The Shadow of Karagiozis

This sculpture was created for an evening event organised by the Academy of Poetry and Fairy Tale, entitled “Karagiozis in the Land of Bells.”

And I thought that perhaps Karagiozis had never really left that land. Because a bell is not merely a sound. It is a call. A warning. An awakening. And that, in his own way, is what Karagiozis has always done: he has sounded the alarm bell.

Through laughter. Through satire. Through exaggeration. And very often through that strange kind of truth that can only be spoken when hidden inside a joke. That is why, in my work, I wanted to approach him somewhat differently. At the centre of the sculpture stands a golden frame.

A golden frame usually evokes something very different from Karagiozis: old palaces, formal portraits, kings, rulers, people in positions of power. Yet inside this frame I wanted to symbolically place King Karagiozis. A king without a palace. Without a throne. Without money. Without power. And perhaps precisely because of this, a king who possesses the greatest privilege of all: the freedom to speak.

Perhaps that is why Karagiozis has survived for so many years. The sculpture was not made from new, flawless figures. I used sketches, cut-outs and fragments of figures created by the shadow-puppet artist Apostolos Domtsidis—materials that had already been used or had remained as leftovers from the creative process. Karagiozis, then, is in a sense created from his own fragments. And he is always there beside us, ringing the warning bell… Hey! Something is not right here…