text by Maria-Thalia Carras
Exhausted after a long day’s trek you walk into the Hotel Grande. Whether you are a part of the world’s traveling art community, a hippy, beatnik, Roma gypsy, an immigrant from one of the four corners of the world looking for a brighter future or just a good old tourist, the Hotel’s simple lobby welcomes you. It offers a bed to rest your weary limbs and “A New Atlas of the City” to guide you around your new temporary home, Larissa.
Maria Papadimitriou’s project - in colaboration with the T.A.M.A. Community - focuses on finding exactly that: a space where all travelers’ wishes and desires can converge. She coordinates the actions of communities such as the Roma gypsies of the region or students from the University of Larissa. She channels their creativity towards a common cause. This cause may be the naming of the Hotel Grande by the gypsies themselves –a comical take on the simplicity and the minimal comforts offered by this establishment in the heart of Larissa– or the “New Atlas”, made up of thousands of photographs taken by students and compiled as a visual tour of the city to be leafed through in the hotel’s reception area; Papadimitriou liberates these communities, uniting their separate worlds and ways of seeing and combining to create new territories of meaning.
To the left of the reception desk in the lobby of the Hotel Grande hangs a painting purchased by Papadimitriou from a Nigerian salesman; a picturesque landscape, the embodiment of that permanent image lodged in many a traveler’s mind, either from a still unfound paradise or from some memory of home which the passage of time has blurred into utopian perfection.
Underlying Papadimitriou’s project is an attempt to understand what pushes travelers forward. Is there a common identity or strain of thought? The characteristic reply by one of the Roma gypsies interviewed by Papadimitriou was that gypsies travel for commercial reasons: if they stayed too long in one place, their selling pitches would slowly fall on deaf ears. Are these travelers then in search of nothing more than a good hard sell? Might it be perhaps that they are their own masters – that they are free?
Papadimitriou creates environments which may be makeshift but which embody permanent hopes and dreams, a resting place for travelers where they can commune in new territories and which for a while they can call their own.
