Costas Tsoclis: Διαδρομές ή ένας ανέφικτος στόχος

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

Nearly eight decades of work do not fit on one wall, so Costas Tsoclis: Diadromes i enas anefiktos stochos (Routes, or an Unattainable Goal) puts them on a screen and in a score. On Thursday 26 November 2026 at 19:00, the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall of the Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall, hosts an audiovisual performance-documentary that follows the visual artist Costas Tsoclis through eight creative periods spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Historical narrative runs alongside original music written for the evening by the composer Dimitris Maragopoulos, and a discussion with the creators follows the screening.

The route itself is the credential. Tsoclis was born in Athens in 1930 and studied at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1948 to 1954 under Yannis Moralis. A state scholarship took him to Rome from 1957 to 1960; he then lived in Paris until 1976, with a DAAD residency in Berlin in 1971 and 1972. In 1986 he represented Greece at the Venice Biennale. On Tinos he founded the Costas Tsoclis Museum, the municipal institution that co-organises this evening with the Megaron. Maragopoulos, an emeritus professor at the Ionian University, brings a composer's ear to a story usually told through catalogues and wall text.

This is a room for people who stay seated after the credits: the ones who want to know how a painter decides to abandon a manner that is working, and who came as much for the discussion as for the screening. It is a Greek-language evening, and the discussion is where the audience gets to speak.

Setting: the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall, the Megaron's smaller auditorium. Vibe: a lecture that behaves like a concert. Sound: an original score by Dimitris Maragopoulos under documentary narration. Door: open entry, reserved online in advance, capped at two places per person.

You watch a single career unfold period by period: the Athens student, the Rome and Paris years, the Berlin residency, the Venice pavilion, the island museum. The music carries the transitions between periods rather than a narrator's summary, and when the screen goes dark the room turns into a conversation with the people who made the piece.

If you want a retrospective with the canvases in front of you, this is not that; the works arrive as projection, and the evening is spoken in Greek. But if you want to understand why Costas Tsoclis kept changing direction, told in one sitting with a composer's score underneath, this is the rare format that tries.

The Megaron is on Vasilissis Sofias, beside Megaro Mousikis metro station, which puts the hall about a two-minute walk from the platform. Entry is open with electronic reservation through the Megaron box office site, webtics.megaron.gr. Reservations open on Thursday 19 November 2026, exactly one week before, with a cap of two places per person.

Costas Tsoclis gets one evening in this hall, and the reservation window opens only seven days ahead.