The ‘secret school’ manifests itself as an interactive montage of artifacts derived from the Greek myth of the Secret School and debunks the credibility of historical discourses. The Greek artist Christina Mitrentse has responded to this myth by creating a solo project originally located as a site-specific installation, in a World War II bomb –shelter in London.
According to the Secret School narrative, during the Ottoman suppression, the Greek populace used to secretly organise small underground schools in an effort to sustain their education. These were convened in churches, monasteries or on other church grounds, usually at night. Mitrentse’s project awakens the emotional state and uncovers the atmosphere in which “homeless”, populations can find educational, cultural and spiritual shelter. It delivers a system that connects Education, Cultural regeneration, and Fiction and Political freedom. This collective space reveals the form of relational sites in contemporary society by describing the heterogenic relationship among them.
The manifestation contains drawings, sculptures, photography, installation, and sound which personalized within the laboratory of the everyday, inviting a debate between the scientific narrative and the museological approach”.
In an incessant reference to metaphor, which defines the significations of natural occurrences within everyday life, Mitrentse’s work proposes the deconstruction of our conceptual mechanisms. By re-contextualizing groups of objects and recreating imagery from books, Christina disrupts conventional readings, suggesting poetic ensembles ranging from the personal to the universal. The artist brings all the artifacts together in a nonhierarchical setting to question the process of observing, collecting, recording and displaying in terms of how data is circulated in a number of institutions such as school, library, church, academia, gallery and museum’.
The secret school acts as a metaphor for any contemporary social space, which has subversive counter cultural associations. It recommends a real heterotopy acting as an ‘esoteric’ space which has a fictional attribute while it becomes a carrier in which the questions of how we perceive knowledge can be communicated.
BERN ROSE FARELLY ARTWRITER CURATOR-RECEPTION SPACE
As part of the site specific project the artist has created a short film: THE 'SECRET SCHOOL' Exhibited at Another Roadside Attraction gallery ,screening project at The Griffin,London 2006 -09. At Shefield short film Festival 2006 and Greek-London Film Festival ,London 2008
Specimen I, Handmade leather photographic book,05
Specimen I on log, handmade book,stiched colour photographs 05
Colour photograph on log, 40x32cm
