VICTORIA DEBLASSIE

Dimensions variable. Phone Booth, paint, contemporary “artifacts”. 2016.

The project Phone Booth: A Secular Shrine is part of my series of site-specific street art sculptures made for the Lakkos neighborhood in Heraklion, Crete during an artist residency at LAKKOS AIR. I researched this neighborhood in order to create site-specific works that revealed something about the neighborhood’s history, architecture, daily-life, as well as the political climate in Greece in general. For Phone Booth: A Secular Shrine, I transformed an existing but abandoned photo booth into a mini secular shrine. Inspired by the mini Orthodox Church shrines seen throughout Greece that housed photos of saints, deceased loved ones, candles, and roses, I wanted to create a secular version of this shrine that celebrated the Lakkos neighborhood. I collected pieces of contemporary “artifacts” found on the street or in trash bins and put them in the phone booth. I also repainted the phone booth to reference the colors of the Greek flag, blue and white and the pattern I created came from using the bottoms of black plastic crates as stencils. After the installation was set up, children in the neighborhood started taking the pieces apart and playing with them, giving a new function to my intentions of the installation as well as the original function as a phone booth.