Kostas Bassanos’s text-based work is a sculptural interpretation of appropriated phrases, verses, and fragments from diverse historical sources. He shifts texts from being content-specific to site-specific. Through his installations, he explores the social and political implications of concepts like territory, landscape, and habitat, emphasizing the materiality of language and its capacity to shape perception, experience, and representation of space. In his video Anywhere but Here, Bassanos performs a sculptural gesture. Walking to the end of a pier against the wind, he throws letters into the sea. As the wooden characters, which spell out the title of the work, hit the water and are carried away, they become a metaphor for escape. By liberating the sentence, Bassanos enacts a physical and temporal departure from the here and now, revealing the performative dimension of his conceptual practice.

Kostas Bassanos (1961) was born in Kamena Vourla and lives and works in Athens.