Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

Maria Papadimitriou presents a new work cycle which is based on the appropriation of pre-existing material. It entails a series of collages based on postcards which Reneé  Bourguignon had received from various friends and relatives during the decade of 1947-57, at the address of 8 Rue Colette, 17^th district of Paris. In the beginning the cards were addressed to Mademoiselle Reneé, but from 1952 and after, Reneé  becomes a Madame, signifying in this way a change in the way she defines herself and the female fantasy. In these collages, the artist converses with the fragmentary traces of this disrupted communication, creating in this way a series of “imaginary landscapes”. These landscapes are like undelivered postcards, combining different places and forms and aiming towards a double act of installing-uninstalling – an act which transforms the identities and multiplies the vanishing lines which extend to nowhere in the world.  The title of the work is based on William Morris’s book ‘Road to Nowhere’ (1890) and on a text by the artist’s colleague, architect and curator Yorgos Tzirtzilakis.