ERATO KUTSUDAKI – PHILIPPOS FOTIADIS
Chloe in Elefsina
editor Papadopoulos, 2023, p. 40

“I see you – do you see yourself in me?” is a question which, according to the Philhellenic Englishman, author Lawrence Durrell, writing in the New York Times in 1960, whispers every landscape to us if we stand in front of it and listen to its pulse. If this is true, what voice does she use to speak to us? Eleusisand what will we say to her?

This small seaside town, only 21 kilometers from Athens, filled with such a rich history and so irreparably scarred, is it not in many ways our mirror, a complex imprint of Greece itself, from the classical to the modern era? And while this year he creatively looks at each other with the society, being crowned European Capital of Culture, it is not the first time he has inspired artists. From Seneca to Henry Miller and from Jacques Lacarière to Philippe Koutsaftis, his powerful vibrations always ignite exploration and storytelling.

Last week, a new story about Eleusis appeared in the windows of bookstores, which, although aimed at children, contains the complex look of two adult active architects trying to describe in their own words and images that powerful and ancient “spirit of place”.Architect and museum worker Erato Koutsudaki creates Chloe, a seven-year-old girl who takes a Sunday stroll through the sacred city of antiquity, and entrusts her narration to architect and illustrator Philippos Photiadis to create the perfect setting.

The author’s relationship with Eleusis began in 2016 when she curated the exhibition “People + Factories” at the Old Olive Mill, during the creation of which she came into contact and got to know his people – “some ancient, some imaginary and some real”. and fully alive,” she will tell us, “all the people who were connected to her and influenced her in various ways.”

Ambassadors of history

For the needs of his storytelling, Kutsudaki creates a “team” of local “ambassadors” who appear to little Chloe as she wanders, each of whom speaks to her about a different aspect of the city’s dense history.

Triptolemos and Demophon, the sons of the first king of Eleusis Celeus, children like Chloe, are impressed that she wears trousers and talk to her about goddess Demeter And Eleusinian mysteries in a casual manner, the children talk to each other, and the statue of Aeschylus comes to life and tells her that her name is one of those that the Eleusinians gave their goddess. He meets the industrialists who built the first factories in the area, immigrants from Asia Minor who moved here after the Holocaust, local navy hero Vassilios Liasko, archaeologist Popi Papangeli and ASKT professor Nikos Navridis, as well as director Michael Marmarinos, General Artistic Director of the organization “European Capital of Culture Elefsis 2023”.

Through their faces, Eleusis becomes known to both Chloe and ours, and they are all protagonists of the microcosm created by Philippos Photiadis, where, as the author told us, “there are deep and underground architectural nuances that play the meaning of a palimpsest.”

Fotiadis, who has always been drawing since his studies in America (Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design) represents a generation of architects, graphic artists and designers who, before grasping the mouse and screen, first become familiar with and love the pencil and paper. His technique (with which he has created a series of award-winning children’s books in the past) has on the surface something light and humorous, but in the background a functional find: the overlapping levels of his “action”, like in shadow theater, they give the 2D environment a sense of depth.

The long, narrow images that he creates in welcoming the action are reminiscent of small sets for a play in which, in fact, Eleusis herself acts as the protagonist. The director and screenwriter of this performance, Koutsudaki, and the stage designer and artistic director, Fotiadis, open an atmospheric and instructive paper window into the “Bay of Miracles”, where the city stands, which the author calls “raw, unpretentious and dense.” A city that, as he told us, if he had to describe it in one word, that word could only be one: “mystery”.