26th June – 14th July 2023
daily 21:00 – 01:00

Registered Time is an exhibition of film projections in public space that aims to illuminate and discuss time based media as a tool to document phenomena such as entropy and transformation in the city, seemingly insignificant and coincidental urban events, and the relation between architecture and the life it frames.

Through a collective discourse unfolded within a variety of camera registration and displayed forms, the location and content of each work and the communal effort as a chronic of the medium are negotiating history and memory in the urban condition. Composed of a group of artists who are working with moving image as part of their practice from a range of different approaches, the exhibition becomes a collective epilogue to the overall Real Time History program, “as the camera records more than the mind can remember”.¹

Guided by a map, the audience can navigate between seven different public projection locations in central Athens. The twelve days course of the program presents five continuous looping works and three special screening and performance events. Together, and through each one’s filmography, we address the various hidden or silent perspectives that are defining a relation with particular aspects of the city at selected projection locations with reference to the objective of the films.

The program Registered Time is curated by Maria Lalou and Skafte Aymo-Boot, and organised by cross section archive as part of its annual research and exhibition topic of 2022-23, Real Time History. With the city of Athens as the starting point, Real Time History aims to put into focus the continual but unnoticeable transformation of the physical environment of the city taking place while we are inhabiting it, and at the same time formulating a praxis of recording it.

¹ According to Harun Farocki, cinema is a valid medium for storing and transmitting a truth of history, as the camera records more than the mind can remember

Aglaia Konrad:

I ♥ Rückbau

I ♥ Rückbau is not just an advocacy of my personal fascination for demolition as a brutal force. My (photographic) practice dealing with architecture, urban space and infrastructure has sharpened an eye for all its inherent “works” that are associated with planning, building, shaping and de-construction. The reverse process of building-back erected structures demand adequate forces, directed by certain cool intelligence.

1) One cannot simply kick a ball on a chain with anger against a big, concrete high-rise. New breed mythological creatures, with inner hydronic power beaks and long stretched necks nibble, lick and chew the concrete beams.

2) Like animated saurusses from an early film-studio set; special effects, is how it is called, and is edited as if the editor is the heroine in the hands of King Kong, just moving buttons, shaken by the avalanche of falling, bumping debris.

The video puts the focus on the opposite forces that are the basis for the ever ongoing change that cities are going through; an alternation of destruction and construction. The work underlines the significance of demolition as a precondition for the new, how something is disappearing in any process of change, and how the city in essence is a constant reconfiguration of material.

Dimitra Kondylatou:

Sleeping City

A fictional short story about a city turning into a dormitory. The everyday activities disappear in this city, where the visitors (sleepers) arrive to sleep, and the inhabitants stay awake, in order to work in the dormitory. When, for various reasons, everyone loses their sleep, confusion emerges about the city’s function and identity. The visual narrative of the video consists of images, relevant to the rapid expansion of the tourist activity in Athens: the documentation of façades in the city center, and of buildings turning into hotels, archival material from the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (E.L.I.A.), advertising spots of the National Tourism Organization (E.O.T.), articles, and video performances.

Sleeping City addresses tourism as a transformative force that has made major physical and infrastructural imprints on the city, from the era of early tourism to the rise of AirBnb. The significant acceleration of this process in recent years is currently having a tangible impact on how the city is inhabited by permanent residents as well as tourists.

The video is a further development of a first version of Sleeping City which was presented in April 2023 within the context of the performance I heard them Singing In The Mountains, curated by Eva Vaslamatzi, and supported by NEON.

Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar:

Credit (Retail Display nr.2)

Credit (Retail Display nr.2) is a video that depicts a virtual sculpture. It also contains a text piece placed on that sculpture inspired by retail display systems. This is a text that can be described as a lyrical exploration into the lived experience of existence within the current paradigm of financial capital – around which material culture is organized. Not from an analytical point of view. But a sentimental one. As the sensation of occupying a coordinate within a financialized matrix of space. This is the experience of a body living inside structures interwoven with financial institutions when the ground one stands is itself a financial asset. The virtualization of the text-as-sculpture is a gesture embedded in the logic of financial capital. To the degree it is grounded in speculation. Wherein the production of physical things are more important as virtual possibilities than as objects traded as commodity. The kind that used to be transported through physical space.

Credit (Retail Display nr. 2) is part of Finnbogadottir Hjorvar’s investigation into the representation of the highly abstract mechanisms of Financial Instruments. The video materializes and puts into words invisible financial structures that are giving shape to our physical environment and in particular cities like Athens in the 21st century.

Anu Vahtra:

Tour du Midi

The vertical video loop consists of a series of fixed frame ascends and descends, along the vertical axis of the Tour du Midi, South Tower, highlighting its towering presence over an otherwise horizontal Brussels cityscape. Throughout the loop, the tower is occasionally erased by the fog, therefore allowing us to see what the city would look like without it. However, even when the fog clears enough for the building to become visible, we never see the top of it as the fog never fully clears. Thus, the height of the already gigantic tower can be endless, but it can also be that the building itself has been an illusion for all these years. The work reflects on the concept of Brusselization: “the indiscriminate and careless introduction of modern high-rise buildings into gentrified neighbourhoods.”

