Aggelika Korovessi book opening launch at Ianos

Yiannis Kolokotronis

Ladies and gentlemen, dear audience, Aggelika Korovessi is the sculptor of sound, words, and balance. In this book that condenses 50 years of her journey in art, the reader, as much as they may be impressed by the images they will browse, the high aesthetic design and the quality of the printing, its hybrid originality, the texts that expose her reflections and connect her work with domestic and international concerns, will find more to take out, if they decide not to make it a coffee-table book, because it is much more than that, nor to let it gather dust on some shelf in their library, because they will need to refer back to it many times, what is this art book that we present today?

Initially, it is an artistic object that bridges art, design, and discourse. It is not a traditional exhibition catalogue, nor a luxury album. I would describe it in contemporary terms as a platform for Korovessi. A personal platform of Korovessi, through which the reader can explore multiple narratives about contemporary sculpture, ancient art, linguistics, philosophy, even our recent political history, as her work begins from the critical post-dictatorship years in Greece during the years of the transition and continues to this day with Korovessi constantly surprising and challenging us.

It is well known that art books in Greece are few and the market is limited. However, this would not deter us from creating a hybrid art book that resonates in the digital age we live in, already George spoke about its hybridity and the integration of QR codes on the pages. This innovation deepens the understanding of Aggelika’s art and also demonstrates her ability to remain attuned to the spirit of the times. Since 1987, I have had the privilege to witness Korovessi’s transformative artistic journey, which began during the critical years of the transition in Greece.

Emerging from the shadow of the seven-year dictatorship, Korovessi grounded her art in the values of a renewed humanism, democracy, communication, and a spiritual commitment that promotes thought in relationships. and collective action. Over the decades, Korovessi developed a deeply intellectual and spiritual body of work, one that explores the inner sound of matter, just as Wassily Kandinsky explored through abstraction, the inner sound of colours. However, unlike Kandinsky’s theosophical abstraction, Korovessi focuses on the codes of human communication, those systems of symbols and rules that produce ideas, concepts, messages, and emotions.

Her journey began with studies at the Athens School of Fine Arts, under Dimitris Kalamaras, in his workshop from 1970-76, from whom she absorbed the fundamental principles of sculpture. What were these? geometry, form, balance. Her participation in the Polytechnic uprising, a defining moment in modern Greek history, left an indelible mark on her artistic sensitivity. Although she chose not to express her political experience directly due to her character, the voices of her fellow protesters and the sounds of those days were etched in her subconscious and were the seeds for a future artistic practice focused on the study of sound, language, and the essence of communication.

Thus, for Korovessi, sound was not merely an artistic choice, but a philosophical perspective through which she viewed the world. Sound reveals human, as well as cosmic connections. The timbre of the human voice, the rhythm, the harmony and its musicality convey emotional richness, bringing people together or distancing them. how the Greek culture now connects with her artistic education, her political identity and communication in her work. Initially, the Greek heritage and artistic education is theatrical and sculptural.

(I take a difference stance from you) What I mean by this: The connection of sound with human expression dates back to ancient theatre, the acoustic elements complemented by visual means, such as masks with exaggerated features and choreography, of course in dance, unified the rhythm, movement, and space to convey emotions and philosophical insights, Sophocles and Euripides. Korovessi incorporates these traditions into her art echoing Pythagorean cosmic harmony, the analysis of Aristotle on sound as the movement of air, the ethics of Plato regarding the influence of rhythm on the formation of character and the role of perception in understanding of sound.

Aristoxenus is the first to speak about how we perceive sound. Regarding her artistic education, I will add from our discussion on page 10 of the book her statement: “Dimitris Kalamas, my great teacher at the school of fine arts from 1970-76 instilled in me the respect for the geometry of nature”, which demonstrates the substantial knowledge she has of sculpture, the techniques and materials, and even further her essential understanding of the existing order of structure and the harmony found in the natural world.

For Korovessi, this respect indicates that her work is not arbitrary, nor instinctive, but has roots in the principles that govern natural phenomena, such as symmetry, balance and mathematical relationships. This allowed her to develop a harmonious system of creativity, technique and scientific dedication to form and material. During that period, she identified these elements in the ancient sculpture, at the National Archaeological Museum, in the same space that she would return to in 2013 with the major retrospective exhibition of her works among the masterpieces she admired and studied as a student.

A pivotal moment in her artistic and personal development is also her following statement: “After the dictatorship, the transition was a turning point in the historical course of Greece and in the radical changes that occurred, primarily in the aesthetics of the place. I remember the exhibition of Ioannis Xenakis at the National Gallery in August 1975, which closed the International Festival of Athens with a week dedicated to Xenakis. During that period, on my travels in Europe, I had the opportunity to be informed about the current trends in art that I saw in the major museums and galleries.”

Her reference to Giannis Xenakis highlights the significant influence of interdisciplinary and experimental approaches in art during this transformative period. Xenakis’s groundbreaking work, based on mathematics, sound and structure was a revelation for Korovessi, who inspired her to embrace the experimental possibilities, exploring sound, space and form as interconnected artistic elements. Alongside Xenakis, add the pioneering research work of the sculptor Takis. He too, through magnetism, had begun to incorporate sound into his works in his large installations and the rebellious echoing work of Jean Tinguely’s metal machines, those who happen to know it and have this experience of the machines that move, and indeed in 1956 in New York, he created the self-destructing machine, you will understand what it is about.

During the same period, the field of interdisciplinary natural language processing and its branches evolved rapidly, namely human language technology, computational linguistics, and later sociophonetics. Today, all these are well-known fields to most of us already through our phones and computers. We are within this space that broadened the dialogue about communication and sound. These developments paralleled broader philosophical and anthropological discussions about sound. Let me remind you that in 1977, Roland Barthes in ‘The Grain of the Voice’ which is also included in the Greek edition of the book in the image text publication by Plethron, released in France in ’77 and came out in Greek in ’88, emphasised the materiality of sound and its ability to convey emotional depth beyond linguistic meaning, and this resonates with the reflection and exploration of sound as a tangible and evocative medium in her work.

During the same period, Korovessi’s travels in Europe brought her into contact with contemporary trends in major museums and galleries and helped her broaden her perspective so that she dared to undertake innovative practices in her work, as she said in our discussion, experimental sculpture was not just a phenomenon of the major centres of Western art, but also a pressing demand for renewal in post-junta Greek art that had been silenced by seven years of censorship and had been subjected to the kitsch aesthetics of the colonels.

This pressing demand for renewal manifested, I remind you, for most with the tremendous confrontation between the Greek avant-garde from abroad returning to the country (Kessanlis, Takis, Chryssa, Pavlos, Daniil, Kaniaris, Antonakos, Iolas) claiming its own share in the cultural space, and the domestic tradition (Tsarouchis, Kontoglou, Kapralos, Nikolaou, Moralis, Tetsis, etc.) which tries to maintain its gains. We lived it, we remember it. It was the atmosphere of that the first public sound sculpture of Aggelika Korovessi is the “Melody”

1986, a huge violin with fluorescent strings that was exhibited in the Field of Ares, Athens. Here is the second one, “Communication”, two years later. It is a of the first public contemporary sculptures in Greece which was placed on Mesogeion Avenue where since 2004 it coexists with the pedestrian bridge by Calatrava. You will have noticed that there is also the metro station there. “Communication” is a work of minimalist perception, it is an arrangement of vertical rods that mimics sound waves and symbolises the flow of communication during the early days of free radio in our country for those who do not remember, it was the time that it opened, that this movement of free radio occurred.

These works pioneering moments in contemporary Greek art, marked the incorporation of sound into public Greek sculpture, exploring human interaction through acoustic and spatial dimensions. I will not comment further, because already within this historical climate, let’s say, we can understand what the placement of such a work means for that time which seems like a foreign body in the perception of the era, in this – we would say – conflict that raged between the pioneers from abroad and the pioneers of tradition in Greece.

Before it completely transitioned to sound forms, the movement, forces, the powers, the network of upheaval and balance are the key concepts that she explores on which she invents her formal vocabulary and composes her sculpture. Form, energy and space are timeless ideas that allow her experimental reflections to bridge the physical with the conceptual. To give form to the fleeting and the intangible. “Horsepower” refers to the raw harnessed energy that drives forward. But it is also the controlled dynamism, the energy of the human body or spirit, that balances in relation to its environment.

