photo caption: Headless Jacobin, Alexis Fidetzis

Για την Ελληνική Εκδοχή

OccupyAtopos2021, designed to mark the 200 year anniversary of the Greek revolution. Fidetzis will curate the hybrid, ever-evolving project #Revolting Bodies, where his own personal artistic practice will interact with that of invited contributors and collaborators.

The project #RevoltingBodies aims to integrate the Greek Revolution into a broader dialogue about the revolutionary phenomenon that to an extent defined modernity, avoiding the glorious, grand narratives and immersing into the stories of the bodies upon which both the revolutionary action and the mythologies around it are imposed. Bodies defined by gender or race, factual or mythical, tender and brutal, glorified and beheaded. Through these bodies the project will see the revolution as something more than an archetypical battle between good and evil. It will investigate the means of turning the individual into a hero and also the revolutionary narrative into a structural element of the national imagination.

Bodies revolted and detestable, defined by gender or race, factual or mythical, tender and brutal, glorified and beheaded. Through these bodies, it aims to investigate the means of turning the individual into a hero and also the revolutionary narrative into a structural element of the national imagination.

#RevoltingBodies will take over the entire physical and virtual space of ATOPOS, transforming its neoclassical building in downtown Athens into its ”Revolutionary headquarters”. A series of installations, actions, workshops and publications will be presented through the participation of theorists and visual artists from Greece and abroad. The project will conclude with a group exhibition that will take place from October to December 2021.

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Alexis Fidetzis was born in Athens where he currently resides and works. He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA) and the Munich Kunstakademie while he got his MFA at the Pratt Institute in New York where he focused on research-based artistic practices. He is currently completing his second Master’s Degree on Modern Greek history at the School of Philosophy in the University of Athens. He is also a
Fidetzis uses historical research as a means of artistic creation in an effort to diagnose current social, cultural and political issues. He is interested in the institutional management of collective social trauma alongside the ways in which power structures shape our common past. For his work he has been awarded by institutions in Greece and abroad, including the Onassis and Niarchos Foundations, while his work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions in Greece, France, Germany, Switzerland and the USA.

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#OccupyAtopos is the main artist residency programme of ATOPOS cvc at Salaminos 72 str., curated by Vassilis Zidianakis, co-founder and Artistic Director of the organization.
The main focus of the program is on interdisciplinary research and the study of contemporary visual culture of the human body.  It will emphasize the embodied experience and the narrated character of the gendered and racialized body, personal and collective trauma, memory, systems of embodied cognition, as well as the relationship between the body, social justice, and ecology. Its mission is to observe and support the creative process of emerging artists, designers, curators, and thinkers.
The word ‘atopos’, from the ancient Greek word ”ἄτοπος”, means out of space and out of the way and refers to that which is strange, unwonted, eccentric and disgusting, but also to the foul and the unclassifiable.
Those who have participated to date have been, amongst others, The Callas, Craig Green, Ren Hang, Bouchra Khalili, Nevin Aladag, Daniel Knorr, Imbrahim Mahama, FYTA, Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou, Aimee Le, Tomashi Jackson.