If the action was art: Charis Tsevis at TEDxUniversityofPiraeus

Thanks a lot for the honorable invitation, to talk about whether act is art and it is able to meet other... activities like diplomacy or politics. One or two weeks ago the organising committee of this event asked me... "Which is my slogan, my catchword, in what I believe"... I answered ... "Belief, Patience and Persistence" After that they told me their slogan which is very similar... "Beleive...Act...Change" and I thought maybe I could adopt it. Based exactly on these three words is standing the project "Mother Tereza" which is a result of three personal stories Many times these stories are like the small parallel rivers which come close and become one stronger. My story starts ,of course, with belief because it is something stable, a stable platform in which we stand every act and basically we can do nothing without it. from what we believe about others... it becomes a dogma, stereotype. However, because belief, many times, comes from knowledge, from conficence Listen at this... When I was at your age, and of course now you don't laugh about it, it was a short gloat anecdode in which my generation, growing during the civil's war period where people in Balkans where seperated into free and prisoned men, made sense, it was something real. We were happy, we considered ourselves ready for the European Union we were ready about something ideal, we had the advantage of our location compared with our neighbours but this extraordinary belief had already started changing and these anecdotes stopped to be anectodes and started having problems. Now, my story, the story of this project started the last summer when I received a phone call from a good friend of mine, whom I know many years from the social networks, you may also know him as "Dimra" or Dimitris Georgakopoulos He called me because he knows that I teach at a college which creates professionals at applied arts. He asked me for a creative art director, which is the highest position in an advertising company at Tirana He was talking about a very good salary, very good working conditions, even for Greek standards, consider that the cost of living there is the half compared to Greece, everything seemed so good, next to us, but much different. As a result, I was surprised, because I admit I knew only a few about this country. So I started asking my friend and an associate of mine, Nikos Vagenas an engineer who is travelling around Balkans for more than 20 years in order to learn their experiences from Albania and Balkans. They were describing something to me which mostly made me jealous because they were describing me some people who still live under some difficult conditions but still they are very similar to Greek people at late 40's or mid 70's. So we are talking about an expectation, a hope, an optimism for the future This image, this description was totally fit to the image I had from my Albanian students and generally all the foreign students I have at the college I am working. They are trully progressive and hard workers and I think the main reason they are doing this is because they hope. Because they think tomorrow will be better from today. I remember the first images that fit again with the same belief I had from Albanians I graduated from an Italian university at early 90's and I remember that on Spring of 1992 when the Enver Hoxha regime collapsed there were thousands Albanian refugees who had fulfilled the squares at Milan. And I remember that literally you could see in their eyes the fear, the pain but also you could see hope. Hope made them take ships like that, notwithstanding it could lead them to tides or odysseys, in order to cross over Adriatic sea, maybe even by swimming because there was always the hope that tomorrow would be a better day. Hope is the one that makes you act, that makes you proceed. Speaking with my friends and trying to find out what I could do with all these data You understand that I had already collected a lot of data from the Balkans, I could combine it with my personal experiences, my students' ones or even with my memories from my years at the university so I was thinking what I could do in order to act based on those perceptions. Sometime, while I was talking with my friends, appeared before me "Mother Tereza"... of course don't think I saw a vision, But it was like an object of study and probably a symbol. I just remembered ,again from the years as a student, a nice song... Jovanotti very well known Italian singer, and the song is called Penso Positivo ..."Thinking positively"... He describes a mosaic church, a church which is a route and this route passes through different personalities such as Che Guevara,..., a simple priest at the county, who he is at a rehab center and they all go towards mother Tereza. Where she is like an ideal utopia So I thought, since I deal with mosaics, they are my love, my every day life, I could express this mosaic church through mother Tereza. You know because I was dealing with "positive" personalities all the time there were people asking me..."We live in such a bad period, how can you see everything with a positive way?" It might be a psycological defense but I want to stay with heroes like scientists, hackers, people who make comebacks with a creative way. And... you know that the choice to dealing with a subject for many years it could be accused of being a mannerism or a way of an easy recipe that is always correct and you follow it again and again But the truth is that I don't stand on a repeat what really interests me is how deep and real is the idea behind mosaics. There is a relationship between a part of something and the whole. This relationship at the portrait of mother Tereza would be the children and from the other hand the colours. Why children? Children are obviously, since we are in an era of funds, the only ones that have the basic fund, that is time!! They got much free time. So investing on such a fund they could proceed to the change Colour on the other hand, within Phusics is a part of light, of visible spectrum is actually what we can see like energy... And many times a colour can "paint beliefs" at politics It's our team, our political party our ideology, is a leader.... However, there is a very interesting experiment, which I did as a student and also it marked me and gave me a meaning of life, If you look, without closing your eyes, this red square for one minute and after that you look at a white place, now we don't have the time possibility to do it, you will see a green square, which is the complementary colour. The amazing thing is that your brain will create the complementary colour without even exists because it needs the equilibrium. This is very educative. So taking the colour as a cause, colour, race, nationality, origin I made different combinations, because you can never have a colour without its complementary. Even id doesn't exist our brain, in order to meet the equilibrium, it will re-make it. And I built my own mother Tereza... That's it and I hope you like it. After I made it, I sent it to my friends that are active at Balkans So, I sent it to my friends and after one or two weeks they called me and asked me... "Chari how does it seems if you send this portrait as a present to the people of Albania?" So I started thinking..."Wow in a matter of speaking I am something like a diplomat or a politician..." What had happened? There was an imaginary chain which connected people that were in a similar geographical area. And they had commons, they were Greek businessmen or Greek people working at Albania, and respectively, they were Albanian businessmen or Albanian people working at Greece. There were artists going from one country to the other, there was our embassy at Tirana which at every executive level it supported our project and saw an opportunity at it. There were executives from the Ministry of Civilization of Albania who easier and simpler than you can imagine said: "It's very nice let's do it" So after all these we managed to have this circumstance. "Was it all easy?" "No". It had its difficulties and you can imagine when the opposite the direct stereotypes such as: "Who are the Greeks who bring gifts?" We have a tradition of not being trusted from them and don't need our gifts. It was easy to accuse us about an economic, political or other kind of penetration at the country. And the truth is that after asking us who is the Real mother Tereza she doesn't hide anything, everything is obvious Yes...we as professionals, the people who act on businesses, on art, or simple workers we have an interest at peace and also one at cooperation and we want to live in a market which is a mosaic and we know it and we want to give something to it, we want to offer. As a result on 25th of March during Greek Spring at Tirana, a nice event at Ministry of Civilization took place And we were the first issue at every Albanian Media and the goverment represented from the Minister stated that they will replay this project in giant dimensions covering this building you see which is the Propylaea of University of Tirana called Mother Tereza at the square which also has the same name. What happens with the change? The change comes of when the stereotypes refuted Actually our embassador Mr. Rokanas said nicely in his speech that the civilization opens a new vocabulary, it's the common vocabulary the one with which we can get on with. And you know although the event was very simple and we didn't want to give it an academic character, on the sidelines of it we discussed with the Minister and our Embassador about the book of Mark Mazower, a British Historian He exactly refutes the stereotypes existed on West or Europe or even within us regarding Balkans as a hostile teritorry... the truth is that this area had a special geography but it always had a mosaic which lived more harmoniously than stereotypes say. An based on some principles which were cultivation of land or collaboration between various difficult regions circled with mountains So, to cut a long story short, if someone comes back to believe that we are a mosaic... we are a mosaic with different colours, colours semplementary which combined together creat a light then we can act and also see this light, namely to walk towards this change. Thank you all.