Artists, Magda Hristopoulou and Haris Kontosfiris, welcome me with a smile to the fragrant orchard outside the gorgeous neoclassical building with a view of the Mal Tepe, they live in with their family. Their home is located in the village Skopia, 1,5 km outside Florina. Their five-year-old son, Orfeas, is playing on the quiet uphill alley outside the door, building things with concrete. My memory recalls images of the past with young Haris creating works of art using concrete.
At the orchard
Haris is carrying his youngest son, two-year-old Myronas, on his shoulders. They are playing hide and seek behind the laundry that Magda is hanging. The artists, young and old, stand next to their works. Looking up, at the blue sky, I see the portraits of the mother and her sons made in metal outlines by Haris on the pergola: an elaborate ceiling against the sky.
The artistic house of hope
The building is an architectural masterpiece. They bought it half in ruins. It was worth its price for the feeling of fleeting hope it offered them; for their mutual dream and for the path towards its realization that they’ve followed together. “In the entrance, on the wall, there’s a line from one of Magda’s poems “This is as far as the light gets”. This is as far as the public light gets, from here on the private lights begins…” Haris Kontosfiris, artist and professor at the School of Fine Arts in Florina, explains.
The whole floor is tiled with old tiles that Haris has hand-painted. The house’s residents have staged the whole house taking usability into account. The light fixture in the centre of the ceiling was found in an old house in the neighbourhood. The interior walls have been painted based on the view they hide. “Whatever’s outside comes inside and everything “folds” in the fire room, with the fireplace,” Haris explains as he swings his sons in the air.
It’s true. The landscapes outside continue inside as drawings on the walls: the cherry trees, Mal Tepe, the roof tiles of Mrs Sofia’s house. It was a collaboration with the excellent painter Giorgos Pantazis, in a decorative back-and-forth on the living room walls. “The tint and the palette spreads generously and directly. Whatever moveable works of art we place on the walls afterwards, work,” Haris says, with the certainty of an artist who trust the unexpected reflection of the present, who trusts the here and now.
Agios Panteleimonas’ majestic roof with the cross, and the mountain across the house bring their strong energy and are assimilated in the furniture that Magda paints. “Me too!” Orfeas adds. “Of course!” his father says, agreeing that Orfeas is the best painter in the house.
The staircase
We go upstairs using the lovely staircase. Wooden steps, over a 100-years-old, creaking and creating nostalgic cinematic images, that the paintings and the objects complement. Woodworm and neglect had damaged the wood, so, Haris restored and painted the steps. 30-year-old works, from the studies on concrete (like the architectural boxes) and the three-dimensional creations made with colourful concrete that are a commentary on the refugee crisis to the stories about shipwrecked watermelons.
Haris’ and Magda’s work, as well as Giorgos Tsakiris’, a professor at the School of Fine Arts of Thessaloniki, sketches are all touched by natural light. The children’s rooms are across the orange bathroom with the painted rhombuses. The shower drains on a wooden floor: a pleasant, functional design that maintains the optics of the old flooring.
Awareness
The most welcoming homes are those in which the team, the family or the community living there dares to share its truth with acceptance and with the intention to co-create. I thank Orfeas who mirrors my dream as he offers me walnuts in his cupped hand, looking at me sweetly. I choose to live in such a community. It’s worth being present when we cohabitate with children. That’s the lesson I learned in this “toy-house” where my inner child came alive.
The bedroom
The “Suicide Authors”, a collective period portrait made by Magda has been placed across the couple’s sunny bed. They are in conversation with Haris’ birds that hang over the bed. “Branches, cardboard, Styrofoam, and feathers from the neighbour’s chickens are the materials I used,” he tells us.
The kitchen’s inner sharing
The smell of goat cooking escapes the kitchen. We sit around the monastery table and we read the poetic wordplay on the walls. Wordplay about food like for example: “a single lentil – the ox’s miracle is its tasty tail – love is bitter, but it’ll get sweet after it’s boiled” etc.
Haris
“I was born in Mytilene and I’ve lived in Athens; I moved to Omonia square when I was studying to become a director at the Evgenia Hatzikou School of Film and Television Studies, and I arrived to the School of Fine Arts. in Florina, in 2010, to teach at the newly-founded department.
From Monday to Sunday, I would go to the houses of different students, not to drink tsipouro (traditional pomace raki) but to supervise their work. Every Wednesday to someone’s house-workshop, every Thursday to another’s etc. To get to a village outside Florina after living in Omonia, is a big, lonely change.
What kept me here was the newly-founded school, the new artists, the mountainous four seasons, and Magda,” Haris tells us. He regularly collaborates with the Zoumboulakis Galleries in Athens, with the Braggart Gallery in Larisa, and with the Lola Nikolaou Gallery in Thessaloniki.
Magda
“I’ve always drawn. It was my dream even though my mother was set against it for reasons I don’t understand. I’m from Preveza, I’ve lived in Athens, Syros and Patras. I came to Florina and never left,” she tells us. “I studied something completely different. At twenty, I was already working at the Open University of Patras. I took a break and sat for the exams for the Athens and the Thessaloniki School of Fine Arts. I failed. I was desperate. But I passed the exams for the Florina School of Fine Arts.
I asked to be transferred here, and I must say not without some bitterness. But I lived by the river, at a magical corner of town. For three years from 9 o’clock in the morning until 10 at night I was at school. In the morning I took classes and attended workshops, and in the evenings I worked at the department’s administration office. Then a law passed that, without me realising, made my dream come true: I had to stay here, for ten years. I’m very grateful for this unexpected gift of life: it seems like a reward for daring to follow my dream. You see, I was determined to draw.
At school, during my first workshop, I met Haris. We both had just moved to Florina. It was love at first sight. We’d never seen each other before. It was February 2010. A year later, we were living together. When we decided to look for a house, this was the first one we saw – and the first one we rejected, it was in such a bad state. I’ve always wanted to live in a neoclassical building. I’m touched by its history. During the Civil war, the neighbourhood was bombed, and everyone took refuge here, it was the only building that remained standing. Two children playing outside were killed… later, a seedy coffee shop operated in the basement. The old lady next door remembers buying hard candy there.”
“I felt good when I entered this house,” Magda continues. “After a year-and-a-half of looking, we came back. The price had changed. It was worth restoring it and staying. Haris would go to the university and then come straight here. We worked really hard. We moved in when Orfeas was 4-months-old. Now he has developed an artistic sense, he makes collages and paints his bedroom walls.”
Magda Hristopoulou is an artist and poet. She studied at the Florina School of Fine Arts of the University of Western Macedonia, where she still works in the administration office. At the same time, she is completing her master’s degree in creative writing at the university’s Primary Education department focusing on the implicature of suicide in poetry. She has published a poetry collection.
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