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Costas Balafas Experiences, Visions, Art and Folk Tradition Costas Balafas belongs to that charismatic generation of photographers who have created a huge volume and quality of visual work for the next generations. I have the hope that art scholars will at some point be bent on respecting the depth of their work and not on the surface of their immense artistic treasure. More useful than a portfolio in this tribute is the biography with extensions outlining the portrait of the human artist. Kostas Balafa’s work is not only known in the photographic world but also to a wider audience. In his assets many solo exhibitions always thematic. A huge, multi-dimensional archive, full of immense realism, spontaneity and sensitivity that can only be found in children hearts. His cinematography work competes with photography. A common feature and golden rule of worthy artists is modesty. The self-interest of the amateur artist augments this form of spirit to a point that is often incomprehensible to the category of artists who do not live for art but live by it. The laconic expressive austerity of speech, combined with the grace of a gifted language that exudes from his soul images as eloquent as his photographs. Interview given to Nikos Saravanos, AFIAP (18-2-1991) He greeted me at his door step of his home in Chalandri, kind and smiling, as always. In the last year, our meetings had become frequent, due to the “YEAR OF PHOTOGRAPHY” where he took part with a significant number of photographs. I hadn’t meet him for three months and after catching up, it was time for the interview and the first question. SARABANOS Does it bother you to record our conversation on tape? BALAFAS Not at all. He placed the tape recorder on the piano stool, sat down with his palms on his knees and started talking, like having a bunch of kids in front of him listening to a story, a fairy tale. The dive in the past, had begun. BALAFAS “I was born in Epirus in a rugged village of a rural family. The harsh living conditions of the village forced me to emigrate to Athens at the time. The place of my origin is a barren place, where people struggled to fake it by cultivating the barren land as if they were holding it in both hands. They used to water her with sweat daily to make her fruit. The harsh conditions of my life have affected my psyche, and that is what I did at my work. The cruelty, the world of toil, that excites me especially. The experiences of my childhood, the world I mentioned and the struggles of this people against the Germans were the first stimulus of my visual recordings. It also greatly influenced my artistic sensitivity – so to speak – what these people created. It is a people with patriarchal virtues that endless family ties have been going on for centuries. People with mental euphoria and artistic vein. Imagine suffering so much slavery and especially this Turkish who was the blackest. At that time, our people were left without a spiritual leader, because all the people of the arts and literatures took along with them the philosophical treasures of the ancestors and left for Europe. It was there that they created the Renaissance that today’s Europeans are proud of. Our people did not of course then have Ictinus, Callicrates, Phidias and Praxiteles to build Parthenons. But the shepherd, wherever he rested, carved his crook and there he channeled all his passion. “He made his beloved a spinning wheel that would make the wool to knit the clothes. The girls made their dowries, embroidered their aprons in the nights, singing in groups. Think of what the folk craftsmen, architects of the time left behind. In Zagori e.g. the roofs of the houses, even if they were worked by the same craftsman, stood out from each other. They were studying every detail, how the underground stairs would be illuminated, how their lanterns would be. Where it didn’t suit them either for security reasons or for building a real window, they were painting it. Whatever they made, they made it with love, with a taste for the beauty of the world around them, and always in harmony with the surrounding landscape. They created with a great deal of sensitivity the general aesthetic balance of the exterior with the interior decoration. Nowadays everyone talks about the architecture of Ziller and Peranthis and everyone is happy about what Pikionis did using elements of folk art. But no one wanted to look like him. SARABANOS I believe that the will power was present, but it was fatal to the feasibility of the economic-political factors of profit making. A frivolous and rough solution, with the result that the province’s human migration wave to the capital is trapped in concrete cement matchboxes. Young and old townspeople then transferred to the villages and small towns the new architectural remains of concrete cement. We burned down the neoclassicals of Athens and destroyed at the same time the houses of the masters you mentioned. Nowadays newcomers are searching around in the paddocks to buy jugs, forks, lilies, authentic or replicas to decorate villas and apartments. Seeing all this reminds me of lifeless notes of a melody that we all pretty much are responsible for her death. BALAFAS Strongly agree. However, great responsibility lies with the competent state authorities and local lords. Unfortunately, the