Tiffon: Empty Hours

The exhibition Les Heures Creuses aims to restore memories and urban observations, appearing during the “off-peak hours” – or more literally translated “the empty hours” – times between one and five o’clock, when the city freezes, while the sun continues to cloud tracks and thoughts. In this exhibition, the sculptures converse in a personal composition, to translate a personal vision of a city that is simultaneously in transition and frozen in time.  Tiffon composes in space, representing an archaeology of her memories and observations with an assemblage of colors, shapes, and materials. Restored out of their architectural context, inhabiting a different scale in the gallery, her personal limits of the city have become sculptures.

Athens is a city with layered history. The fetishisation of Ancient Greece obscures its three thousand-year-long history; wars, occupation, internal migration, the influence of religion, economic crisis … Oblivion has won over culture; its power has overcome so many stories and traces of the past. In times emergency we are once again forced to pierce through oblivion and to recover part of the historical and cultural heritage, to transform the appearance of ancient edifices and their function. The ruins of the present are pilled upon the older ones, while new constructions, often unfinished, stay waiting their next oblivion. Athens, despite its fragile and ad hoc development, doesn’t collapse though. Inventive, surprising and rebellious, it is reborn again and again from its own ruins, building itself from its own debris, constantly reinventing itself, defying its assigned roles. Contemporary and older lifestyles, nodes of representations and architectures are forced to coexist.

The empty hours are not confined in the interior of the bedroom anymore, hidden from the sun, nor in the closed eyelids of the resting bodies. They spill over the edges, on the street and fill the buildings. Emptiness and passivity engulfs the entirety of Athens that lies dormant in the middle of the day. Another rhythm spreads in this feverish atmosphere, slipping into every detail of everyday life. Frozen time is the one of the building sites abandoned by its workers, it is the unshakable marble of the temples, which keeps the past in its veins, the time that precedes the agitation of an effervescent city. Covered with tags, posters, and slogans, walls keep in themselves the sound of revolts and protests; the silence of off-peak hours is an illusion.