Exercises with Boxes

I have always had, since I was a teenager, a deep dislike of people getting together and forming groups. This is not a reasonable attitude, but a very personal one, idiosyncratic to myself and by no means is it a judgement on people who have formed distinguished and remarkable groups throughout the disciplines and enhanced their world with their work.

In my secondary school in Athens, during the last three years, (secondary school in Greece consists of three years of Gymnasium and three years of Lyceum), the "cool" kids were the ones who were the strongest, top pupils, while also being trendy and fashionable. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, were the rebellious, "anarchist" students, who did not appear to give a damn about school. If you belonged somewhere in between and you were a medium kind of student who did not really stand out you were OK, as everyone left you alone to eventually form a group with similar students. But if you were a good, conscientious student, like I was, but not trendy or "cool", then you did not fit anywhere and stood out like a sore thumb. The last two years at school were terrible for me. My previously "best" friends had somehow formed a clique and made it very obvious that I was not accepted. The worse thing is that I really never found out what exactly caused this complete change. In several occasions I was treated in a very humiliating and aggressive way in the middle of school. When I tried to mix in with any other group of students I was made to understand that I did not belong there. What really got to me, is that every group was physically taking over certain spaces inside and outside the school, so much so that you could almost make a map of different territories of each group. It was a given that you should not go to the spots the groups normally occupied, even if they were not there at the time. I think there was a period of about six months I did not speak to anyone at school and I often stood at a specific spot in the courtyard looking out towards a small hill. It was a great anticlimax to a very positive experience, more or less, of school till then.

Forming a group is a very natural thing for people to do and it must have been crucial to the survival of prehistoric men. Any kind of group of people getting together voluntarily, for any reason, presumably do so because they have some things in common or because they have a common cause. By definition and unavoidably, a group carries with it the trait of exclusion. No matter how large or small a group is and regardless of its nature or purpose, it will always exclude a certain portion of people. Visually it is similar to a circle, with the people of the group in the centre. That is neither here nor there and many groups do actually aim to make an obvious distinction with the rest of the world or to purposefully oppose other groups or institutions. Many groups do not even acknowledge this exclusion and would advocate their openness to everyone or their intention to reach out to the world from their position in the group. Of course a group, say formed in order to protect the wildlife of a lake somewhere, will make no effort to interest classic movie fans and so will probably never reach them. And that is not so important, as the two subjects are not directly related. But if the same group failed to communicate with the local people living around the lake and with those whose living directly depends on the lake, then that exclusion would be crucial, not only to the future of the group, but also for the potential future of the lake, wildlife and people of the area. What is really ironic is that, from my observations, by forming a group, albeit often with the best intentions, people tend to exclude or oppose the nearest and most relevant subjects. That is particularly and overwhelmingly apparent in politics with tragic consequences. But even more subtly, especially within creative groups, the danger is that the individuals could get so consumed with their ideas and with each other, that everything will start to swirl around in circles within the group, which will either eventually lose momentum and die out or overflow in some dramatic fashion. In many cases the focus of the group collapses inwards, towards the centre of the circle, shrinking it, so that the inclusion of crucial subjects and ideas from outside becomes less and less likely. Occasionally a group will be so influential or so necessary, with often a charismatic leader or a great dynamic of personalities, that its formation feels inevitable and it changes the face of the world, for better or for worse. Being part of such a group must feel like being caught up in a whirlpool and your following it is no longer up for discussion, you are so deeply in it that you just watch yourself as part of history taking place, in amazement.
Remarkable works have been achieved by people forming or belonging to a group, so again I note that this is a very personal view. But as an individual, I am very wary of the difficulties of belonging to a group and of the lurking dangers to oneself and to others, of a moral and of a human nature.

However much I dislike groups for that inevitable exclusion trait they carry, I am doubly intrigued by their spatiality. By that I mean the actual different physical spaces that a group may occupy throughout its existence, and also the "imagined" spaces that spread outwards from the group and from its ideas to the world. This sounds mildly philosophical and abstract, but it is not as bad as my idea about theatre that I wrote for my MA final dissertation. I sometimes do not believe I got away with it, for my whole dissertation was based on a notion I had that there is an actual shape created in theatre between the stage and the audience. At the time I was actually serious about it, but I could not find the words to explain exactly what I meant. Thankfully one of the professors gave me an amazing reading list of books which gave me the vocabulary and foundations to explain my crazy idea. Amongst those books is my favourite non-fiction book and I believe a very important read for anyone, called Thirdspace, Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places, by Edward W. Soja. Others included Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel Foucault's Of Other Spaces, Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space and Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. I suddenly felt less crazy and that non-physical spaces did not only existed in my mind but people had been writing about them for years.

I will not try to go into the idea of a shape being formed in theatre now, but I could give a simplistic visual example of what I mean regarding the spatiality of groups. If a group was to be meeting in a room, for example to discuss and develop their ideas, then we can imagine this room as a closed box. Already for me, what is going on in this room/box and the ways the space is used or not used and what is being brought in and taken out, in regards to objects and ideas, is in itself very interesting. But even more interesting are the ways in which the group will attempt to externalise their ideas and their work outwards. Because if the weakness of a group is its trait of exclusion-the potential failing to identify and consider crucial ideas and people-, its major strength is the unlimited ways it can externalise and project to the world its internal visions. So then the box it is opened, and all the flaps can be unfolded, tucked in, ripped out and given away, expand, change shape, flip over and so on. This is again a simplistic visual metaphor and might sound complicated and abstract, but just think that the space of meeting does not have to be in a room/box to begin with and also throw in some cyber technology and the possibilities become multiplied and even more abstract.

The groups in my secondary school were able to create areas were they met and which no one else could access. Groups of students moved from area to area, marking it, but they remained nevertheless internally static. It does not have to be that way. There is great future for groups, with the acknowledgement of the potential pitfalls and with an unlimited and hugely open way of externalising ideas and visions. So that real and imagined spaces created through ideas, can form a new platform, or better even a new dimension, which will be more inclusive, more accessible and always developing.

Some years ago, driven by boredom and frustration for the lack of a studio, I made for myself some exercises with boxes. For two months I collected all used boxes of any kind and gave myself a few minutes to unfold them, look at their shape and come up with a construction that either gave them a character or a narrative. Below are some examples.

War

Japanese Fisherman

Love Flight

Out of Reach

Dirty Laundry

Mind or Heart

Anchored Pig

 Greek Kiosk

Boxing Match