George Raftopoulos’ latest works play with the notion of the migrant identity or absence thereof. His works are odd things to look at and he knows it. Being an oddity is all part of the migrant experience and for that matter the human one. These paintings are conversations with the past. They don’t tell stories as much as they reacquaint us with people who should never be forgotten. If you enjoy a good landscape then this probably isn’t for you. But then again, maybe it is.
Mostly, when contemporary art looks at a personal story of migration, we’re talking about dodgy photographs and things somebody found in their grandfather’s attic. For me, looking at George’s paintings, it’s all about ghosts on the canvas.
This is a series based around post-war Greek immigration to Australia. George develops these narratives of migration into more than a set of Kodachrome memories.
Post World War Two migration from Greece has become part of our nation’s folklore. This gives almost everything associated with it a mythical quality. From milk bars to fruit shops it’s easy to live in a halcyon era. But there was always more to being Greek in Australia than “Con the Fruiterer’. What is lost in the legend is the often-harsh reality of being a stranger in a strange land.
These works don’t rehash the bare bones of history, but rather explores a parallel emotional story of the lives involved. A key trait throughout the works is George’s own ambition to see Greek immigration to Australia as more than a textbook event. He wants us to remember that the lives often observed through two lines in a government publication or stereotypes in a comedy sketch are those of real people. George’s paintings bring these experiences of the past back into hard currency. They are ghosts of the Charles Dickens kind. Juxtaposed with Greece’s own current crisis of refugees, the series reminds us of the shifting way we see migrants both past and present. George’s art reminds us that all humans are migrants. Travelling between cultures has never been a case of just reaching point B. Whether it be sixty years ago, a million years past or last week, it’s not about the migrant but who they are seen to be that matters.
Via a process of primitively printed smudges on each canvas, George loosens the identity from individual portraits. While we know that these images are based on Greek immigrants, their immediate identification is lost. They could be anyone. Freed of this ethnic bias, we are left with who we are. As a collective group, they look like a gallery of freaks. As individual images you respond to the traits you see in yourself. These are light and dark mirrors, both complimenting and condemning the viewer.
I’m a Gen X, one of the last eras in which the term “wog” was still used as part of everyday speech. Few of us cringed at the term back then, although I do now. But just because something becomes politically incorrect, doesn’t necessarily mean that society has changed or that the wounds have healed.
The works ‘Prophet’ and ‘Dreamer’ reflect this sense of dystopia. ‘Prophet’ carves a face out of black and white toning. Black to the left, white to the right and grey down the middle. Today, as hordes of Syrian refugees flood Greece, it is a reminder that migrants are seen in a variety of emotive ways, both in hindsight and at the time of their arrival. The work doesn’t make a judgment, the audience does. George overlays the image with a lace like motif, it mimics some kind of medieval costume drama. There is a sense of royalty. Perhaps, as George likes to suggest we are all “emperors” with our new clothes. The way we see fresh arrivals is filtered by our own aspirations for the world. The lace effect across the prophet’s face resembles the fabric you might find at the altar of a local church or a tablecloth from the Grecian cafe of your mind. The identity of the migrant is as much what we project as who they really are.
‘Dreamer’ is a humorous brain piece. The strong fleshy pink colour is at odds with the more austere greys and blues of its brother, the ‘Prophet’. Whilst ‘Prophet’ suggests a John the Baptist style ire, preaching outward to us sinners, in ‘Dreamer’ the audience is literally looking inside the mind of a migrant. As George’s frantic lines in the cranium suggest it is a head filled with both ideas and emotion. An ear pointing in one direction as the face is moving in another, a life in a hurry to start. There is a need for the migrant to keep travelling, whether to arrive at a destination quicker or to avoid being run out of town.
George Raftopoulos will be exhibiting new works at the Nishi Gallery in May.
Before I get dressed I’m naked. I spend some time thinking about how I feel, who I’m seeing and what it’s like outside. Then I get dressed.
When I finally have to wash my clothes I use the care label, but not always.
Nectar Efkarpidis to Bob Earl. Image of Hotel Hotel Original room shot by Ross Honeysett.
When the lights flicker off, the noise of diesel generators spreads across the neighbourhood. You’ve actually got a little coal turbine out on the patio, so you get up from your table and, careful not to trip over anything in the living room, now lit only by the glow of your laptop screen and moonlight, and slide open the patio door. The turbine seems OK but these things take a while to get up to temperature, but when they do they’re pretty reliable.
Coal, back in the cities. A couple of generations ago it was everywhere and now it’s coming back.
