Perambulation 02
“Ultimately the way we tell our story isn’t only about how we see ourselves, but also about what we could eventually become.”
In the inaugural issue, focused on our home territory of the Levant, Perambulation attempted to lay the ground for what it is that we wanted to do—to think together with artists and researchers about borderwork: On the periphery of Europe but not wholly the “other”, we wonder what it is that borders do to us, and how do they historicize certain political conflicts as eternal and unavoidable. Ultimately the way we tell our story isn’t only about how we see ourselves, but also about what we could eventually become. Modern Greece sits at the center of this paradox, as the sometimes heir sometimes surrogate parent to the classical culture that birthed the idea of Europe. But it would be unfair to define it solely through crypto-colonialism, for it is also a rich territory of transmissions, transitions, revolutions, renewals and failures—the Hellenic territory, from the Middle East to the Black Sea is larger than Greece itself.
For the second issue of Perambulation, we look at the more distant borders of Greece from a variety of unusual perspectives: Co-editor Arie Amaya-Akkermans writes about ‘The Bridge’, a project by Greek artist Vangelis Vlahos, presented in Istanbul and Thessaloniki, documenting the fictional journey of a ferry that operated between Greece and Syria in the context of trade agreements from the 1980s, later discontinued due to political instability. And the border is indeed historically unstable as much as it is porous: Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige’s essay “Uncertain Times”, presents her archival research on Lebanon and Palestine during the late Ottoman Empire, and the fascinating diaries of Ottoman soldier Ihsan Turjman, offering us a vivid portrait of the reigning chaos in the larger region shortly before the creation of Modern Turkey that would change the demographic landscape of Greece and the Middle East forever.
Fast forward to the present, Athens-based art critic Cathryn Drake, writes about the work of Cypriot artist Vicky Pericleous, chronicling the displacements and division lines between North and South on the island of Cyprus, and the emotional fluctuations of a border imposed by occupation. Swinging back and forth in time, Russian curator Iaroslav Volovod, takes us from Crimea to the Arctic Circle, in an autobiographical essay, narrating the journeys of Soviet Greeks, and the search for both identity and antiquity, surrounding a region under the specter of war at the moment. For every issue, Perambulation invites a contemporary artist from the surrounding region to show us around their studio practice and research: Greek-Armenian artist from Istanbul, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, invites us to take a stroll around the Byzantine wall of the city, and take a glimpse at her research on architectural fragments.
The editors
Karina El Helou & Arie Amaya-Akkermans