FUTURES PAST

posted by Amber Weaver July 21, 2018

New People of Print Member FUTURES PAST is a cross-disciplinary art studio from Greece, founded in 2018 by Christina Tzekou, architect, and Anastasis Stratakis, visual artist. FUTURES PAST is a conceptual brand that produces art print editions, unique paintings and other multifunctional objects — addressing notions of identity renegotiation, transcultural bonds, cultural reappropriation and recuperation of a distant yet ever-present past, whilst exploring the give-and-take between the handcrafted and the digital within our post-industrial times.

Mother Tongue #01

Their inaugural print series entitled ‘Mother Tongue’ is based on collective narratives related to Greece’s ancient heritage, as well as on a long documented walk through the contemporary Athens city centre. It juxtaposes appropriated archival imagery with raw unedited photographs that capture intricate details of the Greek capital’s urban landscape and daily life — as such, blending the ancient ruin with the contemporary one, as well as the exoticised ideal with its descendant wear-and-tear of the here and now. Overly reconfigured, mistranslated archaic forms such as museum artefacts and ancient temples, are fusing seamlessly with the stark reality of ‘patinated’ sidewalks, graffiti-covered walls, photographs from the scribbled insides of public toilets and other ‘aversive’ surfaces. Aiming to reinterpret the first while recontextualising the second, what is created is an aesthetic amalgamated balancing between the two ages that take place within the same topos.

Moreover, FUTURES PAST creates unique paintings comprised of fragile geometric compositions, using reinterpreted representational forms, painterly gestures or directly appropriated elements — drawing from a syntax of conceptual and formal references, such as: archaic hieroglyphic writing, natural patterns drawn from the Mediterranean landscape, architectural micro-textures and more. Mustering a visual vocabulary, not very much unlike a lingual one, ‘words’ and ‘phrases’ are put together — producing variant occasional meanings, albeit with an exculpated spirit of instinctive and spontaneous playfulness.