Anu Vahtra’s video turns the physical image of the city into a dreamy and ephemeral vision that captures the fundamentally inconstant condition of the seemingly solid cityscape.

Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot:

The Barbaresou Legacy, or The Cursed One

In 1871, Georgios Manolis Barbaresos signed his will, stipulating that his wife would inherit his residence at Pireos Street in the centre of Athens under the condition that she would not remarry, otherwise the village of Kastanitsa in the mountains of Arcadia, the birthplace of Barbaresos, would become owner of the building. Exactly that happened, and that was the beginning of 150 years of struggle to turn the building into a profitable asset for a succession of village committees set down to manage the Barbaresou Legacy. In the process the original mansion was demolished and an unfinished concrete skeleton was constructed in its place. The video unfolds the story using archival material, interviews, and video footage.

The unfinished concrete skeletons of Athens are keepers of stories that are evidence of hidden strictures that define the Greek society: family, bureaucracy, finance. The work of Lalou and Aymo-Boot makes apparent how these unseen structures are ever-present factors that continuously influence how the city we inhabit is developing.

Vassilis Noulas:

The Lair

Athens. The last day of a female member of an illegal terrorist organization. Despina shoots, kills, wanders around the city, tries to find help, fails in every attempt, gets shot, dies in her apartment. The movie attempts a personal portrait of the city of Athens through the drifting of the main character. The Lair —a low budget production with DIY aesthetics and queer elements—is an existential road movie. The Lair is based on the homonymous short story by Nikos Kasdaglis, produced by Nova Melancholia, co-produced by the Greek Film Centre and directed by Vassilis Noulas.

The Lair is a desperate odyssey with the cityscapes of different neighbourhoods of Athens playing a major role as a familiar yet alien background for the story’s hopelessness. Shot in 2019, it represents a snapshot of particular places in the city which have already changed since then.

The Lair premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival 2019, just before Covid-19 closed down cinemas for more than a year. The screening as part of Registered Time will be the first time that an Athenian audience has a chance to see this captivating movie.

Event 1, 26th June 20:30: double bill at 35 Marasli Street - the steps between Dinokratous & Kleomenous Streets, Kolonaki, with a Super 8 live performance by Constantinos Hadzinikolaou followed by the first public screening of Vassilis Noulas’ debut feature film ‘The Lair’.

Constantinos Hadzinikolaou:

MES/A.W.R.A.

A 10min performance

like a song

I stole

from a ghost

Athens will rise again!

Constantinos Hadzinikolaou’s new work for the program of Registered Time is using forgotten material containing footage from his Super 8 archive. Images from a concert by The Fall in Athens (2006) will be accompanied by a live spoken word performance by the artist, setting up his equipment on a mini-tour on two different locations during Registered Time like a travelling Karagiozis player.

Two slightly different versions of MES/A.W.R.A. mark the opening and closing of Registered Time as part of Event 1 on the stairs of Lycabettus and Event 3 on Plateia Avdi.

Sofia Dona:

Emotional Property

The family polykatoikia has been one of the models of reconstruction in Greece. Le Corbusier’s classic Dom-ino is divided into mothers, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers. Each floor belongs to a relative. The emotional property will never be sold, either because it contains the past, or because it is located among other emotional properties, where the ‘foreigner’ does not belong. The house often remains empty for the few days of Christmas or Easter when the children return. Through two site-specific video projections on the rooftop of a family’s duplex (the third floor was never built) and on a plot of land that has been converted into a garden, emotional property describes instances of properties that remain immovable in time as the city is constantly transformed.

Sofia Dona puts the focus on the personal stories behind the complication of fragmented ownership, bringing to the light a certain resistance inherent to the Athenian urbanity, embodied by a usually unnoticed phenomenon that nevertheless has a potentially wide-ranging effect as a constraint to the omnipresent drive for progress and development.

Event 2, 30th June 20.30: Emotional Property, screening in two parts. 1st screening on an empty city plot that has been converted into a garden, accompanied by a tour by Vassilis Lazaris, architect, MDesS Harvard GSD, in his house self-built by second hand materials (5 Lechovou Street). 2nd screening on the rooftop of a family’s duplex (10 Neroutsou Street).

Registered Time WALK

The third and last event of "Registered Time" is a walk through the exhibition of screenings in the public space of central Athens. The evening starts at 21:00 on Praxitelous Str. at Karytsi Square and ends at Avdi Square in Metaxourgio. On our route we will watch the five installed works addressing themes such as touristification, invisible financial and legal structures defining the physical form of the city, the opposite forces of construction and demolition, and architecture as a tool of gentrification. The walk will run along with the thoughts and reflections by art critic Despina Zefkili, who will enter into a dialogue with the thematic of Registered Time and the five in-situ works by Dimitra Kondylatou, Geirthrudur F. Hjorvar, Aglaia Konrad, Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot, and Anu Vahtra.
As the epilogue of the evening, Constantinos Hadzinikilaou will perform a revised version of his Super 8 performance MES/A.W.R.A.