When movement freezes, the tension between stillness and momentum is revealed. “Inmovements” is a curious state of movement within stillness. Movement is implied, not observed. The immobile sculpture is alive with dynamic energy. “The Network of Upheaval” refers to the interaction between opposite forces, lightness and heaviness, stability and instability, movement and stillness. “Balance” is the unifying principle in her work that composes movement, inversion and sound into a cohesive whole. The tightrope walkers of Korovessi are the epitome of ideal balance in a physical and conceptual context.

Whether it is the form with outstretched arms that precariously balances on a blue sphere or the pyramid you mentioned earlier, Anthoula, or the tightrope walker holding a balance pole over the curved, inverted arch, these sculptures explore the subtle interaction between stability and movement, weight and lightness, structure and meaning. In the balancers, the fragility of human existence is highlighted. Especially in balancers holding the pole, the narrative gains additional content. The balance pole becomes a symbol of mediation and coordination essential traits in facing the uncertainties of life.

The visual tension between the taut line, as you see, and the curved base, reveals the opposing, interdependent forces, chaos and order, stillness and movement, permanence and transience. Korovessi cleverly incorporates these contradictions into her sculptural language. The sphere, a timeless symbol of wholeness and infinity, represents the eternal movement, which we saw earlier, while the inverted arch induces rhythmic oscillation, a pulse between balance and imbalance, balance and collapse. In this precarious state, identities, relationships and social norms are constantly changing, just like the liquid that takes the shape of its container, but never remains stable.

Ancient sculpture is great art because besides the ideal proportions based on harmony and balance as the foundations of beauty, there is stability. Stability resists the flow of time and diminishes its significance. That is why solids negate time. In movement, just like in the flow of liquids, we cannot overlook time, because in a fluid time individuals must constantly adapt to changing conditions, as certainty has been replaced by ambiguity, argued Zygmunt Bauman. The inverted arch in Korovessi’s work is an example of this tension; arches in classical architecture symbolise strength and permanence.

However, an inverted arch becomes a symbol of dynamic instability. Moreover, paradoxically, it still supports the form that is above it. This contradiction also reflects Bauman’s view that instability is now a constant reality, which individuals must learn to manage. He states in liquid modernity, survival is an act of balancing, adapting to continuous movement and change without falling into chaos. Similarly, Korovessi’s message is timely and enduring. As our era is one of constant fluidity in human relationships, work, emotions and the filling of voids, balance is a continuous negotiation and balancers with their controlled movements emphasise the ability to cope with instability.

In other words, her balancers are forms that achieve balance not as static entities, but as force. Beings that negotiate their environment. Subconsciously, such thoughts guided Aggelika Korovessi in the retrospective exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in 2013, to juxtapose “Balancer Perhaps” in hall 15 where the Poseidon of Artemision, is displayed, creating a dialogue between the stability of Poseidon and the precariousness of the “Balancer Perhaps.” How does the transition now occur to sound forms, movement, horsepowers, inmovements and the network of overturning culminate in the exploration of sound forms?

Sound by its nature is a ephemeral fluid force, which Korovessi translates into sculptural form, giving physical shape to sound, achieving a composition of balance and movement. The fluidity of sound parallels the dynamism of her balancers. The rhythm of speech finds a sculptural equivalent in the precise, yet dynamic forms of it. Thus, the sound forms of Korovessi represent the external balance of shapes in space, the internal harmony of sound and the convergence of material and meaning into a single form.

In the book New Greek Art 1974-2004, which I was fortunate to have published by the Thracian Art and Tradition Foundation, page 135 she said in her own words: “The word is a structured sound unit which provides all these elements that characterise the individuality of the person who utters it (“sociophonetic” as we mentioned earlier) but also all the contexts that accompany it from its very inception – history here – encompasses within it culture, emotion, environment, representations of meaning, aesthetic expression.

Thus, I try to transform the waveform into sculpture, the recording of the word, appropriately utilising the materials and their composition in space. Because the structure of the waveform is based on specific wavelengths of vibrations, it transforms the material and by extension the work itself into a musical instrument with a specific harmonic sequence. When the musical composition of a word is transformed into stretched strings, where their lengths correspond to those of the recording and are struck with a continuous motion, then it will sound a chord as an echo of the word, from the which the structure of these strings originated.

