Chania, Christmas, late 1950s. His godmother Michalis Manousakis she asks her husband for 5 drachmas to buy a present for her christening. From the counter with “holiday things” he chooses a music box and a plastic tank. The music stopped immediately, the tank lasted longer. “I tied a rope to it and dragged it around the market. Overjoyed, sir,” recalls the artist Haniotis and honorary professor at ASKT.

Can you compare the feel of the first game to what he later added to his collection? “You should have seen me driving up and down Monastiraki. I always come home with the same excitement.” At the opening of the exhibition “A Place Once – Heroes in a Landfill”, which occupies all three floors of the Municipal Art Gallery of Chania, with games mostly European from 1821 to 1960, he talks about the importance of going back to where it all began, to when we were children. “We are all from there,” he says.

The problem of redefining childhood through play begins to bother him when his son was born in 1995. He asks his friend and artist Tasso Misuru to lend him toys, he’s drawing and returns them. He holds an exhibition of these works at the Zumbulakis Gallery, but realizes that this is not enough for him. “The essence was in the subject itself, and not in its realistic depiction. I don’t treat toys as a find, I don’t change their role, I integrate them into space and create stories with them.”

He finds his raw materials mainly in open markets and, of course, in Monastiraki, the “sacred” place, the ticket office for the geography of yesterday. He explains that he does not like new games, “unfinished”, and this somehow distances him from the concept of a collector, with a characteristic that he already has difficulties with. “Toys are like oil, charcoal and watercolor, they are tools for my work, they develop my pictorial language.” He started by buying a 1950s wooden duck on wheels and then found a photo of a little girl holding a toy. It combines two testimonies of the past into a composition and allows, through their coexistence, to weave a story about the era, about how toys were made, about how important it is to have something of your own. “I’m interested in the emotions that the object itself evokes.”

The exhibition “The Place of Once” in Chania presents toys from 1821 to 1960.

Three sections

The report consists of three sections. In the first, we are greeted by bourgeois toys, imposing dollhouses from the late 19th century, carriages, clowns, drummers on wheels, castles, zoos and china dolls from the first decade of the 20th century stand next to books to read and other luxuries. illustrated editions, atlases and puzzles. Commenting on the captions for each object is also of great importance. The artist leaves the position of the creator and, together with the viewer, turns to showing what they think about what they see. On the second floor there are authentic reproductions of famous Greek photographers (Moraitis, Romanidis, Diamantopoulos, Nelly) depicting children, as well as mixed media compositions based on photography. “I am fascinated by the process of research, excavation of reality. When I find a photographic document of a book or game, I feel confident in my assumptions about it, the chronology, the historical context.”

The third floor is dedicated to 1821, an exhibition that was shown in the Nikos Kessanlis Hall of the Athens ASKT on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution. This series of exhibitions began in 2011 at the Archaeological Museum of Chania, where Michalis Manousakis presented his toys in dialogue with ancient finds. This was followed by an exhibition at EMST in 2012 called “measure”, that is, the height from which a child interprets the world, and earlier that year he introduced us to the “Anochiroto Children’s Museum” in Expression – Gianna Grammatopoulou. “gallery. “I don’t know how many pieces are in the collection, toys don’t exist for me while they are hidden in their boxes or on showcases. They only live when they are exposed to other people’s eyes. I dream that I will create here in my city , an interactive school where everyone can get acquainted with the primary material of childhood.

“Place times”, duration until 30 June.