This project began with a question Odysseus asks himself in the Odyssey. Washed ashore on the island of the Phaeacians, before the young Nausicaa finds him, he wonders what kind of people live there: whether they are cruel and lawless, or whether they welcome strangers and honour the gods. Behind his question lies xenia, the Greek law of hospitality. More than courtesy, it bound host and guest in reciprocal duties. The host offered food, a bath, shelter and gifts, and received the stranger as a god in disguise, without asking his name. Only afterwards, when he was ready, did the guest say who he was and tell his story.
In 2018, against the backdrop of the refugee crisis in Greece, Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos set this ancient ritual at a contemporary table. In a traditional home in Athens she hosted four dinners for small groups of Athenians, refugees and travellers from eleven countries, among them Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Slovenia and the United States. Guests arrived anonymously and shared a home-cooked meal before anyone asked where they came from. For the length of an evening, the refugee, the tourist and the neighbour occupied the same position, that of a guest. Their differences did not disappear, but identity was no longer the condition of the encounter; it surfaced slowly, through gestures and conversation.
Jacques Derrida, in his dialogue with Anne Dufourmantelle, distinguished the hospitality that first identifies the stranger from an unconditional hospitality that would welcome the other before any question of name, origin or belonging. The dinners do not resolve this tension; they let it be felt. The moment a guest speaks of where they come from, the table shifts, and nationality, history and status return with their share of recognition, sympathy or prejudice. The stranger becomes a particular person without ceasing to be other, and knowing their story is not the same as knowing who they are.
From these evenings came works that each give the encounter a language of its own. In The plate is always half…, each plate was photographed as it was served and again when it came back from the table; the two images, printed as identical jigsaw puzzles, exchange their pieces, so that the full plate and its remains are woven into a single, unsettling portrait of a guest. In À (X) table(s), the silent footage of the four dinners is layered until strangers who never met seem to share a single table. A proverb Greek grandmothers say when one more guest arrives than there are chairs, «Όλοι οι καλοί χωράνε», there is always room for good people, is written in neon in My grandmother always used to say…. And in It all sounds Greek to me, the syllables bar bar bar, through which the ancient Greeks heard languages they could not understand and from which the word barbarian was born, scroll endlessly across an LED screen.
Rooted in Greek mythology and Mediterranean memory, Chez Nausicaa does not claim that a shared meal can abolish the divisions of the present. It asks instead what becomes possible when the encounter comes before the categories through which we usually define one another. The project was first presented as a solo exhibition at the French Institute in Athens, with the support of the French Embassy in Greece, Nicos A. Vernicos and the Contemporary Art Foundation.
