2023-04-24 22:58:00
Project by Dimitra Skandalis with hanging plants from the ceiling.
I don’t know if it’s my Cycladic ancestry but the smells of the wild plants that grow on the windswept slopes of these islands go from my nose straight to my heart. The aromas of thyme, sage, and fennel give me an irresistible thrill. That is why, when Dimitra Scandali opened the door of her workshop in Aliki, Paros, and I was enveloped by all these fragrances, I felt that finally the contemporary art produced in Greece can have an identity, and not resemble all these incomprehensible ( in my eyes at least) things I see in exhibitions that could have been made anywhere in the world. This is what shook me when I had first seen her visual work – which uses flowers, spartans, seaweed, fragments of boats as raw material – in the two amazing group exhibitions that the curator Kostas Prapoglou had done in one of the abandoned buildings in the psychiatric complex in Dafni but also recently at the Athens Art Gallery.
Skandali (born in 1969 in Paros) is what we would call self-made in art. Her family had large ships that did all the transportation of goods to and from the island until a few decades ago. Later they did a land business, in which she also worked for many years. Something inside her was pushing her to become an artist but she didn’t know how. He took some painting lessons at the Aegean Center for the Arts and took exams at the Academy of Fine Arts, moving to Athens. Upon graduating, he applied to various schools abroad and thus found himself living in California for a decade. Although it was an escape from the only world he had identified with (that of Paros), he finally ended up missing it and making works with seaweed (Pacific and Aegean), humble flowers and herbs that grow in the Cyclades, embroideries he had learned from her mother and grandmother. Having already written her cycle in America, she returned to her beloved Paros with the outbreak of the pandemic. She took the old residence of her ancestors in Aliki and transformed it by creating three spaces for artistic residencies where creators from abroad are already hosted for 25 days a month, a small gallery and also her own studio which I visited. The project was named Cycladic Arts – Paros Artist Hospitality Center and it comes to show that our islands can become the launching pad not only for digital nomads but also for amazing visual artists who will come even in winter to experience these same smells that can bind you with magic like me.
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