Public Lecture and Documentary
George Kontos
Decumanus
Tuesday 12/4/2016, 17:00
Auditorium 301
Summary
The uncontrolled modernization of an age-old city is the frame of reference
for Los Angeles-based *George Kontos’* video essay *Decumanus*. Inspired
from *Aldo Rossi’s* *L’Architettura della Citta*, the video work revisits
how in recent times recoding the minimum standards for building has quickly
rewritten history and how many of Thessaloniki’s urban artifacts have
disappeared. Decumanus looks dispassionately at changing expressions of
Mediterranean urbanism in Thessaloniki.
George Kontos is an artist based in Los Angeles. His works to date include
film, video, photomontage, drawing, collage and sculpture that frequently
employ modes of autobiographical and documentary fiction. He stages
narratives drawn from biographies, political and social histories,
architectural and archeological case studies.
He is interested in the idea and the study of cities, the concept of the
city within the city and all the forms that consist in it and in the traces
of cities that pre-existed in a non-linear sense of a historical time.
Cities are depicted through renderings, scaled models, animations and from
filming of existing places. The work incorporates ideas, proposals,
failures, allegories around a modern and avant-grarde architecture and an
architecture of the imaginary. The architecture plays off in the films
either as itself – existing, historic, present – or as a proposed utopian
space, fabricated.
