Following an impromptu visit to Athens from London in May 2015, South African artist Klaus Jürgen Schmidt decided to stay, leaving London behind. He was “mesmerised and bewildered”.
“After about four days I knew it was where I wanted to be,” he tells Neos Kosmos. “London was disintegrating on a level of cultural interest for me and it felt like I was watching friends suffer their own economic hardships; we were facing an invisible brick wall of impossibility being built by Tory greed.
“I needed more and I wanted a radical shift, and as romantic as my first steps into my life in Athens were – radical change was what I got.”
A year later, Klaus would find himself launching In Athena, an ambitious project taken up by 50 world communicators willing to interpret, clarify and ever try to restore modern Greek reality.
“In Athens, entranced and in pain in its sea of crumbling beige, trapped in a cyclical action of resurrection and demolition. Its historical ramifications. The approaching collapse, and its symbolism.
The moment needed a record and its theme was obvious to me,” he muses. “I feel like Athens is a petri dish for European humanity and its observation, but this particular moment here seems crucially symbolic of the western landscape in turmoil.” Contrary to what people might think, the crisis – in an odd sort of way – is a part of what has kept Klaus in Greece. Despite hardship and daily hurdles that sometimes seem insurmountable, he is doing everything in his power to stay “and will continue to do so”. “My own crisis has happened that parallels, my finance has nose dived … it has been an eye-opener and somehow has made the process of creating this document feel more authentic.”
IN ATHENA begun at a point where he was actually beginning to understand the depths of what the crisis was doing to Greece. Klaus, who describes himself as “naturally very curious, sometimes beyond reason”, was observing the anxiety among those close to him.
“I started wondering about the goddess [Athena] at large, what the goddess meant as an idea,” he explains. “What the possibilities of questioning the idea could manifest themselves as. I begun asking people about it. Questioning those I respect has been my primary education in life above and beyond institutional education.”
Klaus believes that archaeological discovery, ill-timed or miscommunicated, has created a profoundly slippery understanding of Athens. Like the layering of dust beneath a museum glass, facts become unclear when not paid any mind.
“I want to offer people the opportunity to look at something that hopefully evokes a stirring desire to question the idea further,” he adds.
In his introduction, he offers an insight to his personal take on the idea.
“We exist in the dust bowl of Athens, below the Acropolis. We are social and decadent but we are distrusting and very worried. We occupy where we can beneath the Parthenon, once the house of the Colossus of Pallas Athena, long vanished in antiquity, now at large, embedded within our collective consciousness as the iconic virgin goddess. Athena, the weaver of possibilities birthed from a migraine headache.”
Klaus aspires for In Athena to absorb more contributors as it grows into a conversational platform allowing its viewers and participants an opportunity to step outside of themselves and imagine, question and provoke.
“I asked a broad and diverse group of 50 world-making communicators who I respect and admire – a consortium from art, comedy, theatre, astrology, illustration and journalism to fashion and design, music and anarchy – to question and imagine, thus rooted in many forms of opinion is the document In Athena.
Supported by the Onassis Cultural Centre, this collective artwork will start screening in May as a digitally-formatted slide show, narrated by Klaus himself, Roubini Stagouraki and Prasini Lesvia. “It will be released as a recording of the event while being streamed and attended and thus completes itself. This will stream online,” he says, explaining that “print would also make sense considering the visual depth of the work within it, but at this stage digital formatting allows for more viewers”.
As a project, IN ATHENA aims to “observe the goddess within this namesake locality”, being a collection, a new world manifesto and a time capsule containing an assemblage of personal opinions, artworks, manifestations and expressions confronting her idealism. It wants to provoke a more realistic idea of ‘womanity’, of what a goddess is and why, ultimately, the word is a misnomer. “If the goddess was a male-invented, fetishised idea of what a woman is supposed to be, IN ATHENA smashes that statue as it rebirths every woman,” Klaus says. “To celebrate this, I wanted the spirit of the document to be one of everyness, which as a word doesn’t exist but we understand that its meaning must be one of inclusivity and fairness. “It is for women and for Athens,” he stresses.
“I think patriarchy has to end, and there are very beautiful, very feminine ways of beginning to explore the possibilities of a route there. Why not start with the first example of a misogynist objectification, in the form of a statue of male fetish housed in a female body, a statue that names a city in complete chaos?”
With this momentum which has so much to do with gender and sex, political opinion and fear, In Athena becomes a place of original creation, from a point of invention and resistance using the idea of a goddess, terrifying as it is fleeting as a banner.
Throughout antiquity the female form suffered a simplistic yet dangerous objectification invented by men, where women by comparison are perpetually inferior to their all-powerful ideal image.
“These were representations of women in sanctuary – we have no evidence of civic or domestic sculpture representing women in isolation behind her husband’s closed doors,” Klaus says.
“It was behind these doors that her aspirations came to an end. There is connection between this impossible representation and the distorted image of women in Greek tragedy. Patronising and misogynist, Greek tragedy presents women that are either hysterical, or sinful, or crazy, or murderous, or all at once. Watch, as righteous and intelligent Antigone is buried alive by her uncle in an act of patriarchy.”
Even in this day and age, Klaus finds that modern societies somewhat mirror the ancient Platonic Greek symposium, still exclude women from participation in opinion, pleasure and invention.
“Women in classical antiquity were absent from the definition of what their divine image is. Female statues in antiquity were documents declaring the expected notions of the race of women, and are more like aesthetic idealisations rather than factual depictions of women in life. This seems archaic but it directly mirrors modernity in many ways. Now, still, our imagination fails us by proxy.”
The question of whether divinity is linked to oppression or marginalisation becomes gradually more apparent, when ‘divine’ translates into a state of mind associated with the world of drag and female impersonation or appropriation.
“It loses that meaning for many who observe it and more so for those who inhabit that state,” Klaus notes.
“Human imaging and visual female reputation in particular need a revisit – and considering that many of their invented origins are Athenian, there is no better place to start than here – now – IN ATHENA.”
When: IN ATHENA ‘Goddess Renewal’ will take place on Thursday 5 May 2016 at 8pm
Where: The Garden for the Union of Greek Archaeologists, 136 Ermou Street, Athens, Greece
*For more information go to www.in-athena.com or contact yes@in-athena.com