Her Trojan Bag
With Bag of Aspirations Kalliopi Lemos resumes the female fighter’s allegory created within her Tools of endearment series, by equipping her giantess’ armour with one more object strictly linked with woman’s appearance and beauty; her bag.
Choosing as point of reference an iconic and prestigious bag model, the artist elaborates her discourse on the construction and de-construction of the contemporary woman’s myth, by emphasizing on high fashion’s impact.
Lemos’ distinctive artistic language is detectable here as well: The surrealistic qualities of an accessory whose gigantic size deprives it of its function; the multidimensional antithesis’ game between material and optical impression; the use of oxidation to imply passing time and nature. Yet, oxidation’s choice in this case, as the actual process that gave the cold steel its warm colour, functions poetically, implying age and beauty, nature and quality. The bag’s scratched leather surface seems fainted and old, soft and vulnerable while it isn’t - it is steel strong literally and metaphorically given its prestigious status.
A luxurious bag is a symbol of elegance and femininity, an essential of any refined appearance, fashion magazines’ beloved. It is also a portable beautifying lab, a woman’s stereotypical toolbox, her stuffiness’ guarantee. In short, a woman’s bag epitomizes the social construction of femininity.
However, positioned within the Tools of Endearment context, reversing thus its first reading, this massive container of restrictions and stereotypes becomes an ammunition case, a bag full of hopes and claims. Α woman warrior’s toolbox, after all, couldn’t be a beauty case.
And there’s something more. The use of a product so prestigious as a recognizable bag makes this peculiar monument a direct reference to the fashion industry; a comment on the market, on high fashion and its tremendous impact on women. That is, on fashion as a mythology in a Barthesian approach.
Through its monumental dimensions, Lemos’ luxurious bag attempts to re-mythify itself. As Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies:
‘Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will, in fact, be a mythology.’
Looking at fashion as a mythical and inexhaustible realm of woman’s exploitation and suppression, this Bag of Aspirations struggles for de-mythification by using fashion as a signifier for a new mythology: That of the Woman fighter, the myth created through Lemos’ Tools of Endearment. And this way a legendary bag, extremely appealing and prestigious, becomes Lemos’ heroine’s Trojan Horse, her tool-box of endearment full of explosive aspirations ready to conquer any patriarchal meta-language generator of woman’s stereotypes.
Gelly Gryntaki
London 2018