A Guided-Guiding Device (Location: IP Collection)

The  guiding-guided device follows the methodology of the “feminist guiding tour” developed by the CNMFPP (Elpida Karaba, Valia Papastamou, Marianna Stefanitsi, Ioanna Zouli), as a way to seek and leave traces of narratives that are concealed, lost, undermined, or considered secondary.

The work “A Guided-Guiding Device (Location: IP Collection)” was developed as a response to the invitation from the curator Akis Kokkinos to participate with a sound intervention in the “Polyphonic Reading Device” of the exhibition “Everything I Know is a Borrowed Map” at the Irene Y. Panagopoulos Collection.

The guiding-guided device functions as a mediating mechanism, a practice of intervening upon the collection’s standard narrative. Through critical and odd (λοξές) interpretations of selected works in the exhibition and through strategies of détournement, it activates sensibilities around the politics of gender representation in the art world, while simultaneously challenging the normative and authoritarian logics that constitute archives, collections, and exhibition narratives. At the same time, it examines the power relations involved in the processes of guiding and being guided, highlighting how these are reproduced within the context of the contemporary art economy and market mechanisms.

By identifying locations where the collection is dispersed and which spaces the specific works exhibited in “Everything I Know is a Borrowed Map” inhabited before their showcase there, we can picture the landscape, the buildings, the works themselves, and the people associated with them -from the creators to the people taking care of them- as equal parts of the story they tell. Is this, perhaps, an applicable practice of history (of art)?

Rosi Braidotti, within the framework of nomadic philosophy, proposes mapping as a methodology for recording the conditions within which we exist. At the same time, the feminist politics of location suggests that the positions, objects, and subjects within it are embodied and relational, and their different locations constitute traces of what is hidden, while they are constituted through specific power relations.

In this vein, the guiding-guided device offers an affective, embodied experience that relocates the works within the networks of relationships, materialities, and structures that make their existence and reception possible.

Everything I Know is a Borrowed Map, 20.05.2026 - 02.04.2027

To find out more about the exhibition and to book your visit, see here. 

Photos: Nikos Alexopoulos, Alexandra Masmanidi