▪️

Hello, I am going to show you something that is not finished, and it will not be finished as such. It is something that has been on my mind and hands for a long time.

According to the World Migration Report of 2024, 281. 000 000 people in the world live in a country other than their country of birth.

In January 2024, Norway’s immigrant population consisted of 931. 081 people, or 16.8% of the country’s total population.

I am Kalliopi Nikolou, I am from Greece and I have lived in Oslo for 3 years. My mother and grandmother were “chrysocheres”, a word we use in Greece to describe people who are talented in some way, who can create beautiful things with their hands. The literal translation of the word is “the golden-handed”.

Kalliopi was the name of my grandmother, who emigrated from Asia Minor in 1922, but Kalliopi was also originally one of the nine Muses in ancient Greece, who inspired Homer to write the Iliad and the Odyssey.
My mother expected me to return to Greece one day after I left the country in 2005.

In the meantime, I have to learn Norwegian in Norway.
I spent hours looking at the Greek sea, from here over there.

I meet other artists, not young, not at all, and we talk about our ways of being, we are two Greeks and two Norwegians.

As Hito Steyerl said in her lecture “I dreamed a dream” in 2013: “The contemporary miserables are those waiting in the curtains to be cast, to audition, to pitch. They are the crowds who are too fat, too awkward, too old, and who nevertheless go in front of juries to be voted up or down, to be ridiculed, to be dismissed, to be fired”.

Meanwhile, I try to paint, 40 x 50 cm, an average size that an artist can afford nowadays in her small, ridiculously expensive apartment paid for by her partner.

When I came to Norway, I went to a NAV office to ask for help and showed them some of my drawings. Norwegian clouds, they saw.

I Skype with my parents now, quite often.
▪️
And I get adverts in a supermarket chain in Norway where you can get better prices if you are 46 years old. Unfortunately, I am a year older now.

No Home film, by Chantal Akerman.
Manific!!!
There is no distance in the world.
There is no distance in the world?
There is no distance in the world.
There is no distance in the world?
There is no more distance in the world.

And many emotions… mon amour!
Au revoir, mon amour!
Γεια σου αγάπη μου!
Goodbye my love!

I often film with my mobile phone camera. And while I was filming in a playground in Greece, two boys asked each other:

What’s your name?

– Ermis (Mercury).

– And yours?

– Mars.

Mothers and daughters, Mercury and Mars, but also the Moon, the Sun and sons… Ed Atkins is a son, and he who swims in Corinthian Golf is also a son.

What is real?
▪️
This is Damian on the Omegle social platform.

Nasa has taken 6 pictures of holes as volcanoes on Mars, suggesting they could be openings to caves that could shelter future astronauts.

How might these images and Damian change our perception of distance?

🏔 Oslo, 2024 🏔

This presentation was delivered in real time at the Praksis space in Oslo to:

Yushukpui Bobby – visual artist and filmmaker
Rob Carter – visual artist and writer
Nicholas John Jones – Founder and Artistic Director of Praksis Oslo