Page 16 - Collectanea

RIA DAMA
b. 1974, Amaliada, Greece. Lives in Athens.
Give me Back my Shape, 2020
My Landscape is a Hand with No Lines, 2019
A Woman is Dragging her Shadow in a Circle, 2018
The underlying concept of this series of artworks involves my attempt to scrutinise the female psyche. The idea came up after reading some of Alexandros Papadiamantis’ texts. The way the author has chosen to present his female characters as they emerge throughout his work motivated me to venture an artistic interpretation of the specific topic and, in a way, to try to reappraise these women. Papadiamantis trotted them out in such a dreamlike way that they seem not to inhabit the real world but mainly resemble visions and apparitions wandering in illusory space and time that no one is able to specify accurately.
When I decided to work out this idea, my intention was initially to capture and visualize this point of view deriving from a man’s narration, which indicates a delicate perception and in- depth knowledge of the innermost female feelings and results in the idealization of his female characters and women’s nature in general. In this particular case, however, emphasis is not given to the narrative itself. Fragments of words or phrases denoting movement of several parts of the body, such as hands, or the entire posture of the female body are carefully selected. The way these women look is another structural element.
The next step was to isolate these sentences in order to avoid any correlation and direct reference to the original text. They are meticulously placed in selected parts of the composition, which allows them to interact with each other in a new way, triggering a different set of thoughts. Words become elements imprinted on a typewriter without always following the usual alignment of a text but nonetheless serving the needs of the final composition. All of these elements seem to have their own weight; they become part of a different image, a new story.
The typewriter is an indispensable tool for the implementation of this project. The typographical characters are impressed with ink and are in essence placed almost ritually on the fragile surfaces of paper to denote that information of particular value and importance is written on them.
At a second level, more difficult to discern, underneath the level of meanings just created by these words or phrases, a web initially appears, a system of coordinates, points, and well- defined shapes. Traditional embroideries – creations of unknown women – are re-examined and deconstructed to produce an abstract grid intended to hold the resonance of the words found at the first level. These motifs come from traditional embroideries from the Sporadic islands and are now part of the Benaki Museum collection. What is interesting is not their exact representation but the imprint of their remnants, as if they were shadows, distant memories that always remain engraved upon our heart.
Ria Dama 16