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Two cups of coffee and some mandarins… by Rena Pitsaki

The session about the Greek immigration "crises", follows-up with a true moving story between our fellow Rena and Offa, a Syrian artist, who now lives in Greece. 



I was born in Chios on March 16th, 1993. She was born in Aleppo on December 25th, 1984. I was raised in Chora, the center of the island, with the smell of jasmine flavouring my neighbourhood, like allspice does. She was raised in a small, picturesque alley in the center of the town, which accompanies all of her childhood memories in Syria. From a very young age, she remembers herself drawing. She remembers herself observing the world and transferring instinctively whatever she sees, hears, smells, or feels in small sketches. From that age, I discovered a raw need to read about art and the artists who changed our view of the world throughout the centuries. This need became a part of my studies later on. Her strong feel and passion for colouring her figures with oils, carbons, and crayons later became her field of studies at the Fine Arts School of Aleppo. A few years later, she was teaching her students how to make a shape rise out of the marble, out of the clay. 

On August 6th, 2016, at 2:30 am, the boat arrived at the coast of Chios, after a long and unsafe passage at sea. On the same day, I landed at the airport of Chios, after a long time away. I always liked taking a walk near the sea at dawn. This walk makes me feel bonded with the salty roots of my island, the salty roots of my identity. She had to sleep on a bench at the port that very early morning. And so she slept the next seven nights. Neither was she the only one on those benches. Neither that dawn, on my walk, did I meet her. 

It was December. She was still living in Chios, stuck in a political quagmire, stripped of her ability to take her own steps forward, to determine her future life. She is dreaming of going to Bordeaux (FR), but first she dreams of returning to a state of normalcy. We met each other at Souda, the refugee camp. She welcomes me into her tent with a warm handshake, a cup of hot coffee, and some Chian mandarins. Immediately, my senses are stimulated. The tiny space is dominated by her, Offa , and some of her latest paintings. I observe every painting closely: the composition, the colours, the perspective, and I start asking about her work. She is bursting through the conversation, talking with passion and entrancement about her studies, and her large collection of paintings in Aleppo. Her eyes are sharpened, and her body is moving to the rhythm of the effusive stories. The conversation about her personal style of painting is becoming more global, and soon we start talking about Michelangelo, Leonardo, the Syrian culture, the classical ages, and the universality of art. We lavishly spend our limited time talking about our favourite artists and periods of art. 


After a couple of minutes, she opens with reverence a plastic bag full of worn discs, discs that contain pictures of her paintings and her previous life. She indicates that more than likely, none of them will be recognised by my laptop because of water damage on the journey to Chios. We start trying persistently, disc-by-disc, until finally one of them with the name “Aleppo” opens and we both see in full-screen mode a video of her studio. I can still hear the background song ... ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3LlbtcRxGE


Her face is darkening and she is tearing up. She offers me a second cup of coffee and we start talking about the war, the invasion of her home, the moment when she sees her paintings being destroyed by some “men in black”, her first nights in Turkey and now the threat from a different kind of “men in black” [ref. to Golden Dawn attacks]. We also talk about her daily difficulties here in the camp, her fears and needs. The second coffee is almost finished and the night is falling. She encourages me to leave the camp as soon as possible. This is not a safe place during the night. Our first warm handshake becomes a hearty hug, and a promise to meet up again soon. 


As I leave, the only thing she asks of me is a box of carbons, a few small squares of black with which to begin a new artwork… 



[first published on the website www.aplotaria.gr


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Rena Pitsaki was born in Chios, Greece in 1993. She entered the University with a scholarship and completed her studies at the Department of History & Archaeology of the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. During her studies she focused on Art History (semester at Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy) and on Cultural Management (training at National University of Athens, Greece). She is now completing her postgraduate studies at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication (M.Sc in Cultural Informatics & Museology) of the Aegean University. She is working within the last 3 years as a curatorial and administrative assistant at KatArt-e_Art&Technology Lab. She has also been involved voluntarily in many cultural, educational and research projects, in collaboration with museums and foundations, while she is working in the field of curating art exhibitions. She is engaged in issues of interdisciplinary artistic projects, which highlight social, political and theoretical discourses.

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