For the second event of the series Reruns, curator Maya Tounta traces the obscure friendship between an unremembered poet known to his friends as Emerson and the artist George Tourkovasilis (1944–2021). Among the material found in Tourkovasilis’ archive are silver gelatin prints, negatives, and contact sheets documenting whimsical photoshoots—portraits and still lifes animated by euphemistic forms of role-play—as well as diaristic snapshots of Athens, New York, and other places they travelled to together, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. Some are portraits of Emerson (a carousel of shifting haircuts, decades, and continents) captured by Tourkovasilis. Others, perhaps more peculiar, are photographs composed and taken by Emerson in what appears to be an emerging engagement with photography, then developed and printed by Tourkovasilis.

Texts offer a parallel vantage point onto the chronology of the relationship. In Tourkovasilis’ The Rock Diaries (Odisseas, Athens, 1984), a chronicle of the underground music scene in early-1980s Athens, Emerson occupies a chapter of his own. A solitary spectator, poet, and former seaman, staging prophetic enactments in the city’s cafés, he eventually disappears, “never to be seen again,” only to reappear in the archive. There, Songs Without Music (1984), an unpublished poetry collection laid out by Emerson in broken English and typed out by Tourkovasilis, allows us to encounter Emerson’s own voice.

The research into the archive forms part of an ongoing collaboration between Athens-based Maya Tounta (Akwa Ibom), Helena Papadopoulos (Radio Athènes), and Andreas Melas (Melas Martinos), together with the Estate of George Tourkovasilis.

Maya Tounta was invited by Gloria Hasnay. Reruns is supported by The Gingko Foundation.