This reciprocal relationship that is word, sound, string, strike, sound, word, reproduces the sound from its image, just as the string sculpture “Life” and the percussion “Air”.” – Here I give you examples from the recordings, the waveforms, of Aggelika from the computer, their design and below we have the recordings of the greek alphabet, α, β, γ, second row, δ, ε, ζ. The sculptural waveform “Peace” signifies a composition of many people coexisting harmoniously, but with a sensitive balance. “The work pulses on its semicircular base,”

continues Aggelika, “thus declaring the sensitive and fragile balance of forces that create the peace among people and their relationship with nature and themselves.” I encourage the lot of you and the reader, following today’s presentation and the book they will have in their hands, to make their own associations, I will not elaborate further today, leaving many of the conceptual and minimalist works unaddressed, such as the psychogram “Exit of Dreams”, her architectural sculpture proposal “The Shirt of the Earth”, Her historical works such as “Soundsaws of Freedom”

“Two Hidden Words”. Her musical works such as “Harmony” or her pedimental development of the word “peace” which could become the emblem in our parliament or in the parliament of any democratic nation, similarly the recordings for sports such as “Rowing” could also become modern symbols for the sports federations of our country and many others above you see the recording of the word rowing and in a sculptural representation how the sound is analysed in relation to the boat, the athletes and the water.

Of course, I cannot fail to mention the public sculpture of Aggelika Korovessi with her works scattered in Greece, Cyprus, Paris, the Chengdu of China, as already mentioned. I will mainly focus on the monument of National Resistance 1944 execution of heroes which she created in 1997. It is located in Karakolyto Livadia. And it is a magnificent composition of bronze and marble 8 metres x 10 metres x 1m in depth, which is a hymn to the struggle, the sacrifice and the resilience of the Greek people during the occupation, highlighting the collectivity and at the same time humanising the individual experiences of those who fought.

the bronze figures that emerge in combination with the empty letters if you notice on the marble wall, of those who were executed, which resemble shadows, as if to be present, absent, highlight the humanitarian dimension in the approach to similar historical monuments. The transition from two-dimensional shadows to dynamic three-dimensional forms, encompasses Korovessi’s exploration of the balance between life and death. Memory and presence, abstraction and realism. The fighting man or the victim is at the centre, not an idealised or mythologised concept of the resistance, nor the famous victory that crowns the dead of antiquity.

This deliberate focus on the human being emphasises the value of human life and the personal sacrifices made, making it a monument-symbol of historical reality and universal humanity. It is noteworthy that 26 years later, in 2023, a new emblematic monument of original conception, the “Bloody Thursday of ’27” was placed at 42 University Street in the centre of Athens, initiated by the president Mr. Georgios Kavatheas. To honour the IME GSEVEE and the craft movement of ’27 and the first small entrepreneurs who lost their lives.

And it is impressive because the small scale invites passers-by to stop and touch it, creating an intimate and personal experience that transcends our relationship until now with public sculpture. It is also impressive because the oval arrangement of the anonymous hat-wearers ensures that the victims of the movement do not stand out from the crowd, symbolising their collective struggle. And as I said then and it was said without me and I was struck that you said it, this is precisely a political statement from Aggelika Korovessi, that within collectivity and collaboration lies the future of humanity.

I will not elaborate further because I have already given you the essence of the book, you will have the opportunity, those of you who buy it, to return to it truly and through the readings to see and versions that were not mentioned here. I want to conclude, addressing Aggelika and telling her that it took us almost three years to condense your artistic journey of half a century. In a volume of 176 pages, this endeavour is not merely an archival exercise, but a reflective exploration of your profound contribution to contemporary art.

And I confess that as I look at it and look at it again, I realise that there is indeed a lot of material to explore and I want to thank you for this collaboration we had, which was both collaboration and maturity at the same time, both in the concepts and in your work, but even more in our lives, because as we met we influenced each other with ideas and our collaboration,

Aggelika Korovessi

Yes, it was a creative relationship, as it should always be between the artist and the art historian, who is not just a historian, but has a way of seeing from a different perspective. the work and when one loves art, they are also the creator themselves, because they create with their words and with their interpretation, yet another art. The work you have done with the collaboration we had on this project is admirable, but also throughout the entirety of my artistic journey.