Stefanos Tsivopoulos, an internationally-acclaimed mixed media artist, took part in this year’s White Night Melbourne event, and his project, a political statement entitled ‘History Zero’, couldn’t be timelier.

His work continues to receive rave reviews for its unique form and narrative, as it questions the dominant economic system and intentionally covers a wide range of cultural and anthropological records. On a cusp of rupture and change for Greece and Europe as a whole, the narrative of ‘History Zero’ evolves beyond the usual moralising recriminations of corruption, clientele, consumerism and illusions of prosperity.

“‘History Zero’ was initially commissioned, materialised and executed for the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 from the Greek Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, Culture and Sports,” Stefanos Tsivopoulos tells Neos Kosmos.

“It’s a special project for me because it’s been shown around in many different countries.”

White Night is an even more engaging and exciting experience for Stefanos since he can see his work in the context of the festival, and in Melbourne, a city with a very strong and prominent Greek community.

“‘History Zero’ is basically a film in three episodes that will be presented full scale, taking up the main art installation space,” he explains.

Each episode is an 11-minute short film, which consists of moments from the lives of three completely different individuals living in Athens.

“In ‘History Zero’ I’m mostly interested in this aspect of inter-connectivity and that all our actions do have meaning and affect each other’s lives,” he stresses.

“We follow each one to prove even though people may never meet or physically interact, they make choices that relate without them being aware of it.”

The three episode film is the first and main part of Stefanos’ work, set alongside an archive of text and images. For Tsivopoulos, it’s not really a monetary or fiscal crisis but a cultural, educational or habitual crisis. A change in our way of life might lead us out of the crisis and not necessarily the eurozone. To highlight his idea, he created a unique archive of what could substitute for the value of money.

“The film questions the value of money through the story of an old, demented collector of contemporary art, an immigrant who collects scrap metal, and an artist who collects images,” Stefanos adds.

“I depict that in the second part of the installation, an archive of ‘alternative currencies’, which I call a manifesto and which consists of 32 alternative currencies I collected through different periods of time from all around the world.”

Through it, the value of money is contested. The challenge stemming from the Greek crisis was to create a body of work that wouldn’t be about the Greek crisis per se, but to question what a crisis is, where it is generated, even to ask whether there is a way to overcome it, by adopting a different perspective.

“When we are talking about surplus value, we basically have to look into the human factor and the human condition,” he says.

“Wall Street is using words like ‘trust’ and ‘hope’, words that are deeply entangled with our emotions, therefore in our economy we tend to think that there’s like a very mathematical projection of populations, but apparently that is not the essence.”

Stefanos believes that there is a much more emotional scope than what we think. Projections of our fears, of our own aspirations, and even creativity, imagination.

“I came to this deeper realisation during the period I was living in Athens when there was all this discussion about the new government that would assert power in 2012,” he tells.

“I experienced the first uncertainty of the Athenian people and discussions about the Grexit, which instigated my wanting to attempt this project.”

The appropriation of traces from the past and their transcription into a new narrative somewhere between documentary and fiction is a constant of Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ work. His methods have much in common with those of the historian, searching for material traces, however, Tsivopoulos does not merely aim at visually transcribing the past even though he seems to focus on history and memories in every one of his projects.

“I come from a Mediterranean country and people there are kind of obsessed with history, and memories and time are of the essence,” he tells.

“Everyone cares a lot about when, where, how and why things happened – people become emotionally involved. The past helps define our present and plan our future.”

Tsivopoulos is therefore interested in the ‘imagined’ and mediated memory of the past as constituting the contemporary consciousness of the diaspora and the formation of subjectivity in a state of displacement and dislocation, without an ideally structured frame of reference.

The film is considered by the artist to be a living archive of the future, recording the discontinuity, the ruptures and the complexity of the present economic regime and the contradictions of human experience within it, yet it establishes new spaces for the imagination and for memory in which three mutually exclusive states of mind take shape.

“My aim is to expose the creativity that grows into people or communities, defining the idea of the exchange of goods or services and how far this can go – much further than money and currencies.”

“People can also operate at micro-level, in a sense of communal functioning helping each other in a completely different way out of the mainstream monetary exchange stereotypical idea,” he adds.

Stefanos’ archive represents real currencies, money from around the world entering an incredible imaginary world that could create a communal economy of a completely different scale.

“This is the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on so far,” he admits.

“I’m very happy about it even if I have been curating everything from a distance; miraculously, I have managed to keep up with the presentation from a distance and it all looks really good.”

Stefanos Tsivopoulos spends his time between three major art capitals – New York, Amsterdam and Athens.

“I was born in Prague but after a few months my family moved to Greece where I was raised and lived till the age of 27, when I left to continue my art studies in the Netherlands,” he muses.

“Since 2000 I’ve been living abroad and recently moved permanently to New York, but Greece is constantly on my mind, something that is expressed though my work as well.”

Stefanos embarked on his journey as an artist at the Athenian Fine Arts Academy, taking on painting, and moved to the Netherlands where he went into audio-visual techniques and mixed media. Nowadays, his work focuses on open space public performances, while in 2015 he will be publishing a book he has been working on for more than five years.

“It is a very important year to me as I will present another major project in Thessaloniki this summer,” he confesses.

“Moreover, the upcoming publication will contain series of unpublished images, also offering a new ‘reading’ of different parts of Greece.”

Stefanos believes the community of artists in Greece is more connected than ever, as a result of current events. He aims to visualise the diverse culture surrounding economic exchange whilst challenging the social, political and performative aspect of alternative currency models.

“Art is always booming in times of crisis, inspiration thrives under pressure, hence we witness more independent artists collaborating, groups of creative people taking on projects.”

“Greece is an inspiring place for artists and documentary makers. People are changing, people are bonding, evolving.”

Rather than simply documenting these models, Stefanos’ archive stands as a poetic political statement proposing a reformation towards autonomous communal patterns and forms of survival and resistance at a critical moment in contemporary Greek and European history.

“I see my position as an artist more as some kind of critical thinker related to the big concept of art history but also history itself, regarding the ‘what is really happening to us now’,” he highlights.

“There are artists who create beautiful images and bring beauty to our world, which is political in itself.”

What do we call art politics?

“I wouldn’t run for an office, if that’s what you mean. I’m not saying in blue, red or green, left or right, as I share no interest for micro-politics neither was I ever concerned with labels,” the artist explains.

“Art has a lot to do with the political position of ourselves as citizens, while we are experiencing a time that is questioning all ideologies.”

The artist views the culmination of the multi-layered crisis as an opportunity to interpret an alternative visualisation of the future. ‘History Zero’ implies not the end, but a point of departure, of recovery and growth: the beginning of something new.

“I’m approaching our relationship with money poetically, from a philosophical perspective,” he says.

“Being an artist is already a political position in society, as we are entitled to the right of expressing ideas publicly which could inspire people to think, yet art shouldn’t by any means be propagandistic. We are not opinion makers.”

The artist proposes his ideal ways to reaffirm solidarity, cooperation and co-responsibility while eroding and throwing into question the homogenising political power of a single currency.

“‘History Zero’ attempts to record its own trace in this field of active accumulation, going to the core of the concept of value.”

“Can the surplus value of a dream be calculated?”

Let’s find out.

For more information visit www.stefanostsivopoulos.com