The Excluded Form – ETKO – 2023
The Excluded Form – Anexartisias – 2022
The Excluded Form – Mollos – 2021
Limassol is a canvas of geopolitical quakes. Limassol is a collage, a city montage of the times it lived through and of those who have lived in it. Today’s state of affairs changes it more than ever and everyone is seeking an identity in it. Its identity is the actual absence of a specific identity. Limassol is an attractant of identities. It is an identity.
Limassol comes from the mountains and heads towards a liquid element and so, although a city, it behaves like a river. It has always identified with what is fluid and beheld that. Limassol comes from the Mediterranean and is like the foam that enriches and corrodes it. No one is from here, everyone is from elsewhere. It is a chosen city.
The project, “The Excluded Form” proposes the large-scale installation piece of visual artist, Alexandros Vasmoulakis, a work of layered tensions, large gestures and small details, like a collage, like Limassol. It is urban in scale and location, but there’s a catch. It looks like a jungle, but might it be a wet dream? The work is ephemeral, like an instantaneous desire to be surrounded by nature. It hangs for a moment at the scale of the city’s history. As if I am closing my eyelids for a moment and “seeing in front of me whatever I desire”*. The mountains point to the sea, opening up a visual passage to the roots of the sea: the province.
The European Union, like an upsurge in gentrification, has transformed the city. The change of the city is the great spectacle of recent years. Capital has been banked up in the sand, reaching very high. The work climbs onto it, spectacularly. It’s not beautifying it, but it is a spectacle in a society of images, without being an image. Or is it an anti-image, the projection of a city otherwise imagined?
* Excerpt from a poem by Andreas Embirikos from the collection “Hinterland”.
Alexis Papadopoulos / Architect
Rambling with Elias
“An apartment building strolls.
A galaxy lies in the air and is caressed.
Coca leaves shimmer in the pocket.
One hand hoes the soil while the other makes wizard-like patterns on the water … “
Lines and ridges and skylines make up city shapes. They become an image, an advert, a map, a geography. This future needs no more followers. Here are the contours of our bodies.
“It’s time to object (again)
to the blatant fascism of the majority –
our most resilient tenderness”.
Last time I spoke to my mum. When you squinted your eyes. That we read together before going to sleep. That we felt a wild beast, clouds, waves, or flowers. You were sexy in your new swimsuit. The silk green pillow with embroidered yellow leaves and branches. Monday, he didn’t call, I didn’t call. Tuesday, he didn’t call, I didn’t call. Wednesday, I didn’t call, he didn’t call. The sound of the door closing, the whimpering when it opens. The story of that purple dress, the parting in the hair, the suitcase full of tools, that pot of aloe. Our witch friends.
“‘Watch the baby, make sure he’s wearing a hat and give him a pacifier
hold him teach him terms laws manners the right words’
and gradually –
miracles will die”.
When he fixed his gaze on her blouse. The story of her body. Of Elias. Of Tonia. Of othered histories. May new horizons spread out in the contours of your bodies. Sweeping terms, laws, manners, seafronts. Like a warm wind. Voices that make wondrous geographies without writing.
It’s difficult to share that through words on a page with no voice.
“Waiting to crouch, a letter to an empty body, sealed, all responsible
for the tasteless nature of a world that has agreed
to stop rambling”.
* Poet, Elias Constantinou, was born in Limassol in 1957 and died in 1995 from complications related to HIV/AIDS. The setting of Limassol, where his poems often perform, hovers between past and future, and is diffused with “collateral damage” produced by the so-called development of the city, stories that are silenced and bodies that are excluded as Limassol is reconstructed according to investment plans and the real estate market.
Alkis Hadjiandreou / Architect
Peepers and oglers goading in the city
A collaged wall installation, perforated and permeating through the interstices between the green grid and the spine on which it rests, the citified context in which it gestures: “Digger” is a large-scale work by visual artist Alexandros Vasmoulakis, which finds transitory life on this 8-storey building while under renovation.
On the coastal front of “new” Lemesos, this construction site has been selected as the place and platform of an encounter between Vasmoulakis’ piece, “Digger”, and passersby, the very participants of the surrounding space. Part of the project, The Excluded Form, organized by Art Association Cathrine and its creative team, the installation sets up a situation where dialogue might happen between city walkers or art lovers, or the general public and public space, and what it means to them, what functions they would like it to have.
Impactful in its peppy colours and frisky in its tangling strands of leaves, this ambiance of disorientating details throws us in a disarray as we look up, down, around or sideways, squinting or goggling. Faces proliferate and mouths gape, tumbling down through slivers of a jungle life that might be reflected in a whimsy: craving a greener sea front or echoing the jungle law of capitalism, that struggle for survival determined by the fittest?
Alexandros Vasmoulakis’ aerial “Digger” climbs on the scaffolding and clings there, flying overhead. It is pleasing to the eye while also evoking a punctured canvas, so to speak, through which we can peep and review the contents of the building. After a process of many variations in sketches, the artist presents us here with “Digger”, an eruptive composition of a layering of identities, perhaps, reflective of the character of the city around it, wherein we are held in a passing position to take it in?
Maria Petrides / Independent writer