Video [19:00] | Sounds: collected voice messages from my personal answering machine
© Maria Paschalidou 2004

Voice mail 2001-04 is a digital video that combines messages, left on my personal answering machine during these years, with domestic and exterior video recordings of my residence in Chicago. It includes messages in various languages (Greek, English as well as one song in Serbian language).

The video narrates the ‘one way’ type of communication defined by the answering machine as a result of the intentional or the physical absence of the receiver. It is a parade of fragmented stories, incidents, continuities and interruptions of communication created and produced exclusively by the usage of the answering machine. Entering the empty space of the house as well as its surrounding external space, the different each time voices produce a cinematic perspective of multiple daily incidents and narratives.

EXHIBITIONS / PRESENTATIONS:

• Art Wave Radio (broadcast). AB projects. Destroy Athens, 1st Athens Biennial. Athens, 14-23 July 2007. Curators: Dimitris Foutris, Kostas Bassanos.
• Nuit Blanche Toronto 06. 401 Richmond Cultural Venue, Toronto, 30 September – 1 October 2006
• When the Other appears on the scene. Onufri 05. National Gallery of Arts, Tirana, Albania, December 2005 – January 2006. Curator: Eleni Laperi
• Urban flesh and blood. The Kaliningrad Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts & ArtExpo International Video art Festival. "Barricade", Kaliningrad, Russia, 30 September 2005
• 5th Forum for European Artistic Mobility. Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art & Goethe Institute. Thessaloniki, 17-19 December 2004. Organized by: The State Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki, Apollonia/European Art Exchanges, ArtBOX, Culture 2000 of the EU