in three different sites, address an imperceptible, common, undelivered invitation to assembly. As they sound, they simultaneously create a conceivable rhythm, a silent chime.

OTHER BELLS

The work Three Bells is composed of three in situ installations created by the artist within the context of the exhibition and will be realized simultaneously at three sites in the city:

National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
The National Observatory, Athens
Aghios Kosmas

The Three Bells in three different sites, address an imperceptible, common, undelivered invitation to assembly. As they sound, they simultaneously create a conceivable rhythm, a silent chime.

If around an archer, his arrows create a fence, then around the central bell of the church of a village, in a certain distance, there is a limit where its sound turns into a whisper. A source (a bell, a heating device or an electronic sender) is able to create an area around it, depending on the source's possibilities. These arrangements- installations are trying to show similar conditions, where these marginal points are visualized.

A series of drawings, devices and installations for the amplification of vision Through tubes, mirrors and lenses, a viewer is able to have a three dimensional view of an enclosed environ-ment or from a public space the interior of a gallery space and vice versa.

"NonPlaces" awakened to new life or "Is Silence a Sound?" by Agnes Kohlmeyer

"The letter around me is rather an "M". I shout harshly at the dog that he should sit down. Then I put my hands over my face. It is quiet except for the sound of the wind in my clothes…" (Juli Zeh, "Silence is a Sound", 2002) Abandoned places are also fascinating places. I would put forward the claim that it is typical of the action of an entire younger generation of artists, actually I would say it is a worldwide occurrence that artists are making work with a preference for the outside room, "other" non-traditional spaces, the public room, away from the "white cube", away from the traditional museum, and instead working in everyday life, working in those spaces filled with their own life and history. For example factories or former market halls, magazines and warehouses, halls of all types, towers and bunkers, schools and churches, military arsenals, movie theatres, hospitals, railway stations, hotels and many other places. These places include - apart from all the extraordinary artistic interventions of "Land Art" (particularly in the United States since the early 1960's) that penetrated into expansive natural spaces such as deserts- all the parks and gardens, the open places, in the middle of our cities or those places more "on the edge" in isolation, in which today's artists act unquestioningly. Spaces and places that are sometimes still comprehended in terms of "their function" or spaces that have become "out of use", and hence open to new perspectives and new meanings, also become open to artists to create something new. To be more precise, today art tries to measure itself more than ever with the life and "histories" from other realities and from other times, with the past and with memories, with our dreams and with our fantasies, but also with our anxieties and nightmares. Art attempts to demonstrate, wants to make visible and portray ongoing effects, it wants to make change, not only ease or improve. We now finally come to the so-called "NonPlaces" - abandoned, forgotten and highly problematic places, the outskirts, often drawn from poverty, dirt and neglect. Increasingly we see more faceless buildings, intended as satellite cities and shopping-malls, but actually created purely for "survival" and for commercial interests. It appears that even extremely tragic peripheral zones, border situations and former war zones, even entire strips of no man's land still partially active with land mines, can become new places again, if the town planners, architects and - often in a more uncomplicated manner - artists deal with them. Zafos Xagoraris is one of these artists, who deliberately looks for public, but "abandoned places", in order to realise his, often optically rather insignificant or less spectacular but nonetheless, effective actions. After studying architecture and art in Athens and at the MIT in Boston, Xagoraris began, quite consistently throughout his work, to show a special interest in scientific experiments, constructions mechanisms (for example the miraculous-constructions of 'Hero' of Alexandria, 1B.C.) and new technologies, combined with a range of actions in public open space: the use of a periscope from the interior room into the outside room to produce communication between inside and outside, private and public; The construction of a circle out of light sources and arrows in order to determine borders, to define the distance of range; The installation and enclosing of the sound of bells, transmitting sound into other realities. For a few years now, the artist has been magically attracted by the desolation of certain places and their housing, with their traces of human existence, living and life, he is attracted by houses, often long destroyed or decayed, roofless, with empty bare window caverns, bullet holes still clearly visible, which now stand abandoned, but are alive in ones imagination with the everyday situations of living. Concerned with the disposition of this abandonment and how it radiates from the little villages of Cyprus (like Petrofani, Aghios Sozomenos or Achna), after the expulsion of the population, and with a wish to oppose this desolation with something new, a new life, a little bit of renewed hope, through negotiation, through the forwarding of these traces of "deadly silence" to other and more living places, he places his structures with amplifiers (the so-called "amps") to transmit sounds: "trying to amplify the almost silent existing sound". Sounds mean life, they awake memories. Sounds that we recognise can calm or frighten us, we can enjoy them or we can concentrate entirely on our hearing and, as an experiment, exclude the other senses almost completely. Voices and sounds create a presence. For years Xagoraris has installed his bells in Athens, Cyprus, Germany, Austria and the USA. In accordance with the recognition that the bells chime can be carried out of the centre of a living functioning village into the last houses at its edges, and that the sound of the bell can define the boundaries of the village. The bells are now partly locked in voluminous, sometimes half buried cubes made of metal, timber and glass in places that are almost completely silent nowadays - therefore the volume is very muffled, dark, from the depths, as if emitted from prisoners within. The strong and melodious sound of a bell is robbed of its range of resonance and only "whispers ", as if from a coffin. However with the help of tubes and similar devises, the locked in sound can be heard at new places again. Once, to be certain of this, Xagoraris installed a bell, this time hanging free, to a device at one of the most quiet and most un-enterable places in the world, which is in the middle of a possible minefield. A place which, if one perhaps accidentally ran into it - as did the young author Juli Zeh on her inquiry trip through war torn Bosnia - even breathing is difficult and appears to be amplified. Here, at this place, abandoned by all, there simply are no listeners anymore, in whatever range.

