Syrago Tsiara on The Written Eye
Evanthia Tsantila’s work belongs to this vague in-between space of words and things. Through her work she rather intervenes in the process of attributing meaning or naming experience itself.
Her new work (working tittle: The Written Eye) for the exhibition "Places of Memory – Fields of Vision" was still in the process of making when these lines were being written; its context relates to the experienced memory of Thessaloniki and results from the research mainly on traces, fragments, images, and written sources which were selected and processed in the light of conceptual art that rejects obvious relations and creates new references. Traditional clothing, oriental representations, a particular correlation between the city and the founding father of psychoanalysis by a relative of his –a carpet merchant named Moritz Freud, active in Smyrna and Thessaloniki-, as well as a personal moment of great emotional charge, form the basis of this work.
The processing method of the material leads the viewer to the conclusion that the artist creates a jigsaw of complex depictions implying what might have happened in the past. Tsantila’s work reforms the imprint, the structure of feeling of a certain period and not the fact of event per se. Her work primarily involves the historical and psychological procedures of creating meaningful human relations, following their progress and representation.
Syrago Tsiara
Thessaloniki, December 2012
Published in the catalogue of the exhibition Places of Memory – Fields of Vision
CACT - Thessaloniki Center of Contemporary Art, 2012-13