"No man's land" is not a spatial definition here but rather is a definition of time and culture. It defines the transitional stage between one period finishing and another beginning: From post-civil war Greece of the 50s - ideologically and culturally a milestone for the generation of those now in their forties, as is Voussouras - to the beginning of the 21st century of digital information.

Crossing this no man's land (as it was termed during the Cold War] through the dimension of time, striving to 'clear his slate" as he says for that period, he is however captivated by this period's aesthetics - as printed in black and white photographs.

Crossing no man's land, he maintains an emotional distance from the experiences and decisively transforms the memories into cultural expressions. For this reason he sees his material of those years as being 'disposable' (photographs, tapes of antiquated computers, pages from erotic novels, telephone directories and school exercise-books.) In this way he strips them of the sentimental burden of personal events that they had carried from their previous unknown owners. Black and white mass-style simulacrums of accomplished personal snapshots of a period of an equally extreme political "dichromatism" during the duration of which, however, our fellow Greeks suddenly discovered the instant camera, Western movie stars and their poses, modernism and mass production.

Amongst the photographs of innumerable unknown individuals, some very unobtrusive personal insignia of the artist can also be found: A deceased friend, his parents at a young age, himself as a child. Secret fraternization - leveling with unknown individuals of the same period, their common fate is the disposableness implied by the confrontation of 'I' with the time. It is exorcised with humor, bordering on cynicism, as the title of the composition 'Refraction of Children' demonstrates, or 'Lessons in erotic correspondence' composed of pages of an exercise-book where a misspelling student of the period correctly learnt how to spell 'Greece' through coerced repetition.

In the composition of pages from old telephone directories in which names, addresses and telephone numbers have been burnt line by line, Voussouras too writes out his 'punishment' of forced text as the unknown student had, the erasure of records of a period that is over, the eradication of old information, of old events. In a constructed environment of mirrors, images then (photographs of the 50s) and images now (visitors of the exhibition) co-reflect without coinciding in a Platonic procession of disposable simulacrums of different times.

The bewitching aesthetics of the post-civil war period, printed upon photographic paper covers in time-shots the dominant 'values' semantically outlined by Voussouras: Enforcement, flattening, ideological and social bipolarity, prudery (expressed in the black strips covering the eyes of young girls in photographs].

He, somewhat mockingly, calls his study of 'disposable' materials and his semiotic thematic wondering through 'no man's land' 'The archaeology of information'.

However, for myself personally, the central work of this unity is the construction using tin cans - which decodes and encapsulates in the clearest way both the title and the instinct of the artist who captures the period's vibrations as they arise from interspersed symbolism which he transforms into images and forms: The construction of a pile of tin cans is a reference point-farewell to the industrial age of mass produced goods, which Warhol commented upon with his Campbell's soup can. In place of the can label, Voussouras uses the ephemeral medium of photocopy to produce individual copies of 50's photographs. Every can, however, has a red stamp stating that the product expires on 01-01-01. Of course this does not refer to the year 2001, the first of the 21st century. It is a symbol of digital technology (0 and 1) that marks the period in which the major commodity is no longer the industrial product but rather digital information. Thus Vousouras through this work depicts the 'end of a period' that is not chronological but cultural. He does not fall prey to the temptation of using new technologies and new means -attempts that very often pass through a stage of gadgetry before ripening. He avoids the dictates of vogue and the danger of being consumed by the medium -thus focusing through familiar means on the essence that is the message:

No man's land is the finite space-time of freedom.

Anna Hatziyannaki
Art Historian (Paris Ι and Paris VIII)
Member of A.I.C.A.