«Όλοι οι καλοί χωράνε» is the kind of sentence said in Greek homes when one more person arrives than there are chairs. Someone squeezes closer, a plate is added, the bench is shared: there is always room for good people. Its generosity belongs to the intimacy of domestic life, where welcoming another person is never really a question of space, but of the willingness to share what is already there. It is passed down from grandmothers to grandchildren, repeated so often that no one hears it anymore, and it carries in a few words the ethic the Odyssey places at the heart of Greek society: the duty to receive the stranger.
The work belongs to Chez Nausicaa, the dinners Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos hosted in Athens for locals, refugees and travellers, at a time when Greece was asking itself how many newcomers it could hold. Around those tables, the proverb was no longer a figure of speech. It described exactly what was happening, and it asked whether the ease with which a family makes room for one more guest could reach those who come from much further away.
Written in neon, the sentence leaves the kitchen and takes on the language of a public sign. Words once spoken at a family table become an illuminated statement addressed to whoever walks into the room. In the exhibition, the neon hangs high on the wall, above the plates of the dinners, in Greek letters. For some of the guests who sat at those tables, the words were unreadable without translation, so that the welcome itself needed to be explained. The English title, borrowed from the voice of a grandchild, is both a translation and a distance: the proverb arrives as something remembered and inherited, carried from one generation into another and into a different social reality.
The proverb also holds a condition. There is room for good people, but who decides who is good? What sounds like an unconditional invitation carries within it the possibility of a selection. The door appears open to everyone, yet the question of who deserves to enter remains unresolved. In this small qualification, the familiar saying lets the contradictions of a whole society show through, between an ideal of generosity and the criteria by which it decides who may enter and who may stay.
The work neither celebrates the tradition nor rejects it. It returns an inherited sentence to the present unchanged, and lets its meaning shift according to who reads it, where it is encountered, and whom the reader imagines standing at the door. Between the warmth of a grandmother's voice and the language of borders, the light stays on, and the question with it.