bulldozers tore up and crushed the earth, eradicating everything in its path, subjecting the space to the wheels. Since the roofs of the houses have been merged, the hearts of the people they went away. SARABANOS As a fan and admirer of the folk art and tradition, did you then turn your lens to other themes? BALAFAS Certainly yes. But I never broke with tradition. Tradition for me is the root of the Greek people. It is not a hollow word like in the mouths of the Franciscans. How did we end up today? We threw naphthalene and put it in museums. The late Kontoglou said: “The old seafarers in order to find their way and to know where they are headed, they had as a guide the Northern star. People need to follow tradition in order to know where they are going. ” Tradition resembles the instinct of traveler birds who find their way unmistakably on a daily basis to their destination, traveling to the lowlands of heaven. Difficult to revive tradition today, but at least when we are losing our way we can search for and find its indefinable and genuine elements. This is the only way we can chart our own cultural course, because tradition is a tree with deep roots and with established values. SARABANOS What you have to say about art and its dimension? BALAFAS Art is a dimension of philosophy, as in philosophy we cannot throw away an idea, but complement it, augment it. The same is true in art. SARABANOS Tell me when did you feld the biggest jolt that forced you to turn your lens elsewhere by radically altering your visual dimension? BALAFAS It was just after the occupation when the second guerrilla had begun. People were living in despair, not knowing how to save themselves. It was these persecutions of the people who took part in the fight against the Germans. This has been misunderstood for many reasons. I don’t blame anyone. It was everyone’s personal choice to be here or there. What transformed my aesthetic world was when in 1945 I was working in an English camp in Glyfada, behind Saint Constantine. I had the responsibility of the workers and I was working as an interpreter. I remember in the workforce there was a man chased who had a bunch of kids and didn’t have any other income to support his children. I put him to work in the kitchen and at the end of his shift Ι let him take some food for his children. One day when heavy snow had fallen, he had been sent to the warehouses to get a barrel of oil for the kitchen. As he was a thin and weak and hooded with a piece of camouflage tent cloth he looked like an ascetic saint. Pushing the barrel on the snow uphill came the moment who handed over by fatigue. The barrel looked like his life itself, or he would take it from below, or pull it over and slice it. There I helped him out and we took it upstairs. Daily life scenes inside and outside the camp. It was Easter and I remember seeing this people going to the Epitaph, marched silently with lowered heads, chanting the epitaph’s eulogies like were burying one of their own. Some old women, with the children hang around their black dresses in order not to get lost in the crowd, looked like old trees that will be uprooted by the wind and the children looked like offshoots that will continue life. These icons with the childhood memories especially of our mothers who worked full-time and, in the evenings, arrived at their homes wretched by fatigue. Those mothers tasted poverty, pain, sadness like no other social class. And all of these were tolerated with a degree of dignity I would say, always close to their children and their husbands. My mother was a Sarakatsanissa and when I left my village she said: “There you go in a foreign place, be careful not to encroach on you, that is, they will not harass you; If you find money you should give it back, do not keep it. No one throws away money. That money someone lοst it and it needs them or someone is trying to test you in order to see if you are a thief. Wherever you find something which is not yours you must give it back, it won’t do you any good. ” One German philosopher once said: Bring me mothers with ethical manners to change Europe for you. Today we are talking about equality and we have made a type of feminism unacceptable. Children growing up without the presence of the mothers. Many of them become thieves and worse. In my years, women were equal to men. After all, the word spouses say it clearly. I want to tell you two examples. Among Souliotes there were various families, Javelides, Botsarei etc. There were egoisms and differences among them. So, when the captains would gather, and after three meetings if did not agree their wives were taking over as captains, who had no male egoism. Whatever decision the women made was respectful and final for the families and for the captains of each family. Even in the Sarakatsanis, if the leader Shepherd died, his wife was taking over, and the others were disciplined to her. This is not the case today. Customs, and habits have not been studied, they have been ignored, and neglected. These were mainly the elements that led our people to mutual respect, to the unity spirit, and with this unity spirit they help neighbors at difficult times, all together they rejoice and sacrifice for the homeland, in every enemy invasion. Those who supported the struggles most were the people of poverty. It may seem strange, but it is