P.D. 407/80… An endurance journey of 487+ km, Municipal Art Gallery of Ioannina.

The exhibition was shown on the ground floor of the Municipal Gallery of Ioannina (22 June – 26 July 2015), at the same time as Spyros Lisgaras’s solo exhibition on the first floor.

2006, 05:55 a.m.: the backpack on my back, and the journey had just begun. Uphill, as it should be, and long enough to fill the eye…

Athens – Ioannina, last check, ticket in the pocket, headphones in place, and the last shall be first (in the back row). Another school trip, one of those that stay with you for ever.

Every week for the next 6 years, sometimes by coach, sometimes by car, a handful of artists on an endurance journey of 487 kilometres and more. “One stays awake and holds the wheel, the other beside him dreams things up… with no shock absorbers…” Engine running, towards a Department where hands learn to shape utopia, the thoughts of a present beyond stereotypes and rules.

And the journey goes on. Dots in a row: Aitoliko for a little fish (that slips away like an eel), Kamena Vourla for something sweet (life is sweet), Metsovo for kontosouvli (we are Greeks, after all), the Garden of Eden (an oasis) for a rest, and so many more dots full of little stories, an open book for grandpa Thanasis by the fireplace… an enormous fortune!!!

And the city… The city, rainy mostly, and yet warm, welcoming, inexhaustible.

In the jet lag of arrivals and departures, time seemed to stand still, as if those few days stepped out of everyday reality and made images of their own, distorted at times, ordinary at others, but always different. The same gaze, the same person, the same landscape in another space-time, the one that flows motionless across the plain behind holy Ioannina (bathed in light).

How could such a utopia lack initiation into the Spirit through wine…!!

It could not. After all, the History of Art has shown that to touch the Transcendent (literally, the “over-stepping”), you must walk in excess.

I came to know these people, the P.D. 407/80 teachers: similar journeys, similar contracts. One Presidential Decree, and thousands of us, young scholars, ploughed the whole map of Greece every week by any means, for very little money in our pockets but with a priceless reward in the eyes of the young people we helped give shape to their dreams.

Athanasios Beroutsos