Cheap and simple to extract you see. Not much complex integrated infrastructure required. Not so clean of course, but then you’ve got filters on your turbine. Not everyone bothers though. So if you’ve got a neighbour running without filters, well you’ve got to get a posse together and go round and make them see reason. Either that or don’t hang your washing outside when the grid power’s out.
Anyway, seems to be heating up OK, so back to work. You go back inside, sliding the door closed to block out some of the whining and throbbing from the various ad-hoc power ‘solutions’ and sit back down at the table.
You’re on the local mesh wifi, thankfully not much of which has dropped off, unlike the last time the power went out. You’re trying to hash out with some neighbours where to site this water tank you’re collaborating on. The water supply to your neighbourhood just isn’t as reliable as it once was, and so a few of you have got together to build a big concrete rainwater tank.
Things are more chaotic than they once were, but it’s not always a bad sort of chaos.
People don’t have as much wealth as they once did, there’s not so many high end luxuries around, but then there’s not so many rich people either. Sure, for us, well most in the old west actually, ‘The Great Levelling’ as it’s become known meant a decline, but for the many, well it was more of a rise. It’s hard to begrudge so…
‘Ping’, and the low voltage lights come on, casting their dim bluish light over the room.
It is a bit of a mess really… Not the sleek white cube it was twenty years ago that’s for sure. You tried to be neat, but your various ‘interventions’ have made their mark. You remember when you put the low voltage circuit in about five years ago, to tap in to the power from the building rooftop solar, such as it is. You tried to be neat about it, but the cable isn’t cheap, so you ended up doing some, erm, unconventional routing. You’re particularly amused by the bit of cable you stretched from the light switch on the wall directly to the ceiling light. It makes a good line to hang socks on though.
And then there are the pipes all over…
As well as the original water pipes in the walls, you’ve added your own community water circuit, and the grey water from the sinks and stuff doesn’t go down to the sewers now of course. And then there’s the back up sewer pipe to the community sump for when the municipal sewers stop working.
And the living room is more of a kitchen living room now really, since the original kitchen has gradually become your little business on the side – Gin distilling. You’ve got a good relationship with a farmer from the outskirts, an old friend of the family, who supplies you a reliable source of grain. People like what you make, but more importantly trust it, which is more than can be said for some of the imported stuff.
Since the food standards went bust, well you just don’t know what sort of stuff you’re getting, and maybe even what it’s been mixed with before it’s gotten to you.
Saying that, it’s probably time to get dinner started, before the rest of the household gets home.
Three generations, including you, under one roof.
Right what to make for dinner. Plenty of vegetables in the larder… And some of those insect dumplings the kids like… Some sort of dumpling casserole then. You rinse the dirt off some of the carrots and get chopping. It’s a funny thing, you can remember when local produce was a bit of premium product, for people with disposable income. Fresh from the fields that day, still with the dirt on and so on.
Now it’s the norm though. Everyone buys local because it’s cheaper…
It’s still expensive, but now there’s no cheaper option. Partly it’s because the infrastructure problems make shipping long distances much more difficult, especially when it comes to fresh stuff. And the exotic produce from other continents is much rarer too since the great levelling.
Coffee. That’s the thing.
Still you can’t begrudge that someone on a coffee farm in Brazil the same standard of living as your mate on his farm on the outskirts of town. It’s just it’s made life a little bit less comfortable over here. Most went up, but the few came down in the levelling… And you were in the few. And though things have gone backwards in a lot of ways, well it’s not so bad. There’s less healthcare, but then people are a bit healthier. Allotments, vegetables, community… It goes a long way towards life. The future, well these days it is pretty evenly distributed, even if the bloody power goes out now and then…
To get to your future we’ve got to start with now… I want you to think how old you’ll be in twenty years… So how old are you now? And in twenty years you’ll be?
Good.
So a lot has happened over the course of twenty years, some of it good, some of it not so good, some of it tragic, most of it pretty unpredictable. But, you’re still here, living life, on your way back to your place at the end of quite a long day. It’s pretty late and it’s gotten dark, and the street your walking along is mostly quiet, apart from the occasional passing vehicle. It’s cold too. Winter is definitely on its way. You can see your breath when you pass through a beam of the streetlights. You walk the last few steps to your door and touch your key to the lock, eager to get in.
But, what? The lock has gone red. Hmmmf.
You touch your key to your phone. Oh, what?! Well that’s not very friendly. You’ve been outbid on your place so it’s someone else’s now. Oh, and yep, there’s your luggage, locked to the wall, waiting for you.
