Face Me is bringing the beauty and texture of the face back to the fore through the enjoyment of sculpting in clay.
ACTIVE BANK is an artist group working in Athens.
The work with refugees came out of conversations ACTIVE BANK had with artists in Zarakes and people in Athens. The work is about continually exploring what subjectivity is and what kind of subjectivities exist for people in, say, a camp. It’s personally and politically motivated, in that it’s as much about personal development as social human beings, communicating with each other, as it is about the way people exist in the world as it is currently.
In the eyes of post-colonial critic Gayatri Spivak, enforcing comprehension of a Western kind of subject is colonial. But, when people are coming to seek help in a foreign country, the non-comprehension of the language – the language that allows you to be a subject in that state with access to the knowledge that others have - is dehumanizing. We’ve been translating signs, relating the Greek Government and the European Union, into different languages so that people are aware of where they are positioned in relation to those structures.
The projects are led in conjunction with the people we meet. It’s participatory in a fundamental sense, in that we start conversing with people and we proceed in a conversational way. And as far as we see it, dialogue, having human interactions, making friends, bridging between ourselves and others – that’s decolonizing. The people we built relationships with there are our friends - it is particular, there are a lot of people we didn’t communicate with. We think it’s important to be honest about the fact that no relationship is indiscriminate. Although we do work in Eleonas and meet people there, we make our main base outside the camp and are not affiliated with any institution or organization.
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