PUBLICATIONS
JOURNAL
Peripheries no.6
TEXT EXCERPTS
“Typing with one finger/on a touch screen/feels like sowing an entire field/with loquat pits.
They taste sour/and their skin looks dehydrated,/skin of old age,/the smell of wet earth...”
— MARIA ZERVOS
“Which Phaenarete can deliver/a virtue from the ruins,/a Kore from the ashes,/a pistachio tree root pulled out/from the bulldozer’s mouth,/a passenger from a passport/or a sun ray through the dust?
Which Phaenarete can deliver/a virtue from the ruins?/Our vanity is virtuous.”
— MARIA ZERVOS
Peripheries
Harvard Divinity School Journal / No.6 / 2024
“Peripheries”, published annually by Harvard Divinity School, is a literary and arts journal that publishes artistic work that is, broadly understood, "peripheral"; work that explores the interstices between discourses, traditions, languages, forms and genres. Maria Zervos’s art works and poems were published in the 2024 issue.
ARTIST BOOK
Peripatetics
TEXT EXCERPTS
“Catching a metaphor, unlike catching a bus, leads you to stops and destinations that are not pre-mapped. Catching a metaphor is creating a desire line.”
— MARIA KOUNDOURA
“The internal outsider can only be home for so long before he grows nostalgic for the other worlds he has tasted, and while he sits at the family table he keeps looking over his shoulder wondering how much longer he will have to stay.”
— PABLO MEDINA
“I am trying to recover that rhythm of life in my native city that must have determined my own inner rhythms. But I feel I am not doing it right. In the bus, people come too close to me, the men breathe their fatigue into my face, the women look at me with suspicion and whisper something to each other. I take too much space, that’s what it is.”
— SVETLANA BOYM
“.. had to walk / barefoot ten kilometres to go to school / in a village in Epirus they offered him ouzo and / sour cream pie / again he thought Peano’s curve had no place here … ”
— ERSI SOTIROPOULOS
“One can say that Picasso was a first, second, and third world artist all at once, although he might not have been aware of that and neither were art historians. Born Spanish, but after the raid on Guernica never having set foot on Spanish soil again, Picasso was a profound peripatetic artist.”
— JELLE BOUWHUIS
“My strolls around the Acropolis became for me a metaphor for life; going around and around the hill is like seasons passing.”
— HEATHER FELTY
Peripatetics
Book / Self published / 2017
The diverse literary practices of the essayists and poets included in Peripatetics reveal the philosophical nature of walking, as it began from the time of Aristotle. Selected by Zervos, the writers include Svetlana Boym, Jelle Bouwhuis, Heather Felty, Maria Koundoura, George Kalogeris, Pablo Medina, Ersi Sotiropoulos, Melissa Green and the editor.
ARTIST BOOK
Hunting
TEXT EXCERPTS
“Zervos’s terminology consists of various discernable elements, such archetypical ones (women, nature, aging, danger) and contemporary ones (design, film, gazing camera, environmental issues) - that are open to interpretation …”
— JELLE BOUWHUIS
“This is actually the beauty of what she does. When Zervos puts text with her video it might appear to provide the viewer a concrete clue, but there is always an underlying uncertainty, the ability to transform something given into your own.”
— HEATHER KOURIS
“Her hands formed the shapes of angels, aggressive wings that went up and down.”
— ELENI GAROUFALIA
Hunting
Book / Futura Publications / 2008
Hunting is a catalogue that brings together selected art works by Maria Zervos and includes essays on Zervos’s work by Jelle Bouwhuis, Heather Kouris and Eleni Garoufalia.
Hunting was published with the support of the Mondriaan Fonds.
ARTIST BOOK
Diagnosis
Maria Zervos
TEXT EXCERPTS
“[W]hat perhaps best characterizes [Zervos’s] work is that idiosyncratic sense of the female self rather than any polemical element. Rather than being about attitude it is more about creating a sense of doubt and perhaps also ambiguity about the self.”
— KATERINA GREGOS
“Women are continually aware of the various roles they play: a girl, a mother, a mistress, a virgin, a wife, a whore or a saint. Over the past few decades, female artists have visualized these roles in various ways, take for example: Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas, Hannah Wilke and Tracy Emin. The work of Maria Zervos continues in this tradition.”
— JANNEKE WESSSELING
“Zervos’s poems are studies, sketches on the way to the image, which exercises and refines the senses of the artist in producing her work, and of us in re-producing the art work again through seeing. These poems are images that hit back on us, and thus leading us a step further within the infinite experience of seeing.”
— EVA FOTIADI
Diagnosis
Book / Self Published / 2005
Diagnosis is a catalogue that brings together selected art works by Maria Zervos and includes essays on Zervos’s work by Andrea Gilbert, Katerina Gregos, Eva Fotiadi and Janneke Wesseling.
Diagnosis was published with the support of the Mondriaan Fonds.