Dimitra Kondylatou works across moving-image-making, editing, writing and hosting. She visually explores gestures, practices and correspondences within contexts and spaces of hospitality and exchange.
Dimitra Kondylatou is interested in the limits of art and its entanglements with tourism and everyday life. Her methodology is informed by and crosses boundaries with other disciplines, such as anthropology, through her participation in collective projects, the realisation of workshops, and the presentation of her work in festivals, exhibitions, conferences and publications.
In 2022 she was an artist in residence at ISCP in New York, supported by ARTWORKS (SNF) and at Saari Residence, supported by Kone Foundation. In 2019 she was awarded the ARTWORKS Fellowship by Stavros Niarchos Foundation. From 2012 to 2018, her artistic research on art and tourism was enriched through her seasonal occupation as manager and worker of the neion guesthouse in Lefkada and through the residential project The island-resignified that she initiated and hosted there from 2015 to 2017. She was co-founder, writer and editor in kyklàda.press publications (2020-2021) and member of the artistic board of TWIXTlab (2017-2018). She holds a Master of Arts from the Dutch Art Institute (2017) and an Integrated Master of Fine Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2012).
In the shade of the season
HD Video / 22:57 min / 2021
Tourist accommodations, paid hospitality.
Simulations of domestic spaces, more and less familiar, traditional, modern, comfortable, clean, dirty, big, small than our rooms.
Women in their posts.
Eyes scanning the space.
They look automatically and exhaustively through the window nets, the holes, the walls. They see beyond what can be seen; the dust molecules swinging and sitting on the ornaments, inside and outside the furniture.
Hands - always ready to dust them off - touch beyond what can be touched.
Dead DNA cells in fallen hair, in body fluids, on the sheet, the floor, the bathroom's porcelains.
Ears that hear more than what can be heard, like the voice asking or ordering the replacement of the towel thrown on the floor.
Sensory organs and senses in full function.
They filter dirt, cleanliness, order, disorder, familiarity, proximity, intimacy, distance, awkwardness.
To keep everything in place.
with: Katerina Georgaki, Anne-Claire Jonnard, Eleni Kalamanti, Julie Neveu, Angeliki Vonitsanou
sound mixing: Alexandra Katerinopoulou
LUXENIA
HD Video / 10:04 min / 2021
A receptionist, a waitress and a chambermaid work during the summer season in Hotel Luxenia. One day, towards the end of the season, they pause for a while, and their pause interrupts their automated, everyday routine. A radio show narrates the cultural history of the pineapple - transformed from a colony trophy to a symbol of hospitality to a commodity - and the transmission of an online seminar for the hotel's employees speaks the language of commodified sociability. Luxenia is about the staged image and the backstage contradictions of the so-called hospitality industry.
With: Sabrina Brodescu, Anous Bogosian, Natasha Sarantopoulou
And the voices of: Dana Papachristou, George Samantas, Maria Juliana Byck
Direction / Script / Editing: Dimitra Kondylatou
Cinematography: Konstantina Gorgogianni
Sound: Giotis Paraskevaidis
Color grading: Aggelos Mantzios
Original music: Anna vs june
THE BOX: on edges, vertices, faces and commodified intimacies
HD Video / 10:48 min / 2017
A video essay that uses theory, fiction and art history, in order to refer to the relationship of art and tourism, by highlighting the artificiality of spaces, relations and behaviours in both fields. Although the artist, like the tourism worker can reconstruct the narrative of their workplace, they often end up being the dumb performers that sustain its stability and intactness. The paradox is that according to the political economy of labour, in order to keep their stability, they are often in movement and displacement. By introducing Manet's last painting, Un Bar aux Folies - Bergères -a painting that is believed by Michel Foucault to have changed the dominant perception of painting and representation- it wishes to enter the contemporary discourses on the modes and the systems of cultural representation and mediation.
Music: Giorgos Moraitis
3D: Korina Kassianou