Georgia Kotretsos: Socially engaged? Better, Socially Married!

[...] I will cite a story; a story I was made aware of in a clandestine manner, a seductive and alluring one.

It’s a story that touches on and rubs off like stand-paper on the entire value system of Greek society.  I have a lot of thoughts, and my first one is that silence is a form of complicity; but I am not a snitch. I will tell you everything I know, but not what I suspect. I will disclose all that the storyteller allows me to share.

Last May, the storyteller came to me genderless, faceless, voiceless, and unidentified.  The mechanics of the contact will only make this presentation ever more elusive. I am guilty, though, of devouring the uncanny bait of the initial provocation to engage in a discussion to the point I even surprised myself.  To be the chosen “one” soon came with great responsibility.  I welcomed the rules of communication, the manipulation, the game, and the risk of falling victim to the elaborate trap of a skilled “trickster”.

That possibility equally excited me. I was open to believing, but also to being fooled. This person has not been blathering on; the level of ingenuity, tenacity and persuasiveness captivated me.

When it comes to sharing this story with you, I have to admit that I struggled. Soon after the initial contact I reached out to friends and colleagues. Leeza Ahmady, director of the Asian Contemporary Art Week, instantaneously extended an invitation to me to present this unusual experience at the FIELD MEETING in NYC.  At that point I was still apprehensive about the developments of the situation I was caught up in. I accepted the invitation to present, and from August onwards, my inclination to satisfy my curiosity about the world by raising questions was instrumentalized to the max.

The presentation will be based on an interview I have been working on in Greek since May 2014.  It took some time for trust to be established and the process found me in the grip of a frenzied state of mind over the summer months. I often had to exist in order to correspond to the needs of this communication.  

I am about to present to you a provocative endeavor of a Greek artist who is manipulating civil rights in the form of repeated marriage with third-country citizens (non-EU) to bring foreign artists/intellectuals to Greece, effectively recruiting intellectual engagement through a personal residency program for a waning state weighted down by financial crises.