Stefanos Tsivopoulos - History Zero
It is not about the end of history, it is about the reinvention of our future. [Stefanos Tsivopoulos]
From the 55th Venice Biennale, Stefanos Tsivopoulos.
History Zero was conceived in the Summer of 2012 while I was in Athens and working on another project. I stayed there for almost four months and that was the longest I had stayed there in a long time. The centre of Athens is perhaps the area where the effects of the crisis are most visible. The challange for me was to make a new work not about the crisis per se but to question what crisis is, where it is generated and to ask whether there is a way to resist by adopting a different view of the crisis. [Stefanos Tsivopoulos in conversation with Katerina Gregos, 2013, History Zero Catalogue].
Stefanos Tsivopoulos represents Greece at the 55th Venice Biennale. Combining an archive of alternative currencies and non monetary exchange systems with a film in three parts narrating the apparently distant lives of an art collector, an African immigrant and an artist, he explores the role of money in human relations, reporting - on one hand - the various collaborative ways people have always found to cope with the distorted dynamics of the dominant economical systems and poetically reflecting - on the other - on the unpredictability of the future and the mutability of value exchanges. Tsivopoulos is not dodging the opportunity to reflect on the crisis, History Zero is not about the end of history but about the reinvention of the future:
History Zero talks about NOW but it refers to history and for me history, because it has been a costant theme in my works, I felt like even though i'm looking at it always trying to find a new inspiration a new way to interpret our currant time, I thought that maybe there is no reason anymore to do it; maybe history is stagnant maybe it is olso in a crisis...the title suggest that there is a pause in history, there is a moment where the future but also the past stop and they create a moment of contemplation.
This conversation was recorded in Venice, at the Giardini della Biennale, on May 31st 2013.
The music that goes with the interview is by Ricardo Webbens, Indian Wells and mmpsuf.
