Aphe is a Greek word that refers to the act of “touching,” both with the skin and with the senses. It is also used in the sense of ‘igniting’ or “involving.” By choosing this word as the title for her exhibition, Dimitra Charamandas places her work within a debate that challenges the traditional opposition between touch and sight.

Since ancient times, sight has been understood as a more intellectual way of apprehending the world, relegating touch to craft activities and emotions. However, it is precisely these manual activities and expressions of feelings that interest Dimitra Charamandas. She refers on the one hand to miroloyia, funeral songs from the Mani region that confer prophetic status on the women who sing them, and on the other hand to everyday gestures such as preparing food, harvesting chamomile, or tending to small livestock. These collective activities are ritualistic and promote social cohesion, but they have been relegated to the margins of a society that is now fascinated by productivity.

In this exhibition, Charamandas observes that the landscapes close to her heart (the Jura, Greece, but also Latin America, where she traveled in 2024) are structured by similar questions: how to preserve or recover water, how to build walls that connect rather than separate? Her paintings and installation describe these questions rather than answer them, paying sensitive attention to cracks and areas of encounter.

Dimitra Charamandas was born in 1988 and lives and works between Solothurn and Basel.