Co-existence – When Art and Global Collaboration Meet

One of my great joys has been to be a part of a wonderful collaborative group of global artists, writers and thinkers that are producing some amazing projects. I’ve been exited to share news of the Major Group Exhibition in Kyoto, Haiku books as well as art and haiku books, books and exhibitions the group and I have been collaborating on under the enthusiasm of powerhouse Sensei Masashi Nakamura.

Part of Maria’s installation. My photograph of the Sacred Nagi Leaf from Kumano Hayatama Grand Shrine in my hands in yoni mudra is center left.

Greek Artist Maria Papatzelou is another member of the global collaboration and powerhouse creating brilliant collaborative works. I am honored and grateful that she invited me to submit a photograph as a part of her latest “Co-existence” – an interactive installation for the Eterotites/Alterites international art project held July 2020 in Chevenes Southern France that represented 10 artists from France and Greece. The photos are a main part of the interactive art + existence. Because of Covid-19, the art installation will travel in Summer of 2021 to Southern France and later to Thessaloniki, Greece.

It includes around 100 pictures of hands she has collected and photographed all over the world, accompanying her drawings of hands as well as small sculptures of plaster and wax hands holding each other. Photographer @Jagoda Kalliarekou also partners with Papatzelou in the project taking photos and editing them for collages.

In June she had an open call for people to “photograph your hand by holding your own symbol and answer the question: – “Why did you choose this symbol, what does it mean to you in relation to + existence and otherness.”

We will be eagerly awaiting a book on the project too!

Hand drawings by Maria Papatzelou for the installation.

Maria Papatzelou’s and and Haiku with Masashi Nakamura in

The Liquid Sky: When Art, Haiku and Japanese Myth Connect

Lafcadio in Japan Code – Seeking A Lost Spiritual Tradition Commemorative Exhibition Catalog Released 日本の文化

Maria’s words about the project:

Hand. Double function. Between the positive and the negative of the human will. It can equally to pamper or to hit, to create or destroy, to hold or to fly, to offer or to take, to become a punch, to humiliate, to kill. We understand the world through our senses and the initial sense that defines what is beyond us, the point where we stop and the other begins, is the touch. By touching, we are still learning the dimensions and the different qualities of the space that surrounds us, long before our speech and movement in the world. Our hands direct, through the touch, to the positive, to the pleasure and desire, or to the negative that hurts and that is why we repel it. Me and the other one. The other. With a symbol the hand defines our interaction with the other. Our existence +. Not always harmonious.

Most often difficult, painful, traumatic. We constantly move between our own desire and will, and the necessities imposed on us, having to confront the limits of others, to coexist in a continuous interaction between us, seeking each of us an ideal, vital space of existence. + existence. Personal, private space and time. I and my intimate environment, friends and family. Collective space, society, work, city, the urban and natural environment in which I move. Can we co-exist in harmony without suppressing or being suppressed? To define a space of ours, among the others beside us, which will allow us to grow fully, without limiting the space of anyone else? The question concerns the Otherness, our rights and our obligations as social beings, our personal and collective evolution as individuals.

The + existence is a project that is co-created with the viewer, makes him a participant, a co-producer of the visual act, a task that poses questions. Responses will be given through the + process of producing the work, in an open interaction with the viewer, who becomes a co-creator and answers himself, without interfering with the artist, who is here, the coordinator of the whole undertaking, adding the visual gesture the drawings and the sculptures that will complete the installation in the space. With an open, experimental mood to the other, to create a visual, interactive space in which the artist and the public co-create and suggest, showing that, yes, when there is a will, the harmonic + existence can become the reality us.