Registered Time, an exhibition of film projections in public space.

Curated by Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot.

Artists: Sofia Dona, Constantinos Hadzinikolaou, Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar, Dimitra Kondylatou, Aglaia Konrad, Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot, Vassilis Noulas, Anu Vahtra.

Organising and Production: cross section archive

Technical Support: Yiannis Malatantis

Design map-program: Studio Lialios Vazoura

Intervention/reading during Event 3: Despina Zefkili

Thanks to: Psinaki Foristika, Georgios Minedis, Pantheon Palace Management, Elix Conservation Volunteers Greece, Dorian Inn Hotel, NEMA Resort Wear, Emergon - Kolonaki, Seychelles.

Exhibition duration: 26th June - 14th July 2023.

The exhibition of durational projections is on view daily 21.00 - 01.00 at five different locations in the centre of Athens.

3 events present one-off screenings and performances on 26th June, 30th June and 6th July.

Registered Time is supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

good spaces left

3rd December 2022 – 1st March 2023
daily 17:00 – 23:00

Measuring the erasure of public space in transition

good spaces left is a solo exhibition by Anu Vahtra (Estonia), marking the beginning of our annual program Real Time History, curated by Maria Lalou and Skafte Aymo-Boot.

Fences are woven into the urban fabric of Athens. They are here to keep out, to neutralize, to cover up, to redirect, to restrict, to limit, to confine, to mark a boundary. When a fence goes up in public space – this space is no longer public.

Anu Vahtra has been invited to unfold the theme of Real Time History with her insight rooted in a practice of critically examining and documenting processes in urban landscapes. Vahtra’s work is centered around her precise observations of spatial circumstances, with a focus on the ephemeral and the transient, the unstable yet intentional: traces of past activities, processes of transformation, urban leftover spaces. She has been documenting aspects of demolition sites in Amsterdam and Brussels and empty storefronts in post-gentrification downtown Manhattan. In good spaces left at cross section archive, Anu Vahtra focuses on the fenced off Exarchia square, the confrontational presence of the fence and the dynamics that surround it. The exhibition consists of a series of excerpts from the process of documenting this barrier, the unwanted change it covers up and the attempts to capture the fading fragments of a good space, confined. Anu Vahtra has been in Athens and around its geographical borderlines over the course of three working periods during 2021-2022, researching and digesting its particularities. This exhibition is the result of her research on the theme Real Time History within the current urban and personal framework, recording irreversible spatial events, moments, and configurations of the Athenian cityscape.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Anne Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red, chapter XVII Walls.

There is a common understanding that the city of Athens during the last 20 years has been subject to particularly transformative forces in the form of a series of critical events that have left permanent marks on the city: the 2004 Olympics, the 2010 financial crisis, the current post-crisis gentrification. However, Athens is always in a state of constant change, like any other metropolis.

This condition, which could be called a process of constant becoming, is driven by the life that is being led in the buildings and streets of the city, streets which are the same but also always different. What defines a certain image of the city is the memory of that specific moment in time, connected to either personal memories or momentous events kept in the communal memory of the city. These moments are connected by periods of everydayness composed of a sequence of seemingly insignificant events, forming micro-histories that are evidence of the actual change taking place. Together they continuously define the physical environment of the city we live in, and influence the way we do so.

This transition from moment A to moment B is hardly perceptible because it is experienced from the middle of a perpetual flux, and a certain sensitivity is needed to observe and record it. This praxis itself consists of a series of indicated variables, the object at the centre of the event, the witnesses of the event taking place and the remains as the imprint in the city’s memory, that will become part of the city’s own mental archive of information.

The witnesses of the event can be either signified as instigators of truth or as ignorant viewers. Under any of the two identities, their capturing of a sequence is what delivers a collection of registrations framing other times, an alteration, a deconstruction, a formation, or even a possible moment of stillness. Those witnessed durations are what is phrasing in other words the term Real Time History; the analytical dissection of the time sequence from A to B can obscurely deliver significant historical artefacts, that are dismissed or not covered by current news in headlines.

This process of never-ending, indiscernible change and its recording are the starting points for the 2022-2023 program of cross section archive.

‘good spaces left' by Anu Vahtra.

Curated by Maria Lalou & Skafte Aymo-Boot.

video loop on monitor, 2 video loops projected on tracing paper mounted on window, video loop projected on wall, LED lights, postcard 148 x 105 mm.

Special thanks to: Lieven Lahaye, Indrek Sirkel, Tania Theodorou, Georgia Stamou & Afroditi Mitsopoulou.

Exhibition duration: 2nd December 2022 - 1st March 2023.

The exhibition is on view daily 17.00 - 23.00 from the public space of the crossing between Mavromichali and Isavron streets.

The research for Real Time History is supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.

good spaces left is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports.