The interview in English

Text: Knut Werner Lindeberg Alsén

First Day

On my countless walks through Athens I have passed the small ceramic workshop "Myrto." Without noticing it. Until now.
The weather is unusually warm for a Greek autumn evening in November. I am on my way toward the Acropolis Hill for a fine dinner with good colleagues. As we cross Rovertou Galli Street, we head straight toward three graceful vases in the display window. Like glowing lanterns in an urban, cosmopolitan landscape, they guide us into a creative, social workshop and meeting place fostered by a fireworks display of a Greek artist.

Myrto Papadopoulou.
Wow!
Exciting!
We agree to meet the next day.
She returns to hers. We to ours.

Myrto's workshop is located in the Makrygianni district of Athens, bordering the majestic Acropolis, the scenic oasis of Philopappos, and the old town of Plaka. The neighborhood is rich in content and welcoming, and a must for culturally interested visitors from all over the world. Makrygianni is one of the oldest quarters in the center of the Greek capital, with roots reaching back to the Middle Ages, antiquity, and the Neolithic era. The neighborhood rests deliberately in the shadow of the mother of architecture, the Parthenon. Here stand older and modern monumental buildings such as the Acropolis Museum (2009), created by the Italian architects Manfredi Nicoletti and Lucio Passarelli, as well as public cultural buildings and state administrative institutions in neoclassical style, such as the Weiler Building (1836), which today houses the Museum Center for Acropolis Studies.

In the neighborhood is the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum, the family home and workshop of the world-renowned jewelry artist Ilias Lalaounis. Walks through Makrygianni offer a conglomerate composed of flamboyant cultural buildings, tourist shops, a gas station, grocery store, galleries, well-regarded eateries, and Nordic academic institutes, as well as the Nordic Library with 40,000 volumes on Greek archaeology and ancient Greek religion and history. Here is the Norwegian Institute at Athens (1989), a scientific link between Norwegian and Greek academic communities, especially connected to cultural heritage, history, and archaeology in Greece. The institute has a library of 15,000 volumes on ancient Greece and welcoming facilities available to researchers, students, and visitors.

For Myrto, working in the neighborhood means well-being. She grew up in the Koukaki district, which borders Makrygianni.

New Day

The bright morning sun seductively breaks through the city trees and playfully brushes along the streets. Windows glint. The air carries a sense of well-being and fresh baked goods. The neighborhood slowly awakens—to coffee, breakfast, work, and school.

Myrto waves me in.
Photographs are taken.
Conversations unfold.
Experiences are shared.

Myrto tweaks details and seeks comments. Willingly she shares her own life: about her upbringing; education; art, forms, and colors; materials and clay; about the shop and workshop she once had on one of the Ionian Islands together with her twin sister. I process a stream of biographical fragments, from childhood to the present, accompanied by a searching gaze. To photograph is to be invisible in the visible, to capture fragments of reality that are composed into a larger—admittedly—subjective whole.

Myrto was exposed to art early on. Already as a young pupil at Arsakeia–Tositseia Schools, one of the leading private schools in Athens, art was central to the curriculum. Her family was interested in art, and early on she became an admirer of the work of a ceramicist who was a family friend. Myrto says that everyone who grows up in Greece is not only introduced to Greek, ancient art at school, but also through their surroundings: Greek art exists everywhere in the urban space, from antiquity to graffiti. That she felt art played a role at a young age naturally influenced her career choice. Despite well-meaning familial warnings, her dream was to be an artist. A ceramicist she would become. And so she did.

In her opinion, Greek ceramic education was not good enough at the time, so Myrto went to the United Kingdom, where she lived for nine years. First a bachelor's degree in ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent, followed by a master's degree at Staffordshire University, which were leading institutions in the field, focusing on design, production, creative breadth, and encounters with a diversity of contemporary artists and concepts.

Naturally, Myrto is influenced by the minimalist Cycladic period (3000 BC–2000 BC), vases produced in the Geometric period (900–850 BC), and ceramics developed during the Magna Graecia period (Greater Greece), which refers to areas of Sicily and southern Italy colonized by Greek settlers from the 8th century BC. Recently she has felt a strong attraction toward Japanese contemporary ceramics, which influences her artistic expression today.

Myrto Papadopoulou is a vibrant and social human being. She is a dynamic educator who explains in depth what she does while she does it. I learn as I document. Unfazed, she completes the tiniest details—almost invisible adjustments at the sink—toward perfection.

What do I think?
Today the vase is finished as the beginning of a new series. It differs from those in the display window. The vase has acquired small wings, little pieces of fabric fluttering in the wind. It is as if the vase is trying to free itself from gravity. I see it—subtly Japanese.

In sync with the work, she invites in random passersby who stop. She kindly allows herself to be interrupted by the curious: tourists; artist colleagues; archaeologists from the institutes; neighbors and friends.
Waves are exchanged.
Invitations extended.
New wows!

Last Day

I meet Myrto, fresh in the morning and well prepared. The workshop is tidy, Myrto is dressed in her favorite color, white, with her hair pinned up. The workshop is a meeting place, an inspiration—and Myrto has time for everyone. She is exuberantly alive, like a bird dancing in the wind, performing and delighting herself and others together with others. The stories flow incessantly. Myrto is fearless, yet sensitive. Like the vases she creates: strong, beautiful, good to be near—and vulnerable.

I see artistic melancholy, and capture it.

Today the twin vase will be created. Yesterday's firstborn is carefully placed on the storage shelf in the narrow studio; it must dry before it finds its final expression. Myrto invites me up a strenuous climb to the narrow mezzanine, where she stores small ceramic secrets; inspiration magazines; books; samples and tools. From a small retro radio—an inheritance from her father—beautiful classical music trickles out.

Today Myrto makes small coils of clay for the new vase. The work process is painted in words as she shares experiences and lets her thoughts roam freely through the space. The clay is kneaded, struck, and pressed through a meat-grinder-like tool into thin little coils of clay that will be glued and assembled into what becomes the vase. The vases are built up slowly, millimeter by millimeter.

It is smoothed.
Handled, glued, and shaped.
Perfectly round layers, one after another.
Soft movements.