Stranger by the Wall: Tula Plumi & Stelios Karamanolis

Some encounters begin in company and unfold in solitude. In Plato's Symposium, Aristodemus sets out alongside Socrates towards a banquet at Agathon's house. Along the way, Socrates falls behind, absorbed in thought, while Aristodemus continues ahead. They share a destination, but not the same arrival. Between departure and reunion, the journey opens a space of delay and separation, where being alongside someone does not necessarily mean moving at the same pace.

This passage became a point of reference in a conversation between Tula Plumi (b. 1988) and Stelios Karamanolis (b. 1977) discussing the encounters that shape our lives: meeting strangers, walking alongside them for a time, separating, and perhaps never meeting again. Stranger by the Wall takes its title from a Karamanolis work that draws on the same narrative. The work carries the trace of this exchange, bringing together questions of proximity, separation, and what remains after an encounter has passed.

Bringing together the work of Plumi and Karamanolis, Stranger by the Wall explores how encounters continue to shape the present, even as their meanings change over time. Distance and recollection alter memories of people, images, and places, leaving fragments that resist a single interpretation. What feels familiar may remain elusive; what is remembered may be as much a construction as a trace of the past.

How do we recognize what we can no longer fully know?

Rather than seeking to recover a fixed meaning, Stranger by the Wall approaches memory as something continually reshaped through encounters with the present. The past returns in fragments, carrying traces of what has been while taking on unfamiliar forms. Between recognition and uncertainty, these traces become ambiguous figures: close enough to evoke familiarity, yet distant enough to remain strangers.

Curated by Oskar Johannisson Gonzalez