'Setting up in the palace a great histon, she wove a fine and very wide (histon)'
– Odyssey ii 94–95
While in Classical Greece, women used to spend most of the day in the gynaikon, the women’s quarters of the house located on an upper floor, where mothers raised their children and engaged in spinning thread and weaving, Iliodora Margellos revisits history and places this private space at Dio Horia Acropolis Annex, located at the lower level of the gallery. Thus, a peculiar kind of a temple is being built, dedicated to powerful goddesses, such as Athena, Arachne, and Artemis Chrysselakatos, that praises patience and nurture as feminine qualities translated through the silent act of weaving and embroidery, and aims to tame the spirits and counterbalance enforced social isolation, securing an opening to women’s inner world via quiet means of expression.
In the Histonas (Room of Webs) installation, Margellos’ storytelling unravels through manual repetitive gestures, in two separate series of handmade embroidery & weaving on metal screen: the Seasons series (i.e. I Will Love You Like Today All Year Round (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring)) and the Nostalgia series (i.e. I Want To Make Nostalgia My Friend (Nostos, Ponos, Kleos)), informed by the artist’s mixed origins, as an effort to re-enact the singular topographic and mythological elements that illustrate Greek heritage and society. The works’ titles bring to mind lyrics of a familiar song; as per Gregory Nagy, in discussion of Homer and the lyric poets “the idea of making song is expressed metaphorically through the idea of making fabric”.
The works co-exist in the same space as suspended, autonomous bodies, to create an immersive visual play. Using surface reflection and thread as a medium for embroidery, weaving, and beading, the artist invites the viewer to experience the Greek topos, as a reference to the abundance of color in Greece’s multitude of islands and the infamous element of the sun as a source of light, combined with the lasting tradition of feminine roleplay and an ever-evolving discourse that involves the nostalgia of a past non-space and the ongoing intensity of our present times.
In Histonas (Room of Webs), time evolves and continues to flow, emotions appear to be the same but gradually change in valence, and women – the artist included – seek visual and interior balance. Varied materials come together to playfully transcend the borderlines between the architecture’s enclosure of space, the fabric’s penetrability and the art’s ultimate journey of the soul.