a fact. The more one is tyrannized by his motherland, the more he is tied to her. The land he watered with his sweat, when needed, he is willing to do it with his blood. Of course, along with them stood the intellectuals. People who were unprepared for deprivation, fought side by side for the destiny of the poor people, while at the same time utilizing the knowledge of common people. So, they came together at the pinnacle of sacrifice and artistic creation. Perhaps it is the fate of this people to deal with each conqueror united, while the opposite happens in their internal affairs. No children and no women betrayed the fight. It is these young men who are burried on the hillsides and in the sand without a name and a cross. They are the unknown soldiers. We spoke earlier about these women, about these mothers of Epirus. I will tell you an incident among so many to understand their generosity. The enemies burned everything, killed their husbands and their children. So, when the Italians capitulated and we took them us prisoners there, either in HELLAS or in EDES, these mothers welcomed them without any evil because they had also mothers waiting for them. There I lived the most typical scene when an Italian injured and was an able to cross the river. One of these mothers took him on her shoulders, and passed him across the bank, and she told him: You are lucky because I have also a child soldier, and another mother can take care of my son as I do to you. Because the 50th anniversary of the Albanian front is recent, I will tell you one last incident. The military sections were separately away on the mountain peaks. On top of a hill was a tree. There one of us went to watch the Italian section. But the Italians also had sent their man to the same spot. There the two men met on the hill and started shooting each other. At some point the bullets were finished. They threw down their weapons and hugged down to the Hellenic section. Our soldiers were constantly applauding them. Two soldiers, two people signed the peace contract there, on the front. They had nothing to separate, others sent them there. I am referring to this rare phenomenon of humanity and solidarity to overrule the passions of this friendly world and to find ourselves again our brotherhood. No one had anything against with their neighbors, if something bad happens to them the bad in our neighborhood. SARABANOS You have a huge archive of modular themes and a different style to each. How do you plan to make the most of this effort? BALAFAS This is my big concern. I have now started making the book of Resistance 1940-44 and I hope in two months it will be ready. This was done with my savings. Because for a project like this, you have to have the financial means. Of course, it’s not going to bring me profits, but only losses. The second book is about the place I was born, Epirus, and its publication will depend on the appeal of the Resistance book. SARABANOS I wish you good courage. I have not yet been able to approach my homeland visually. Every time I go to Sparta, Mystras, Monemvasia, Mani, my hands are getting numb, I haven’t made a single click with my camera. This huge backdrop of dreamy extensions is so crystalline and silky that it takes me to a transcendent space, removing my power to touch it. I go there just to get charged and there I feel why the poets, Ritsos and Brettakos have become Nobel nominees. BALAFAS Do not be sad, I once had the same feeling in Epirus. But it is every artists duty to include in his work, his place and his time, because whatever we learn from older cultures we shall study it, and we preserved in a figurative form, carved in stone or recorded in history. You talked about transcendentalism. Well, the creative imagination of the folk masters often reaches the transcendent space of their dreams, transcending this reality, dominated by their unbounded imagination. At the back of the church of Makrinitsa, two cypresses are carved with their peaks get together. It is the formulation of the concept of folk song about the death of an innocent couple. “North wind blows the brunches crouching and kissing. The ones who were not kissed alive are kissing each other dead.” The folk craftsman did not hesitate to express the idea, to transform reality and to give the cypress a slant from the wind. What are you saying now, let us go for a visit together in your hometown of Sparta? Mystras is full of cypresses. After all, in your own work there is this special dynamic and dimension of your dream transcendent world. Let’s go together to get to the top of Mystras castle again. I want to stand on the back, on the edge of the cliff, shout and hear my echo scatter in the gorges and ravines of Taygetos and turn back. SARABANOS Let’s go but I won’t keep a camera. BALAFAS It doesn’t matter, I’ll have my own cameras. SARABANOS Kosti, I’ll just leave you there alone. I will do what I do every time. I will return to the Palaces of Palaiologos to revive my dream once again, the Dead State, the Parthenon of Byzantium. BALAFAS Do whatever you want. Who knows early in the morning I might find in the bed you with your cameras beside your head . SARABANOS I don’t have many, only one, and this is very old. BALAFAS It doesn’t matter, the old rifle has value. interview: Nikos Saravanos, “Greek Photography”, 1991, (republished) Curated: J.Eco |