Memory is a dangerous function.  It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any.  It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality.

-Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories III, 1991-5, p. 30.

There is at first, a place, a location that has no meaning, no memory, until you arrive there and experience it.  And then afterwards, your memory of the place, of the event or events that happened there, replaces your perception of the properties of the location, of your acknowledgement of the place that at first stood alone.       

In Spiros Margaris’ work, the viewer is presented with two images.  On the left, a photograph of a vacant public space, much like a work by Bernd and Hilla Becher; on the right, the uncanny presentation of the same space a second time but as occupied by an unknown man in a suit.  The difference between the two images is obvious, a space vacant and occupied.    

The photographic pairs are presented in groups titled, Mein Spielplatz (My Playground) and Schulträume (Dreams of School Days).  These titles imply that the work is about the artist's experiences.  For the projects, he chose particular places from his childhood, places of public use.  They are the familiar places of shared experience.  Presented as vacant they allow for the viewer's projected memory.  But before one can completely indulge in childhood recollections of locations, there is the juxtaposition of Margaris' work with the second image. The photographs show a grown man in a suit, a man too large in scale for the childhood spaces, who is dressed for work, not play.  This anonymous figure prevents personal projection onto the vacant photographs and suggests some unknown business.  

While the artist claims the work is a warmhearted representation of his return to the places of his childhood, one cannot underestimate the images' compositions and odd croppings.  The man's torso alone is seen strangely bending down to hold a toy horse, his back faces the camera as he looks at a clock, his legs are shown standing near a slide, his foot extends from a doorway he has just entered.  These do not seem like ordinary images of childhood locations revisited by an adult, where for instance, the person concerned stands proudly next to their school's main entrance or near the now aged elementary teacher.  There are no names, no other people, only empty places and an over dressed, obscure man in the shot; a man who seems to be a sort of "nom du pere" in the schoolyard, ominously turned from the camera or only partially visible, as if he were an investigator on a surveillance assignment.  

The man in the photographs, Spiros Margaris, is on a search.  In the photographs, he seems to be chasing something through doorways and looking outside.  In one shot he is shown running down a staircase, as if he could not find what he was looking for upstairs, and rushing on to other places. He is not searching for the locations of his childhood, but for his childhood.  Where did it go?  He is in the right place.  His first photographs show proof of the locations, but when he tries to fit back into that world, he is the wrong size.  The right place at the wrong time. What seems like a science fiction scenario is the reality of age and the passage of time, and of the fascination with the static locations that seem to outlive us. 

Margaris' images, his initial public offering at professional artwork, have a prominent dialogue with other photographs.  His obsession with modest locations compares to recent work by Candida Höfer, a student of the Bechers.  Margaris' interest in the relationship between the inhabitant and public space follows the lead of Margaris' fellow Swiss, Robert Frank.  There are also close ties between his work and Sophie Calle's Hotel Series, in which locations become the subject of repeated consideration.  One should also not overlook the similarity between the playground gymnasium in Margaris’ work and minimalist sculpture such as Rachel Harrison's The Bell Tower.  The gymnasium looks like Harrison's geometric sculpture, which like Margaris' work, needs a participant to complete it by pressing the doorbell on one of its bars.

On one side of Margaris' work is a world uninhabited, and on the other,  a world with one man. Where exactly are these places?  Who is the man who inhabits them?  What is the complete story? The real story is in the images we cannot see.   It is the world before and after nostalgia, the vacant, memory-less place that seems to have nothing but formal properties, and then you live there, and it becomes permanently inhabited, by the persistence of memory. 

Rachel K. Ward