Eleni Kamma draws her primary material from diverse sources, such as children’s book illustrations, horticulture manuals, architects’ plans and from design. By a process of collection, copy and re-composition she creates designs that examine the potential for contriving utopian and ideal spaces, while formatting a critique of cultural stereotypes. Kamma perceives space as a complex network of diverse relations in which numerous narratives coexist. The stratification apparent in her drawings reveals the procedure of her artistic practice and transmits a sense of suspension and constant movement, activating the viewer’s imagination.

Kamma’s research has recently concentrated on ideal dwellings and the possibility of existence of a “feminine” architecture. Influenced by meta-feminist theoretical quests, Kamma researches ways of conception of a space between the ideal and the possibly real. This “in-between” space — in the sense the term is given by Elizabeth Grosz — is a place without boundaries, open to social, cultural and natural transformation and also a space in which the dual systems contend. Kamma aims at bringing about the rupture of the dualism imposed by the Western way of thought focusing on contrary constructs such as the natural and the constructed, male and female, decoration and structure, form and content.

Kamma chose Piet Mondriaan’s Broadway boogie-woogie (1942) and an organic motif from a tile of the 16th century Rustem Pasha mosque in Istanbul, to constitute the structural elements of the work “the potential for an evolving and long-lasting coexistence”. For the artist, Broadway boogie-woogie intimates the rationalistic thought of Western patriarchal society, whereas the organic motif relates to decoration and a more feminine form. Examining the dominating ideology upon which Western societies and cultures were built, Kamma seems to create what Luce Irigaray maintains is lacking in order to be able to build a new world in which to live together, to come to a dialogue, to approach one another.

Daphne Vitali

Text from the catalogue of the exhibition In Present Tense. Young Greek Artists, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), 2008