In a sense, I have kept a part of that not feeling quite American, to fuel my search. This gave me permanent, foreign, strangeness status that I internalized negatively and pushed me to the arts where the uncommon was appreciated. I was fortunate (although I was very unhappy at the time) that my parents emigrated from Greece to a cold, Northern Yankee, super conservative part of New England in the United States. But I think what we are talking about here is cultural estrangement. Existentialism appealed to me at that age at almost an erotic level. Camus’ The Stranger, was a book that fascinated me when I was growing up. I suppose to be foreign is to be strange. Do you feel a foreigner or do you feel to belong to some kind of territory (geographic or theoric)? I think that the idea of a foreigner is present in a work which explores and investigates several theoric spheres. The condition, real and as a methaphore, to be foreign, seems to me the most interesting thing of the last decade by opening the possibility of different cultures to live together. We all have to make these choices as we go.

It is a harder road, as it goes against human instinct. I think that even in the artworld, most feel comfortable when they can label, identify, relate and recognize, put into a category or box what they think are meaningful relationships. When it comes to species, flora and fauna such inquiries are very useful – but in trying to quantify artistic energies much less so. When that doesn’t work religion does the rest. Humans have this predisposition or need to classify the universe. The need to categorize artists or anything for that matter is something more related to Charles Darwin than it is to John Ruskin. Don’t you think that today the way to present art in this way is obsolete? One of the problem of the art system is the need to compartimentalize the work of some artists into labels, typologies and places. Dailogue between Philip Tsiaras and Francesca Alfano Miglietti

Dark and light taming a boar