A story to tell

Once upon a time, there was a little girl born to parents each with a controversial cultural background. One parent grew up reading classical books published as children’s magazines, listening to modern Greek music and inviting colleagues from different countries to his house. The other part, on the other hand, was introverted, loved art galleries and classical literature, music, and theater productions.

In the parents’ dining room stood a bookshelf, created entirely out of wooden boxes that had once housed NATO spare parts and Luftwaffe munitions. It is almost ironic that these boxes, painted from green to white for the shelf, formerly carrying weapons, became the source of infinite knowledge. All books were actually read and highly appreciated: poems by Konstantin Cavafy, Odysseas Elytis, Kostas Karyotakis, or novels by Elias Venezis, Ernest Hemingway, Stratis Myrivilis, and many others.

The first book Athina – that’s the girl’s name – took from the bottom shelf when she was four years old was an art book that looked huge to her, with a green hardcover and gold letters. Title: “World Encyclopedia Of Art.” Every day she heaved the heavy book out of the library, placed it on the floor, and then traveled through time and space with the art encyclopedia. By the age of six, Athina had acquired an adult’s knowledge of art.

Her mother was different in many ways from most mothers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And so she considered her little girl an excellent companion on visits to art galleries and museums. Every trip to the center of Athens ended with a visit to art galleries. Athina was delighted. What she had read and seen in the big green book of art became real.

Her greatest love was the “Ora” art gallery of the Armenian-born painter Asantour Baharian, as well as the “Polyplano” and “Nees Morfes” galleries. In “Nees Morfes” she first saw installations by her mother’s close family friend Gregory Semitekolo, composed of white human-sized figures and sound.

The family lived sometimes in Athens, other times in Chania on Crete. Art exhibitions were also visited in Chania. Already as a child Athina admired and captured here paintings by Gaitis, Fasianos, Mytaras, sculptures by Gabriella Simosi, Parmakelis and ceramic works by Vernardaki and many others. Visits to her aunt’s summer house allowed her to get to know Gregory Semitekolo and his wife Nelly primarily as individuals and friends, and not just as artists. Beautiful memories of an even by far wider circle of friends that her mother and aunt had since her youth.

Although she loved art history above all, Athina later entered marketing and the world of social media, though she always had visual art in the back of her mind. During her bachelor’s degree in marketing and business administration, she took many art and archaeology courses. She realized that what others didn’t seem to understand in and about art, she already knew just from reading her childhood art book.

The years that followed her late twenties were years of personal happiness and tragedy. Against all odds, Athina kept investing money and time to study art, buy art books, visit exhibitions, take art classes.

Today, through her website and athina’s project, she invites all art lovers and artists to personally contribute to redefining visual art as:

• mirror of modern society’s positive and negative aspects
• empowering source of communities and social minorities
• catalyst of social, political, and environmental changes
• act of resistance to the status quo
• visual language without boundaries in a multicultural modern society.