Thanasis Totsikas “Miracles” at Rodeo, Piraeus

It is the finish of January and we are strolling on his land, undigging piles of content, excavating works and parts of performs from the cold soil, compost features all above the put amidst his sizeable assortment of tractors, cars created in the 40s and go up to the 90s ‘all doing the job.’

Maya Tounta is there taking pictures and enjoying the metallophone. We went alongside one another.

It is a dazzling sunny working day in Nikaia, whilst almost everywhere else is strike by a awful snowstorm.

My second come upon with Thanassis Totsikas is interrupted by fifteen years. The to start with time was not far from his home, sitting on a table close to the corpse of a slaughtered goat, ‘killed especially for us’.

When 1 tends towards him, issues turn sacrificial.

An existence split among the urban and the bucolic, deep into the psychology of the materiality of everyday living, his perform is effectively working with domesticity and the transformation of vitality, the temper, the spirit into type, edifice, dwelling.

There is something elemental about the human being and what he helps make. Things can sense cavey or from the distant long term.

He enjoys fire, participating in with it, melting and welding metals, considering of structures, how to make them, how to repair service them, a kind of fixer belonging to the aged world.

He crafts the wind, the light-weight and the sound things generate when they touch. Philosophical playtime.

Although he is (not) up to date.

Properly proven inside the soil ended up a group of metallic tubes, in degrading pearl Miami automobile tans, many of them and rusted.

Then we went again into the concrete house, wherever his self-manufactured engines await and he built knives for us and blades, to safeguard us from all hazards they did.

Fluo shades mixed with rust and marble, clay and wooden, decomposing egg shells, orange peels and soil are his index. And fire, and breath and the gentle they make guy in mother nature, gentleman and character, holding hands. An index created of steel, seem, fireplace and spirit.

The lousy spirits should be saved absent. The seem of fuchsia and the audio of yellow, steel on metal, mail them far from the home.

When you fulfill someone like him and they seem as if the stop is close by, a requiem they say, and a piece of marble appears with their title on. You speculate.

“It’s not a tombstone, it is a piece of marble with my identify on.”

A teenager in the entire body of Pan.

Is Pan a teenager?

He sits on his bed inside of his shelter designed from marble and earth surrounded by a yellow tule, ashes and countless drawings. A ruler of some faraway kingdom, painting bouquets each and every day, checking the climate and other phenomena.

Arriving back to Athens, via a tunnel of white, what was left was the sound, the mirror, the fluorescent and the steel. The heat of the flames our talismans however contained.

His buried flutes have been cleaned.

They stand upwards waiting around for you to use them. Each and every one particular sings in different ways, like the shells from the sea, never ever a same audio.

His leather-based coat is coated with mud, and his comfortable tops embellished with knives and sharp blades.

The area concerning residing and not residing is extremely small, the knife reminds us.

Impressive and afraid, we are split concerning our exterior and our indoor lives.

at Rodeo Piraeus, Piraeus
right up until September 24, 2022