“It is from the gulches, from sorrows that one returns, reborn, with a finer taste for joy, with a subtler language for all things, with a happier spirit, with a second – more dangerous – innocence, more child and, at the same time, a thousand times more refined...And if he is still in need of an art, then it is a mocking, weightless, fluid, divinely spontaneous and divinely prim art, an art like pure flame that crackles in a cloudless sky! What we have until now been discussing, my friends, is what is truly significant: none other than joy, every joy!”- from Nietzsche's The Gay Science
“Hire my self to whom? What beast adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie maintain?- Through what blood wade?”-from Rimbaud’s -A season in hell (bad blood)
Inspired by Nietzsche’s artist Maria Papacharalambous created the “Here @ now happiness” in 2010 and inspired by Rimbaud’s poem has been aiming to create in 2011, a collective artistic movement that aims to trigger a sense of responsibility in the audience or the participants in relation to the common and the social.
Evi Tselika artistically and creatively researches the concept of socially engaged art in segregated urban landscapes. She looks at how art has long been called upon to play a role in visualizing the ways in which the socio-political is experienced, generated, maintained, and imposed, from traditional public monuments through to contemporary public interventions. Art has assumed a role in connecting people, both geographically and temporally, to places, to "imagined communities," and to other peoples. It has also increasingly aimed within the last three decades to act as a reflection mechanism, so as to trigger thought in how we are responsible in shaping our community and how as a unitary being we are involved in the social and where our responsibility lies. Artists, writers and cultural producers can through their actions voice their resistance to socio-political occurrences, aid in the reshaping or reimagining of the public sphere and prompt reflection on our ethical responsibility towards the collective whole. After all it is through interchange, dialogue and interactive creative manifestations that reflection can be triggered, of how our actions shape the common and how our inactions maintain social injustices.
Maria Papacharalambous and Evi Tselika came together to creatively explore the belief that, by cultivating our inner world and by undergoing an introspection that takes us deeper and deeper, we just might understand or remember the collective nature of our existence and our responsibility towards the other. As philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us “Action as distinguished from fabrication is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act... Action moreover, no matter what its specific content, always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries”, from The Human Condition. Artistic action and creative participation can therefore be presented as a medium through which dialogues and critical thought could be generated so as to allow for the pathway towards the creation of more inclusive collective identities and the development of a sense of responsibility towards the other.
The first manifestation of their collaboration occurred in May 2011 after Dr Niki Katsiaouni’s writings and inspirational words in regards to the concept of ‘Parrhesia’. Foucault in his analysis of the word "parrhesia" indicates that it appears for the first time in Greek literature in Euripides writings in the fourth century BC, and occurs throughout the ancient Greek world of letters from the end of the Fifth Century BC. There are three forms of the word: the so-called form "parrhesia"; the verb form "parrhesia-zomai"; and there is also the word "parrhresiastes". "Parrhesia" is ordinarily translated into English by "free speech" (in French by "franc-parler", and in German by "Freimüthigkeit"). "Parrhesiazomai" is to use parrhesia, and the parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., is the one who speaks the truth.
Dr Katsiaouni wrote and presented in regards to the concept of ‘parrhesia’ in the manifestation of the Parrhesia Project – Common Reflections, at Artos Foundation on the 11th of May 2011, where a collective artistic action was created, inspired by the concept of what occurs when art asks us to reflect onto our own habits and customs. It set out to question how can artistic practice aid in shaping and producing the common, thus triggering shared knowledge, experience and new forms of community and how we can resist through the common, and creatively imagine the ‘multitude’? The concept of Parrhesia- speaking the truth and actively resisting the injustices that occur in our everyday encounters is as Foucault indicates “not solely a negation but a creative process. To create and recreate, to transform the situation, to participate actively in the process, that is to resist” 1984. Creative action, contact and dialogue could act as catalysts to extend our comprehensive boundaries and to enable us to view alternative realities within our collective whole that we often ignore.
