Agence France Presse — English
September 22, 2004 Wednesday 2:28 AM GMT

Europe rendezvous: Art without borders for cultural impresario

STRASBOURG

As Europe forges ever tighter bonds, Dimitri Konstantinidis, whose
vocation makes him the embodiment of a European art without borders,
seems to have been constantly one step ahead.

“I am Greek, and also French from Alsace, but I feel equally at home
in Prague or anywhere else,” says the cultural impresario, and points
— almost accidentally — to his background to prove it.

Born at Kavala, on the Aegean Sea’s northern shore, with Turkey to
the east and the Balkan patchwork of nations to the north, he has
always seen borders as something you cross.

What then could be more natural for this former student of art
history than to settle in the border city of Strasbourg, itself a
cultural crossroads, and create Apollonia, the association of
European contemporary art?

“The urge to travel, to see what’s happening in the next field, came
to me young,” he said. “The chance to move on came when I was a
student, and I took it.”

The Soviet Union seemed to beckon — he was developing an interest in
Byzantine art — but in 1979, aged 19, he opted finally for eastern
France, partly on the recommendation of a Greek friend who was
already living there.

There, working for a regional cultural association while preparing a
doctorate on “the spatial concept in fifth and sixth century icons”,
he found himself rubbing shoulders “with lots of immigrants from
Poland, Italy and Portugal.”

>From a modest background, he could see “nothing cosmopolitan” about
his origins — but then recalled that his family hailed from Trabzon,
the eastern Turkish port city formerly called Trebizonde, “where
Greeks, Turks and Armenians used to live happily together” until
nationalist pressures led to the population exchanges of the 1920s.

Called upon to organise exhibitions of contemporary art, it was to
eastern Europe that he turned for inspiration, ingoring the Berlin
Wall which at that time still divided Europe into antagonist blocs.

Following a two-year break to do his military service in Greece —
“so as not to cut myself off from my country” — he was selected to
head Alsace’s Regional Contemporary Art Fund (FRAC).

Created in 1983, the body was set up to collect works of contemporary
art, largely for educational purposes.

“I realised that Alsace, and Strasbourg, because of their
geographical situation and the presence of the European institutions,
had a particular role to play. I thought I had to do something,” he
said.

This “something” took the form of an “inventory of contemporary
culture of the Eastern European states,” a project funded by the
Council of Europe (one of several European bodies located in
Strasbourg) and featuring 250 artists from 17 countries in a series
of exhibitions.

Not all local deputies were enamoured of Konstantinidis’ efforts to
give the FRAC a “European dimension”, and in 1989 he left to create
his own association, Apollonia, as a “platform for European artistic
exchanges” with a strong focus on central and eastern Europe, the
Balkans and the southern Caucasus.

Since then Konstantinidis has been crossing borders to his heart’s
content, travelling from one country to another to seek out artists
whose works can be exhibited in Strasbourg and elsewhere.

Apollonia’s current show is representative, a collection of
contemporary Polish work themed around “the quest for identity” and
scheduled to travel on to Greece and Poland.

To facilitate cross-border initiatives of this kind, Konstantinidis
is pushing for the creation of a common status for associations that
would harmonise their administrative situation throughout the EU and
“promote cultural pluralism in Europe.”