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Retroaction

The island of Hydra casts a seductive spell that securely ensnares reality,
while also partaking of the myth-making process.
The elements that compose Hydra have something of the fragmentary quality
found in memory associations, and something of the glorious gratuitousness
of poetry. These elements pierce the senses and affect the conscious mind
in the manner of a catalyst. Their action is immediate, sweeping
and liberating.
Hydra is a real place with a specific history. It is a testimony to a past
that cannot change, but it is also a living stage for an imagined present,
in which all things are subject to chance, possibility, and expectation. It is a
stage set for adventures, ventures/ phenomena and dreams; for situations
that cannot be described in words or pretty pictures, but only experienced
and absorbed on the spot.
Present history is not recorded, but lived. Nikos Zouboulis and Titsa Grekou
are the kind of people who make present history, who shape the times
they live in.
Their relation to their work is purely existential. Through their work
they channel forth a passionate, insatiable appetite for life, which leads
to the furthermost consequences of the creative act, brushing aside
all restraints and inhibitions. Each time they perform this act before us,
it embodies an intensity of experience that is new and unique.
The outcome is always unexpected, open to experiment, with all the unknown
coincidences and unforeseen perspectives that this involves.
This explains why these two artists have found in Hydra such a powerful
stimulus, such a challenge: an incitement to action and commitment,
a summons to grapple with the problems of space and time, history
and tradition.
Their new experimental work is based precisely on this twofold dimension
of history (the moment as opposed to continuity; present and past;
destruction and preservation) which shapes and defines the traditional
culture, the morals, and the metaphysics of this country at all levels.
The artists start from the strict methodological organization of an idea.
This forms the groundwork, the basic pre-supposition of their work.
They then go on to explore the extent of the feasible: how far the idea
can be carried. These are the limits determined by the artists themselves
(they are the ones who stage the action and the memories evoked by it).

Beyond this, the extension into the field of the non-feasible is left wide open:

it depends on the participants, on their cohesion, the shared emotional
experience of people gathered in a common meeting-place.
This may result in privileged moments of communication and communion,
running through the participants like an electrical current.
The artists' concern has always centered on real situations. But in the present
instance, they have attempted something bolder: a retroaction.