Semén series

The work brings into juxtaposition lace’s structural fineness and beauty with the harshness of slur words used to describe male homosexuality (“faggot”, “pancy”, “poof” and “fairy”). At the same time, another group of smaller lace feature words that describe the desired "harshness" of hyper-masculinity (“macho”, “hunk”, “stud”, “cocksman”, “jock”, “manly”, “beefcake” and “stallion”). Collectively, the pieces of lace explore the limits between the notions of “feminine” and “masculine” as a long-established and still dominant binary.

 

Furthermore, by using pieces of lace that belong to his personal collection of inherited cutwork lace, Dimoulias highlights lace as a measure of "exchange value": lace is still used in Dimoulias's home country Greece and in other places around the world as part of the traditional “marriage inheritance gift”. Thus, the work aims to deconstruct a traditional heteronormative culture that creates and uses objects in a very specific way – a way that is complex, controlling and contradictory at the same time. Last but not least, the cultural origin of the work is foregrounded by the material used in order to write the words – olive paste produced by the olive trees that Dimoulias is growing in his land in Corinth, Greece.