The work is exhibited at the Warehouse C

The words yurt and ger have the same meaning: they are the temporary, portable tents of the nomadic tribes which they use for their brief settlement, before they start again their journey. Maria Papadimitriou is building her own version of such a tent, creating a space of rest, an intermediate space as such for its function in a western city as for its purpose as a space of recreation. Retaining her reasoning in relation to the oral history of the nomadic tribes, she connected this structure with Reiki (the therapeutic Japanese practice) which was also spread out through the means of oral tradition. As a result, she supplied the tent with pillows, blankets as well as head phones in which traditional stories can be heard in order for the visitors to relax. As the curator Jennifer Allen has mentioned: “To lie down and listen is an invitation to anyone to exist as an experience within history, which apparently we are not able to approach or conquer but on the contrary it is always changing due to its constant flow”. The work My Yurt is an heterotopia, such as the airport, or even better the resemblance, the reconstruction of an heterotopia, as well as the tents, the place which stands between journeys, destinations and arrivals.

Theodore Markoglou