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«Pioneering, thinking and alternative artists should be allowed to take center stage in Thessaloniki, in order for the social, political and cultural context to be improved»

Giorgos Koftis

We all carry on in life as our conscience dictates us

Text: Dimitra Kehagia
Giorgos Koftis

Through intense and vivid colors, painter Giorgos Koftis portrays the most devastating tragedies, such as deadly shipwrecks and terror attacks, which he needs to get out of his system or else injustice suffocates him, as he explains. This feeling led him to create the visual installation 58 Nails in Tempi, a work dedicated to the memory of the victims of the dreadful train accident that occurred on February 28th 2023. “The starting-off point for this work was the fact that these kids died for nothing, whereas I had the luck to survive the most severe of all maladies. This accident is a trauma that simply cannot be metabolized, that will keep on festering inside all of us,” he points out, while explaining that “art brings forth a ‘shame on us’ cry rather than some vague ‘shame on them’. After all, we all carry on in life as our conscience dictates us.”

The several serious health issues he has undergone in pivotal moments of his life, never drove him away from art. On the contrary, these hardships fueled his creative and activist spirit even more. In 2019, in Germany, not only did he receive one of the most distinguished scholarships in Europe, but also scheduled an exhibition in New York. It was at that time the pandemic striked, and shortly after he fell gravely ill. “In all these personal misfortunes, I have been accustomed to say to myself ‘all will be fine’. Nonetheless, in other issues of wider concern I am way less adaptable.”

A good thirty years ago, still a youngster, Giorgos Koftis was one of the first to take on graffiti in Thessaloniki, initially inspired by the metal band logos. He nostalgically recalls this life-giving activity of the early 90s. “It gave us ardor and meaning, without knowing exactly what that meaning was at the time.”  Years later, he grasped that the element that stirred life inside of him was no other than the activism involved in it, a trait that persists even today in his works. Apart from Nails, he is widely known for his symbolic murals made by coals from burnt forests in Magnesia and the mountains of Mani, as well as for the murals in Florina depicting scenes from Thodoros Angelopoulos’ films. The iconic film director has been a key reference in his life, whereas he considers it a blessing for Northern Greece that many of his universally acclaimed films were shot in the wider region. Moreover, he confides his bitter feelings after his mural portrait of Angelopoulos in the AUTh premises was painted over by order of the University’s administration.

Visual art held a key place in his upbringing, as he came in contact with the concept of art right from an early age. He moved to Florence to study Painting before returning to Thessaloniki as a permanent resident, where he enrolled in AUTh’s Faculty of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Thessaloniki, which he passionately loves, and improving its unwelcoming landscape, inasmuch as he is capable of and responsible for, has become something like a personal crusade for him. “The Mataroa Project at the Thessaloniki Seafront is an exemplary initiative that upgrades the image of the city, getting local artists involved,” he notes. Moreover, he suggests that pioneering, thinking and alternative artists should be allowed to take center stage in Thessaloniki, in order for the social, political and cultural context to be improved.

The starting-off point for this work was the fact that these kids died for nothing, whereas I had the luck to survive the most severe of all maladies. This accident is a trauma that simply cannot be metabolized, that will keep on festering inside all of us. The art brings forth a ‘shame on us’ cry rather than some vague ‘shame on them’. After all, we all carry on in life as our conscience dictates us.

Giorgos Koftis

Over the last fifteen years he has been running a painting workshop, a “personal revolution” as he calls it, while also taking on the illustration of many books and music albums, for artists such as Yannis Angelakas, Dimitris Baslam and Stergios Chatzikyriakidis. Moreover, he has worked as a set designer and a video artist both for the National Theater of Northern Greece and in other Greek and international projects. Giorgos Koftis avoids compromising in his art, and feels lucky not to have found himself often in this predicament. “I try to draw joy and stay free of guilt from what I do for a living. The world, the universe and God have a strange way to pave the way towards what we truly desire.”

Over the last few years writing takes more and more of his time, but his work is yet to be published. One of his favorite motifs is the issue of Artificial Intelligence. “At first, most of us viewed A.I. as a threat. I now treat it as a valuable tool, endowed with a vast existential and philosophical interest, as it can be seen as the sum of all available information on a worldwide scale. Its excessive use may weaken our ability to express ourselves, but I don’t think it will ever substitute genuine creation.”

One of his main concerns as an artist in this stage of his career revolves around the philosophical dimension of A.I., as unraveled in the following scenario: “Let’s suppose that A.I. has resolved all of our problems. Hunger and war are a thing of the past, the need for one to work no longer exists as all people enjoy a guaranteed income. Our need for art would carry on under these conditions? My guess is that human civilization would undergo a total reboot, in which the instinctive-intuitive part of humanity would gain more and more ground, as all other issues would have been resolved. Perhaps a new approach on the notion of god would emerge, more mature, freed from guilt and all the restrictions.”

One of his most recent goals as an artist is to design a series of totem poles for the “new gods”; not necessarily with a human form. So, in this spirit, he asked the A.I. tools to come up with an alternative version of the Ten Commandments, destined for a new religion. He will then portray these commandments on a wall of Thessaloniki, as he believes they could trigger a creative dialogue with the city’s citizens. 

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gkoftis@yahoo.com