Exhibitions
In 2024, Urban Exoticism transformed into a calligramme that was featured in the contemporary art exhibition Thirsty Thirty, curated by Monica Colussi.
16 Oct -15 Nov 2024, 48 Albemarle Street in Mayfair, London, UK.
About the calligramme
This calligramme serves as the visual embodiment of “Urban Exoticism”, a term that encapsulates the layered, fragmented, and often obscured elements of metropolitan life. By arranging words derived from Tsagkari's seminal essay into an intricate city plan, the piece reflects how urban landscapes—particularly those at the intersections of gentrification, cultural appropriation, and historical remnants—are reimagined through an exotic narrative. Each word, like a building block in a city grid, mirrors the fluidity and complexity of spaces that exist both within and beyond the gaze of everyday experience, evoking the mysterious and sensual qualities inherent in such environments.
The design, with highlighted terms like “urban,” "exotic,” “erotic,” and “cthonic,” brings into focus the tension between the ancient and the modern, the familiar and the strange, much like Tsagkari's recontextualisation of 19th-century exoticism in contemporary cities. This calligramme not only mirrors the physicality of a city plan but also captures the shifting perception of urban spaces as heterotopias—sites that blend the erotic, the mysterious, and the marginal in ways that deconstruct the rigid binaries of the Western cityscape.
Ultimately, the artwork transforms words into structural elements of an imagined city, symbolising how “Urban Exoticism” reframes overlooked or marginalised spaces as essential parts of the urban fabric. It is a cartographic reflection of the modern metropolis, where each intersection of words creates new avenues of understanding, evoking the sensual and the mystical beneath the surface of the mundane.