OK, so your phone has found you a place a few doors away. You unlock your luggage and it rolls along behind you as you trudge off down the street. I mean honestly. At least in the old days estate agents were people, with a bit of common decency. These bloody algorithmic services just don’t care.
Still, if you were after the personal touch you could’ve paid for it…
And it wouldn’t be cheap. Even a bit of consistency round here is pretty much out of your price range. Getting outbid every few days is just a bore, but you get what you pay for. Or more accurately everyone gets what they can pay for. And in towns like this, space is a precious commodity and the market is furious.
Anyway, only a few more days living like this and then back home-home. And no real harm done as your new place is only a bit further down. Oh, and it turns out you were notified this afternoon that your top bid got trounced, but you’ve had your phone on deathly silent.
Your luggage is still trundling along behind you as you get to your door. The lock opens and in you go… Only to be greeted by a long flight of stairs up to your room. Great. Your knees aren’t as strong as they once were. Conversions like this just aren’t quite so set up for itinerants, unlike the last place where the omni room is properly built in.
You start climbing the stairs, and your luggage, moving like a giant turtle on a beach, follows behind you…
Until, finally, you’re home. Not home-home, just home, but it’s a nice enough place. Omni purpose, but the room seems set up for evening so you take off your jacket, get out your phone, and sit at the table as you have a look what’s around for dinner.
Yep. Still plenty of activity circulating the neighbourhood. Well there would be. An area like this is extremely well serviced. Hmmm, what to eat? That Chilean brand you had yesterday was pretty good, but something a bit simpler today… Pasta. Classic and warming. And there’s one in your price bracket turning in to your street now. You direct it to head your way, and sit back and wait for the case to get to your door.
I did some thinking about the ‘home of the future’. I began with a classic futurism technique of deciding upon two factors, then imagining each factor changing to different extremes, to generate ideas for four different futures, twenty years from now.
The factors I became interested in are equality, and infrastructure… So what will it be like in twenty years if things become more/less unequal, and infrastructure becomes more/ less centralised and reliable…
Scenario one: ‘Current Trends’… Less equality and better infrastructure
Government policies favour increasing accumulation of capital in fewer people’s hands, with neo-liberal economic ideas.
High tech industry is spurred on, with consolidation in services and supply chains as ‘winner takes all’ is the mantra (see Uber vs. Lyft, Google virtual monopoly etc).
The loss of jobs to technology isn’t managed well however. Inequality increases, and the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow, with the hollowing out of the middle class. Unemployment is high. Despite the inequality, crime is kept in check through efficient policing.
Scenario two: ‘Bright Future’… More equality and better infrastructure
In response to popular pressure, and a recognition that equal societies have less violence etc. global economic rules change to decrease gap between the have’s and the have-nots. There is a ‘great levelling’: The 1% become the 51%, the distribution of wealth is dramatically widened.
Taxes are high, and government is fairly strong. Technology enables a very fluid jobs market, so the wage disparity between the current ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world disappears. The man growing your coffee in Brazil demands the same wage as the man running the organic artisanal coffee shop.
Scenario three: ‘Localism’… More equality but worse infrastructure
Things level out but at the expense of investment in infrastructure and technology. Efficiency and productivity declines as things become less reliable and more chaotic. People naturally respond by becoming more self-sufficient, and localism flourishes. Security isn’t bad because there’s not much difference in wealth or opportunity anyway.
Scenario 4: ‘Collapse’… Inequality and bad infrastructure
Most places take on the feel of some dystopian society, with the rich living in gated communities, which provide security and private infrastructure for those that can afford it. The rest live in a fairly broken down society, without much service provision. Security is bad due to lack of policing and the unequal situation.
Rhubarb and cardamom syrup —
1 cup castor sugar
2 cups water
1 Ttablespoons cardamom pods (lightly crush them with your hand)
750g rhubarb (leaves taken off and rhubarb chopped into 2 inch pieces)
Rhubarb and cardamon soda —
45 ml rhubarb and cardamom syrup
5 ml simple sugar syrup
1 lime wedge (squeezed)
Method
Rhubarb and cardamom syrup
Put all ingredients into a pot and bring to boil.
Once boiled, bring down to low heat and stir to allow the rhubarb to break down. Only do this for 5 minutes.
Take it off the stove and allow to cool.
Using two strainers, double strain rhubarb into another bowl.
Refrigerate (the leftover rhubarb is nice with yoghurt or ice-cream).
