Artists

Dimitra Charamandas

Press release

Teeth grinding and tears — these are reactions I can relate to when contemplating our planet’s fiery future, previews of which darken skies today, from Greece to Quebec, near where I write. In Dimitra Charamandas’ installation, Harvesting Tears, nominated for this year’s Swiss Art Awards, the artist included a ledge of translucent pellets, found objects whose force comes from a kind of semantic surplus. Known as mastic tears, they are the crystallized droplets secreted by the mastic tree, long prized in the Mediterranean for medicinal and culinary purposes. The word mastic comes from the Greek masticháo, which means to grind the teeth, and the resin is cultivated by scraping the trees’ bark. In 2012, a wildfire tore through the island of Chios, the main source of mastic, scorching some 16,000 acres, and many mastic groves and livelihoods in the process.