Thursday, March 10, 1927 – Sunday, September 24, 2023. Ninety-six years, almost a century, after the historic day of the artisan movement in Greece, a memorial on 42 Panepistimiou Street, by the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry opposite Arsakeio, comes to remind passers-by and workers in the area of the “Bloody Thursday of ’27” dramatic events. The struggle for better living conditions of the middle-class landlords of the interwar period and the first casualties in the artisans trade union history.
(https://www.eea.gr/arthra-eea/istoria-i-matomeni-pempti-ton-mikromesaion-10-martioy-1927/)
While the daily press at the time recorded and described such events and collective memory kept them buried in the subconscious, art, and more specifically the aesthetics of public sculpture, brings them back to memory in times of revision, marks the space and reinterprets their historicity.
The sculptress Aggelika Korovessi is known for her pioneering studies on the invisible and fluid properties of nature: intensity, power, balance, change – which also characterise human personality and human culture as a whole. In her conceptual sculptures, she has demonstrated the principles of motion, equestrian forces (both literally and metaphorically), principles of balance and how it is achieved, forms of sound (sound “sculptomorphs”), and explored the multi-alternating Protean forms of truth. Her multiple alternating sculpture is complemented by unique and original public sculptures placed in Greece (Athens, Porto Hydra, Karakolithos Livadeia, Metsovo, Halkidiki, Kos), Cyprus, and abroad (France, China). The rich personal shape-forming vocabulary she developed over almost four decades of research on the concept and substance of form, starting from the study of ancient art to reach contemporary digital art, reveals the most fundamental characteristic of art: to overturn our habits.
The sculptural composition by Aggelika Korovessi, standing on Panepistimiou Street in honour and memory of the three victims of March 10, 1927, Georgios Geraldis, Michalis Kontos, and Kodros Benoukas, is not just a memorial monument to the fallen. It is a contemporary poetic sculptural composition made of anodised aluminium that praises and highlights collectivity over individuality.
A semi-pyramidal arrangement of figures with hats disrupts the clarity of the form. The viewer’s eye, accustomed to the balanced geometry of shapes, loses the rhythm. The oval ending with six equidistant male figures abolishes the strict social hierarchy: there is no hero-victim at the top but a group. We see this in the Parthenon metopes. If the differentiation of individuals serves individuality, collectivity is that achieves social goals. In Korovessi’s monument, the hero-victims do not have individual characteristics to distinguish themselves among the multitude of identical anonymous figures. The group in the first row holds the same value as the groups in the other two rows, which are held together by their delicate bodily mass. Any figure could represent any of the de-heroised dead strikers.
The composition’s large gaps between the forms, the holes in the sculpture –one could say– disrupt the solid volume in order to lighten the static dynamism and the apparent immobility of the forms. The viewer’s gaze fills in the sculpture’s gaps with pieces of the urban space behind it. At first glance, Korovessi’s sculpture forces the viewer to enter the here and now. In traditional sculpture, a negative-space public memorial sculpture is bold and risky. For Korovessi, the way the sculpture cuts through the space of Panepistimiou street and incorporates it fragmentarily into the composition is an allegorical version of the dialogue between the memory gaps and the historical event. Moreover, Korovessi has stated: “Free from the limited truth in the image itself, I am interested in the works expressing their era, being reflective with many extensions and interpretations, being in harmony with their environment in both natural and conceptual dimensions, and serving collective consciousness as memorials.”
Over time, memory gets rationalised while it is decompressed from emotion. The monochromatic metallic memorial for the Bloody Thursday of ’27 by Aggelika Korovessi is another perspective on contemporary reality and a profoundly political statement, emphasising that in our days, collectivity is the strongest mean to protect individuality and collaboration is the future of humanity.