The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: “Çınaraltı”: Under the plane tree with Eleni Mouzourou & guests
Date: Wednesday, 9 October
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
In a performative conversation, Eleni Mouzourou explores the place of centenarian trees in contemporary urban spaces, delving into the human stories and uses around them and the values and fantasies projected onto them. Thereby, the artist shares an insight into her ongoing research on ancient trees as biodiversity habitats and as living time-machines connecting deep pasts and distant futures for human and more-than-human city dwellers.
In the framework of a research residency in Istanbul in spring 2024, the artist focused her attention on Plane trees designated as “monuments/monumental” by the Istanbul municipality, taking into account their notable presence in the materiality of the city, as well as in regional folklore and the social imaginary. For her encounter, she reconfigures individual interviews conducted with various local interlocutors during her residency and blends them with audiovisual footage and archival material in an experimental polyphonic reading.
The conversation brings together the voices of an interdisciplinary tree researcher, a cultural manager, a paleobotanist/
Trees are considered as physical entities in their impermanence and mortality, as well as in their potential timefulness beyond their organismal age. They emerge as sites of remembrance and social gathering and as places of refuge. Addressed are the ways they can become instrumentalised in the production of nationalism, the monumentalisation of “nature”, the politics of belonging in the construction and maintenance of landscapes, and the growing risk of tree loss as a result of anthropogenic activity.
In view of the troubling thriving of far-right ideologies across the globe, this project engages with the ecological and political implications of biodiversity and chronodiversity as one continuum through which to acknowledge differences to cultivate communalities.
The research was realised in the framework of the Berlin cultural exchange stipend 2023/24 in cooperation with DEPO/Anadolu Kültür
BIO
Eleni Mouzourou’s work navigates the intersections of natural and sociopolitical landscapes, mapping perspectives often overlooked in dominant narratives. Her practice challenges totalising worldviews by highlighting the specific and localized within broader sociopolitical contexts. Using multiple media, including drawing, video, and artists’ books, she investigates the complex interconnections between personal, historical, environmental, and political issues, focusing on their influence on the formation of (national) identities. Postcolonial Cyprus serves as a point of departure for her explorations, with more-than-human entities—such as trees, pigeons, and bees—emerging as witnesses to displacement, colonial legacies, and migration. Eleni was born in Nicosia and is based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and an MA in Art Therapy from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2019). That same year, she co-founded ANDPRESS, a collective dedicated to the production and dissemination of artists’ books and paper-based works. Her recent exhibitions include Speculative Properties at Adalbertstr. 9, Berlin (2023); Twister at nGbK, Berlin (2022); and Papier Marché at Steirischer Herbst ’21, Palais Attems, Graz (2021).