On The Tip Of The Tongue
Participants
Discussants: Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis, Evita
Tsokanta, Despina Zefkili
Artists: Marina Miliou-Theocharaki, Kostas Roussakis
Sound Design: Dimitris Patsaros
22.05. - 18.06.2021
Enterprise Projects
Chalkidonos 56-58
11527 Athens
Images courtesy the artists and Enterprise Projects
Photos: Stathis Mamalakis
On the Tip of the Tongue
On December 18, 2020, Margarita Athanasiou, Helena Papadopoulos, Theofilos Tramboulis,
Evita Tsokanta, and Despina Zefkili met at Enterprise Projects, and discussed matters around
art publications and magazines in Greece, their position inside the realm of contemporary art,
their past, present and future, as well as language and translation. Five months after that
gathering, the audio documentation of the discussion fills Enterprise Project’s environment
once again, along with two new art commissions. Kostas Roussakis’s and Marina Miliou-
Theocharaki’s works are also conversing – through different channels and from different
starting points – with the space itself, negotiating the written and spoken word, its variations
and possibilities.
Kostas Roussakis’s sculptural installation creates space, more than just viewing and listening
conditions. Α space moving like a dry splash, challenging scale. A space being unfolded and at
the same time, unfolding emotional and corporeal states. A space disturbing its environment
and the viewer, yet, offering consolation. Roussakis shapes an environment of silent
communication for all those notions that we first sense and then discuss, for all those
identifications that we create between materials, memories, colors, emotions, and qualities.
The visitor is invited to inhabit the space and to follow a paradoxical movement, with a
disrupted focal point.
Oral Fixation (2021), Marina Miliou-Theocharaki’s sound installation, approaches voice,
speech, and their sensorial traces. With a text she wrote herself, serving as a score, the artist
employs different functions of the mouth as a material and a medium to initiate the visitor
into a unique bodily stimulation. Inhabiting the spectrum that expands from the mouth’s basic
survival functions to the ones that are purely devoted to pleasure, Miliou-Theocharaki’s
installation creates a new linguistic condition, one that pertains to the texture, intensity, and
mystery of the voice, beyond any language or translation.
On the Tip of the Tongue is a platform fostering the coexistence of different tools, forms, and
approaches that relate to the written and spoken word, what comes before it, and its
transmutations.