Agnes Kohlmeyer Venice, July 2005

Zafos Xagoraris: The Silent Center by Christina Petrinou

The series of works proposed by Zafos Xagoraris takes as its main point of reference the green zone which cuts through and divides the island of Cyprus into an occupied and free zone, while doing the same to the evacuated and uninhabited Famagusta district of Varossi, on the eastern end of the island. The status of Varossi is a result of the war, of the Turkish invasion. The death of this leveled city was the war. This conquered area has been ripped up by its foundations, since its people have disappeared. Both Varossi and the green zone touch upon the issue of transgression but also of the prevention of war. In essence, these are areas where flow and production have been interrupted, creating a gap. These areas are symbolized by pauses and absences. In an age of acceleration, the neutral green zone and the deadened Varossi take us to an age where the brakes have been applied, as the result of a series of political and military obstacles placed in the way of defining dominion. These spaces, which are the result of military and political violence, safeguard peace through faith in deterrence. The sound amplification mechanisms proposed by the artist magnify a rustle or a whisper, thus breathing life into the deserted areas. Moreover, Xagoraris has planned for the positioning of a bell along the green line, while a Moslem imam will be standing on the northern side of the island. The sounds of the bell and the imam will meet in the center of the green zone. The range of the bell and the imam approach the limits of silence, of a whisper (1). This encounter between one sound that refers to Orthodoxy and another calling Moslems to prayer ends up gathering the echo of both civilizations. Distance is no longer measured spatially and is replaced by temporal distance; by the distance of sound. Xagoraris replaces geography with chronography. The fruit of this exchange of sounds is the creation of a closeness; a communication between all the points of this space. In other words, within this no entry zone, Xagoraris proposes a freedom of movement through the sound of the bell and the imam. The green zone and Varossi are transformed from inert spaces with no inhabitants into a free crossroad of the speed of light. The city and, by extension, territorial dominion cease to be pinpointed in one specific position, on a crossroad of spatial borders, and shift to a crossroad of the speed of sound waves. In this way, Xagoraris introduces the moving, the shifting, the disorganizing of borders from the regional areas towards the center in these dead zones and areas. Xagoraris succeeds in creating a cultural colonization through the diffusion of culturally diverse sounds. The range of the sound transmission is such that it coincides with the spatially prohibitive borders and is, in an extreme way, omnipresent within them. Through this momentary enrapture and disturbance of sound, Xagoraris relocates and deregulates these spaces which are exposed to a continuous observation and surveillance within a sovereign field of supervision, where visual control acts as a deterrent. Moreover, if the forthcoming developments in the Cyprus issue allow it, Xagoraris intends to place a bell in the center of Varossi which will ring from its center to its periphery like a sonic invitation to a possible assembly or reinhabitation. This action can be exhibited through photographs which will document the peculiar status of Varossi, i.e. that of an area conquered by the Turks but not yet settled by them. Finally, Xagoraris wants to create a communicative, silent atmosphere which he achieves by placing two sirens along a straight line (with reference to Helmholtz's experiment). The two sirens eliminate each other's sound and so, instead of having a state of emergency expressed in sound, we are faced with a process, with a voice of silence, with an alalia (lack of speech), which comes to support the aesthetic of disappearance, of absence. The viewer or the listener hears the flickering of sound which is not the result of a malfunction or an accident. Just as in silent films the viewer feels less the absence of the actors' speech and more his own inability to hear. Through these silent "Harpies," Xagoraris forms an acoustically sensitive zone which is delimited by the imposing sonic silence of the work. Through the silence of the sirens, what becomes unbearable is the absence of noise or a voice. In an age where the voices of silence have fallen silent before the onslaught of sounds and images, this silent installation/protest makes listening impossible and can be compared to the process of blindness. Sound and silence seem to be to sonority what vision and blindness are to visibility. In both cases of silence and blindness, something is concealed in a purely audiovisual age. At the same time as the deafening audiovisual explosion, we have Beuys's silent works which come in contrast to Russolo's ("noise-making") futuristic machines that produce terrifying noises. Beuys extols the suffocating of sound in his work Silence (1973) and in his installations, where the use of felt isolates every sound, thus creating a silent but dynamically isolated environment (Plight, 1985). Faced by the Futururists' triumphantly deafening noise, Cage places silence in his work entitled 4'33''. But it is a practical impossibility for silence to be achieved, since there are always the natural sounds of the audience and the environment. Through his silent sirens, Xagoraris attempts, in an age of the sonification of images, to express through this sonic absorption a state of silent exception which wishes to act as an invitation to a possible overthrow. This silent zone created by the sirens gives rise to the appropriate conditions, magnifying every sound. By choosing the geographically neutral space of the green zone, i.e. a no man's land, and the uninhabited district of Varossi, Xagoraris brings to the fore places of a questionable status; through the use of sonic range, he tries to bring about a cultural encounter; faced with the cacophony of communications and the onslaught of images, he counter-proposes the dynamic of silence, by juxtaposing and at the same time by invalidating a deafening sound system.

Cryptograms by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

Our stance on the future is more ambiguous today than ever before. A delirium of futurology alternates with scenarios of disaster and reflections on ruination and death. I would maintain, however, that nowadays the most extreme versions of joyful futurology and apocalyptic prophecy come together in the notion of Zero for the future: i.e. the invalidation of our ability to make convincing predictions and the consequent anxiety that is stirred up by this fact. Besides, that more and more people often feel the need to bring up the word "future" betrays the degree to which we lack a clear image of that which this word signifies. In many Eastern traditions -in which we also soak our experiences-"disaster" and "creation" constitute two sides of a common process, where that which dies and is ruined becomes the foundation of a new perception of that which is to come. At this point, we should make clear that architecture and the city can in no event be identified with the unremitting building frenzy of late capitalism. That, then, is why it may prove more useful and edifying to study the most repressed aspects of the environmental transformations which we witness every day, in every region of the globe. Perhaps therein lie the beginnings of a new sensibility. In 1929, during the New York Expo, the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes set up the model of a futuristic city consisting of five hundred thousand buildings in miniature and fifty thousand vehicles in motion. Those who visited Futurama -as the surrealist pandemonium was called-came face to face with all the metropolitan shocks of the technological imaginary. Several years later, another American author, J. G. Ballard, claimed that all the derelict buildings, the dirty highways, all the crashing failures of urban planning and the deserted hotel fragments are closer to that which we will be encountering in the future. In these areas of modernity, the new is presented in the form of an unfamiliar poetry and ruin, constituting a kind of "cryptic architecture, such as the forgotten codes of an abandoned geometric language." [1] In an architecture of this sort we are able to distinguish the irreparable exposure of its destiny and, at the same time, the ideal locus of a series of earthwork artistic practices (Robert Smithson's Monuments of Passaic, Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates, and Berndt and Hilla Becher's industrial silos). These cryptograms are recognizable in the photographs Zafos Xagoraris has taken of Varossi, an uninhabited neighborhood of Famagusta. I know of no other Greek artist who has chosen to concentrate on such an enigmatic reading which extends to the shifting of sound pieces, expanding the innermost cryptography of the landscape. I should point out that these photographs constitute the documentation of broader research on the concepts of the Silent center, of limits, of dead or inert zones, and of the mechanisms of prohibition and penetration. In the mid-1960s, Robert Smithson linked the existential cryptography of the landscape to the second principle of thermodynamics, "entropy,"[2] which annihilates the very thing which energy produces, leading to a kind of self-destruction, to the stony, silent state of mass, to waste and residue. It is indicative that Smithson cites Vladimir Nabokov's thesis that: "The future is but the obsolete in reverse," going on to say that "instead of causing us to remember the past […], the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future." Today, nothing more convincingly expresses entropy than the deserted areas and the bombarded expanses amid the cities' sprawling bodies. It is this which makes them look