Clocks of the tides

"L’amour dérobe les heures" originates from the artist's exhibition text, which predates all the works in the exhibition and serves as a guide to their transfiguration. The drawings—characterized by sparse lines and black-and-white compositions—are abstract interpretations of images drawn from two books: Tatiana Stavrou’s Secret Springs (Μυστικές Πηγές) (1940) and Akylas Millas’ Prinkipo (1988). These works serve as paradigms of a bygone era, where lyricism was embraced as a vessel for radical thought. Svoronou further instrumentalizes this lyricism, shaping it into a language of animation through which she reflects on the present, as well as on her own and her family's entangled histories of migration from Istanbul and Asia Minor. Images from Stavrou’s erotic novel Secret Springs (Μυστικές Πηγές), particularly its first chapter, appear almost untouched—Svoronou’s narration merging seamlessly with that of its female protagonist. A larger-than-life heel, held by a disembodied male hand emerging from a small boat, echoes Stavrou’s depiction of a woman (perhaps herself) who, upon seeing her own reflection as an older woman in the bathroom mirror, embarks on a fragmented journey through memory. Her recollections transport her to an anachronistic past where her relationships with men take center stage, revealing glimpses of her own evolving identity through them. A parallel narrative unfolds through Akylas Millas’ Prinkipo (1988), a volume dedicated to the island of Prinkipo (Büyükada). Though professionally a doctor and only a self-taught historiographer, Millas blends historical fact with lyrical narration. This is exemplified in the excerpt featured in Svoronou’s text, where he poetically depicts the island as a rare and almost divine gem, as if it had accidentally fallen into the sea from God’s fingertips. Described as a “forsaken pearl,” the passage expresses both admiration and nostalgia, possibly alluding to the island’s shifting history and cultural transformations. By likening it to a jewel fit to adorn a beloved, Millas highlights Prinkipo’s beauty while evoking a longing for a past that has gradually faded. In addition to his writing, Millas—an illustrator as well—intersperses his narration with minimal drawings that reinterpret historical artifacts. This methodological choice is particularly striking given the accessibility of photography at the time. His use of lyrical abstraction and decorative motifs as a means of engaging with dark histories resonates with Svoronou’s animation. Through her own process of secondhand transfiguration, she extends and repositions these visual and narrative elements in the present. A final and essential element of the animation is language itself—animated words that unfold at their own rhythm, forming a silent expression. Composed from the same lines as the drawings, as if emerging from the same primordial matter, these words—often eclipsed from contemporary vocabulary—manifest in real time while echoing Millas’ text, where a pearl has lost its shell, swallows symbolize borderless travel, and a soul drifts aimlessly at sea. As in Stavrou’s fragmented journey through memory, time becomes further abstracted, replaced by tempo, where meaning ultimately distills into symbolism—expressed as lines with the potential for endless recomposition. This framework extends into Svoronou’s ceramic sculptures featured in the exhibition—material reinterpretations of these ideas, where decoration becomes central to a form of political narration. Five groups of sculptures—bows, lace with wood, bitter orange candelabras, Tanagra figures, and swallows—adorn the gallery space like instruments of architectural narration, repurposed from churches, abandoned houses, and the streets of Athens. A language of transfiguration underscores themes of power struggles and historical resilience, further expressed through the binary of fired versus unfired clay. Clay—like the sparse lines of the animation—becomes Svoronou’s primordial material, a means to manifest her collected symbols: an idiosyncratic assemblage of references tied to her specific identity. Her life, shaped mostly in Athens, resonates with echoes of her family’s past in Imvros and Istanbul and her more recent revisitation of these places, where time has eroded the traces of yet another bygone era. The bows, often dismissed as frivolous and feminine adornments, take on new significance. In this context, they reference their unexpected presence in the frames of religious icons within Orthodox churches in Imvros and Istanbul, as well as their simultaneous role in Turkish rituals of offering, where they are tied to tree branches as votives. Lace with wood, a recurring motif in Svoronou’s cyanotypes and drawings, originates from an heirloom—a very old piece of lace inherited from her grandmother, who herself was unaware of its origin or journey. Like the soul lost at sea or the borderless swallow, the lace has traveled across time and geography, arriving in Svoronou’s hands without a clear direction. Its pairing with wood evokes construction materials—timber beams, planks, and MDF—used to board up abandoned houses in Imvros and other former Greek-inhabited areas of Asia Minor, shielding them from outside intrusion. The swallows, sculpted as hybrids of unfired clay and Posidonia—a type of seaweed brought to shore by the tides—further explore the fragile boundary between protection and exclusion. Posidonia, a material that both fortifies the shoreline and purifies the water, serves as a metaphor for the tension between purposeful refuge and accidental displacement. Similarly, the bitter orange candelabras and Tanagra figures speak more directly to cycles of birth, death, and renewal. The bitter oranges evoke the distinct fragrance familiar to anyone who has walked through Athens in the autumn, while the Tanagra figure—one of the earliest mass-produced ceramics, found across the Eastern Mediterranean—recalls the notion of a grave good. Yet, in Svoronou’s work, the figures appear in reverse, excavated as if they had never been buried—an echo of a language lost in time, suspended between past and present, infused with atmospheres that are neither entirely melancholic nor joyous, but bittersweet and unplaceable. As in her previous work, Svoronou’s sculptures embrace decoration and symbolism—methodologically anachronistic—as a means of reclaiming meaning and offering an alternative way to interpret the present through a rapidly fading past. Where sentimentality and the senses converge in her unlikely use of clay, an appreciation emerges for what is often considered unfashionable or ornamental—elements that, in their quiet radicalism, carry unexpected weight and significance.