Today we present to you, a few works of exploration . Tianyi Zheng through video and Stanford Cheung through sound recording, explore the soft nature surrounding the house while Xenia Papadopoulo and Marilli Pizzaro play with each others’ poetry through translation in their own dialects. Translation is an amusing tool, as it allows for communication. However, how can we assure a true translation, that fully captures the multi faceted meaning of words. English has been the middle-man in this process as it is the obvious connection between our fellow Puerto Rican resident, Marilli and Xenia’s mother tongue, greek.
Merged into Tianyi’s images, we notice gracious glimpses of Elli Skourogianni testing out movements in our local olive grove, filmed by Viosjana Shkurti.
In the background, we hear experimental jazz played by Kostas and his band, whose concert we attended the night before. The melodic notes of the piece, grabs you into this visual composition.
This visual presentation of the day, beautifully sums up the various activities that occur at Koumaria : exploration, experimentation and sharing.
Here is the (rough) English translation of the poem written by Xenia Papadopoulo, 3 years ago :
Fresco in Egyptian blue
…or maybe secco? *
I know an Arab
who lets the bread slowly expand
in a fiery canton
who loosely ties his black and white Palestinian turban
and who has a blurry look like the fishe’s in a fish market’s trunk
who yells ʽʼaiwaʼʼ
after he already has provided for
and who is alert with ammunition in the hands of a six-fingered
that when I get nauseous in the streets of Cairo he offers me sweet ʽʼshishaʼʼ
and view from heavenly minarets
for Allah’s will
who is an incomprehensible rock with glazed surfaces
an amphorae shell
who reclines in perfect geometry
whose eye slots
tell me his one truth
and the crocodile nape/col all the rest
that in dinner, sometimes
we have a power cut
and then we forget the food in our plates and we both look high
the same stars
of our lonely breath
who I preserve in my memory
as he wants to be an encaustic icon
*Al secco is a wall painting technique, it means painting in dry wall, while fresco is the painting in fresh wall – directly after competing the last plaster layer