199

199, Hydra Slaughterhouse until 1 Nov. 
Deste foundation/ National Historical Museum of Athens 

Photo by @chloeakrithaki  
#destefoundation #exhibition #kostisvelonis#sculpture #hydra ##filikietairia#greekrevolution #fighters #funerary #masks

The Shepherd’s Story of the Bond of Friendship

A translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Venskabs-pagten” by  Jean Hersholt.

 

We've recently made a little journey, and already we want to make a longer one. Where? To Sparta, or Mycenae, or Delphi? There are hundreds of places whose names make the heart pound with the love of travel. On horseback we climb mountain paths, through shrubs and brush. A single traveler looks like a whole caravan. He rides in front with his guide; a pack horse carries luggage, tent, and provisions; a couple of soldiers guard the rear for his protection. No inn with soft beds awaits him at the end of a tiring day's journey; often the tent is his roof in nature's great wilderness, and the guide cooks him his supper-a pilau of rice, fowl, and curry. Thousands of gnats swarm around the little tent. It is a miserable night, and tomorrow the route will head across swollen streams. Sit tight on your horse lest you are washed away!

What reward is there for these hardships? The greatest! The richest! Nature reveals herself here in all her glory; every spot is history; eye and mind alike are delighted. The poet can sing of it, the painter portray it in splendid pictures; but neither can reproduce the air of reality that sinks deep into the soul of the spectator, and remains there.

The lonely herdsman up on the hills could, perhaps, by the simple story of an event in his life, open your eyes, and with a few words let you behold the land of the Hellenes better than any travel book could do. Let him speak, then! About a custom, a beautiful, peculiar custom. The shepherd in the mountains will tell about it. He calls it the bond of friendship, and relates:

Our house was built of clay, but the doorposts were fluted marble pillars found on the spot where the house was built. The roof almost reached the ground. Now it was black-brown and ugly; but when it was new it was covered with blooming oleander and fresh laurel branches fetched from beyond the mountains. The walks around our house were narrow. Walls of rock rose steeply up, bare and black in color. On top of them, clouds often hung like white living beings. I never heard a bird sing here, and never did the men dance here to the sound of the bagpipe; but the place was sacred from olden times. Its very name reminded of that, for it was called Delphi. The dark, solemn mountains were all covered with snow. The brightest, which gleamed in the red evening sun the longest, was Parnassus. The brook close by our house rushed down from it, and was also sacred, long ago. Now the donkey makes it muddy with its feet, but the current rolls on and becomes clear again.

 

 https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheBondOfFriendship_e.html

199

199, Hydra Slaughterhouse until November 1
Deste Foundation/ National Historical Museum of Athens
#funerary #masks #destefoundation#nhmuseumofathens #collection #brass#sculpture #kostisvelonis #fighters#greekrevolution #filikietairia #hydra #199 — at Hydra Island Greece.

Receiver

Receiver, 2020
Cypress trees 

#deste #cypress #trees #kostisvelonis #destefoundation #hydra #exhibition#receiver #hydraslaughterhouse

Νεκρικό εκμαγείο του Ιωάννη Μακρυγιάννη

Νεκρικό εκμαγείο του Ιωάννη Μακρυγιάννη, 1864.  Φιλοτεχνημένο από το γλύπτη Δημήτρη Κόσσo

Γέρω Τσιάμης της Χαλκιδικής

Εφοδιαστικό έγγραφο μέλους της Φιλικής Εταιρείας

Εφοδιαστικό έγγραφο μέλους της Φιλικής Εταιρείας 

DESTE Foundation, Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra

The DESTE Foundation, as a gesture in response to the 200th commemoration of the Greek War of Independence, has decided to celebrate the 199th anniversary by commissioning Greek artist Kostis Velonis to conceive an immersive presentation of ten funerary masks of fighters of 1821 from the collection of the National Historical Museum of Athens. The exhibition will be on view in the old Hydra Slaughterhouse starting on June 27 and through November 1, 2020.

Conceived as an intense visual and corporeal experience, 199 is an emblematic memento mori. The exhibition is based on juxtapositions and unexpected associations of this special historical material in the setting of the old slaughterhouse and the distinctive topography of Hydra. Steering clear of the traits of a strictly celebratory exhibition or the conventional and moralistic approaches and ideological constructs around the subject, the artist invites viewers to re-examine their relation to the historic event and restore the role of art and artists in the social and cultural processes as well as in the re-evaluation of historical research.

If the year 1821 marks the start of modernity for Greece and its induction into the Age of Enlightenment and its contradictions, 199  explores some of the consequences and implications of this prospect, the contemporary significance of artistic representation, the allegories and memory of the bodies, as well as the questions and emotional turmoil triggered by such an historical event.

In this way, the exhibition repositions the relations between the body and history, between inner experience and collective self-knowledge, identity, and alterity, reality and imagination as well as between man and animals. As Kostis Velonis states, “the mourning of Cyparissus –whom Apollo turned into the evergreen cypress tree out of pity when Cyparissus was devastated by the loss of his beloved stag– is equated here with the loss of hundreds of animals in the Slaughterhouse and the sacrifices of fighters in the Greek War of Independence”.

And he continues: “The phantom that hovers over a rebellious Greece seems to set off from Pontikonissi, Kerkyra, which is almost the archetype for Die Toteninsel, the 1880 painting of Arnold Böcklin. The famous picture of the islet at sunset contributes to this peculiar time machine, travelling to arid Hydra and bringing some particular vegetation into the Slaughterhouse. This temporary sojourn brings together such contrasting concepts as the accessible and the inaccessible, the endless and the finite, the perishable and the eternal, paying tribute to the spectres that seek their new place.”

**Please note that due to the Covid-19 social distancing regulations, there will be no opening event for this exhibition*

  https://deste.gr 

DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra

27.6.2020 - 1.11.2020

Daily 11:00–13:00 & 19:00–22:00

Tuesday Closed