menacing, like a vast, hard, nameless residue which Western civilization has trouble understanding. That is why I believe that in his photographs of Famagusta, Xagoraris has apprehended, for our benefit, the slow slide of duration and that "visual unconscious" which, thirty years ago, smoldered beneath the euphoria of the tourist boom. In Concrete Island[3], Ballard's hero travels to a "futuristic resort on the coast." There he observes the "ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned in advance of itself." I wonder what it is that makes these images both awkward and fascinating. Is it the arrested time of the political-military drama? Is it the fact that, ultimately, we perceive "human work as a product of nature," as Georg Simmel once suggested? Is it the mild pleasure we derive and the attraction we feel for the destruction of the vacation spectacle and these immense modern structures? Is it the inexplicable and unholy link between pleasure and pain? These "collapsed new buildings" (Einsturzende Neubauten) may mean something different to each one of us. However, they do represent a state of exception which is tending to become a paradigmatic condition of our time. The conservative author Carl Schmitt once defined the "state of exception" (Ausnahmezustand) as one in which "the State continues to exist while Law fades." Indeed, these are extralegal zones; abandoned spaces of exception where constitutional legitimization and fundamental human rights are suspended. The fences, the sentry boxes, the visible signs of militarism, the railings and the no entry signs transform these places from cities into actual "concentration camps." It would be helpful, at this point, to bring up Giorgio Agamben's well-known dictum that "today it is not the city but the concentration camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West." [4] However, "if the camp is the place where, as a place of exception, there are no subjects of Law but merely bare life," then the dissemination nowadays throughout the world of such areas, expands the state of exception model where "everything is possible, precisely because the Law has been suspended." [5] Without any fear of exaggeration, one can view modern-day ruins as a generalized model of space and as a dominant narration of our time. Xagoraris explores the suspended nature of these areas which is in fact their elevation to a metaphor for a situation which "reveals the totalitarian nature of war in space and myth" [6] and is spreading throughout the planet. In a word, it gives us the right to understand much more if we look at these photographs as allusions to an unstable reality, i.e. our own. The traumatic marks of war cease to be geopolitically controlled or to constitute a form of conflict between periods of peace, becoming a universal destiny. In this sense, these areas are now removing the old reassuring divisions between history and fiction, and, more importantly, between territory, politics, architecture and the collective imaginary. The multiple distribution of such images among various forms of civilization, more as an expression of grief for "the pain of others," certifies that these are ideal self-representations of our time which transform the popular myths of technology and modernity into signals of menace. Just as psychoanalysis made us suspect that the essence of language lies in ambiguities and slips, so can we suppose that the essence of modern city planning lies in the bombing targets, in the destroyed and abandoned areas. Perhaps that was what Benjamin had in mind when, in his controversial "Thesis 9 on the Philosophy of History" he described Angelus Novus "seeing a single catastrophe, piling up continuously ruins upon ruins," [7] where "we perceive a chain of events."

1. J. G. Ballard, "News from the sun," in Myths of Near Future (1982), London 1987, p. 96.

2. R. Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monuments" (1966), in N. Holt (ed.), The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York 1979. On this topic see also Y. Tzirtzilakis, "Edafikes praktikes tou dievrymenou pediou" (Ground Practices of the Expanded Field), Architektones, 49, 2005, pp. 54-57.

3. J. G. Ballard, Concrete Island, (1973), London 1985.

4. G. Agamben, Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, transl. into Greek by P. Tsiamouras, Athens 2005, p. 276.

5. G. Agamben, "No Longer Citizens, Only Bare Life," in Form-of-Life, transl. into Greek by P. Kalamaras, Athens 2002, pp. 41-45. "'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of exception" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is keeping with this insight.' Benjamin's diagnosis, which is by now more than fifty years old, has lost none of its relevance. And that is not so much, or not only, because power today has no other form of legitimization other than a state of exception… but also and above all because, meanwhile, bare life has become everywhere the dominant form of life." ("Form-of-Life," ibid., p. 7).

6. P. Virilio, Pure War, A Discussion with S. Lotringer, transl. into Greek by A. Dantzidis, Athens 2003.

7. W. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940), in These on the Philosophy of History. Surrealism. On the Image of Proust, transl. into Greek by M. Paraschis, Athens 1983, p. 12.

zafosx@hotmail.com

Zafos Xagoraris (1963) studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts, the National Technical University of Athens and at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His Ph.D. is on the construction of miracles by Hero of Alexandria.
His work is consisted mainly of installations, mechanisms and drawings, directly related to the urban environment. After 1989, when he presented an installation next to Charles River in Boston, he has created a series of public artworks. He has also presented 9 solo and several group exhibitions and since 1998 is a member of the Urban Void group, performing everyday actions in the city.
During the last four years his work was related to the concept of range, when isolated sources (a bow, a foghorn, a bell etc.) and the limitation of their capacity, define a space.
In 2002, he presented two public installations at Metsovo, Greece and Langenlois, Austria and in 2003 he started the construction of a permanent public artwork at Kallithea station in Athens. He also realized the first of a series of movable sound installations, with the title "Amps", in abandoned villages and neighbourhoods at Cyprus (2003- ), and with the collaboration of the Museum of Contemporary Art, he created the public art project, "3 Bells", at 3 different venues in Athens.
In 2004, he presented public artworks at the Art Lot in Brooklyn, NY, at the European Patent Office in Munich and at Modena during the Going Public 04. He also participated in the project in progress "L'Autre Ville", which will be realized at Nicosia, Athens and Lyon. He was the co-curator of the collaborative project in progress "Paradigmata", (Greek participation at the 9th Biennale of architecture in Venice, Benaki Museum Athens).
In 2005 he presented a public sound installation in Lyon during the Nuits Sonores festival and the show "Plus Jamais Seuls" at the BF15 gallery.
He also participated at the Fuori Uso exhibition at Pescara and realized two sound installations in Munich and Chicago simultaneously with his solo exhibitions at Francoise Heitsch and Gosia Koscielak galleries.
He lives and works in Athens, Greece.