8th THESSALONIKI BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Thessaloniki Performance Festival
“Green Dreams, Water Deities and Techno Divinations”
Exhibition: 28 April - 14 May, 2023
Performances’ programme: 09-13 May, 2023
MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse Β1, Pier Α’, Thessaloniki port area)
Linguistic, sonic and visual patterns, terrestrial and digital sounds, immersive environments that include water, soil, plants and other elements of nature, peculiar posthuman creatures, subaquatic and telluric synergies, and oriental ballets, are just some of the elements that make up the programme of the Thessaloniki Performance Festival in the framework of the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art which will take place 09-13 May, 2023, at the MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts (Warehouse B1, Pier 1, Thessaloniki port area), under the title ''Green Dreams, Water Deities and Techno Divinations”.
This year’s Performance Festival is comprised of a video exhibition (28.04-14.05), a film screening and four performances, which all aspires to expose the true fragility of a society based on individualism and brutal domination. The Thessaloniki Performance Festival takes an ecofeminist stance, protesting prevailing ideologies related to nature and femininities and proposing paths for social change and justice. It focuses on ritual practices as a means of raising awareness and prompting to action, opens portals that will let us explore how spirituality and technology intertwine within the current volatile landscape, and will explore the interconnections between human and non-human beings, as well as the ways for their peaceful co-existence and co-evolution. It will reveal and address contested areas and will examine concepts related to both current and future representations of identity, castigating dominant social norms and issues of gender and power in our anthropocentric era.
Participating artists: Niya B, Eva Giannakopoulou, Agnes Momirski, Persephone Myrtsou aka Ayşenur (and the Orientalist Ballet), Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens (film screening)
Curated by: Eirini Papakonstantinou, Art Historian-Curator at MOMus-Experimental Centre for the Arts
The programme in detail
28 April – 14 May
Exhibition with videos by the festival’s participating artists
Tuesday 09 May, 21:00
Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens
Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure, 80’
Film screening; The film will be commented by the artists via live internet connection.
With a poetic blend of curiosity, humor, sensuality and concern, this film chronicles the pleasures and politics of H2O from an ecosexual perspective. Travel around California with Annie, a former sex worker, Beth, a professor, and their dog Butch, in their E.A.R.T.H. Lab mobile unit, as they explore water in the Golden State. Ecosexuality shifts the metaphor “Earth as Mother” to “Earth as Lover” to create a more reciprocal and empathetic relationship with the natural world. Along the way, Annie and Beth interact with a diverse range of folks including performance artists, biologists, water treatment plant workers, scholars and others, climaxing in a shocking event that reaffirms the power of water, life and love.
Wednesday 10 May, 21:00
Niya B
Ekdysis, 40’
“Ekdysis’”-the biological term referring to the process of shedding the external layer of the skin in reptiles- is an ongoing project, which is displayed through performances, installations and video. In this iteration, Niya B engages with her own internalised toxicity and the elements of water and air in a ritual of shedding skin and letting go. During the performance Niya will create an ephemeral installation.
Female subjectivities as well as nature are seen as wild and irrational under patriarchy, and thus have been subjugated and ‘tamed’ throughout his-tory. Misogynism and assumptions of feminine inferiority are embedded in Western culture, from antiquity to our present times. In her performance, Niya B works against the notion of linear time to trace back the oppression of the feminine. In this occasion, she uncovers an epigram attributed to 4th century Alexandrian poet Palladas, and she copies the words on each page of her diary.
The text reads: "Homer showed that every woman is bad and dangerous,
chaste and harlot, both are destruction”.
Thursday 11 May, 21:00
Agnes Momirski
siXren (verbum medicinae), 40’
SiXren (verbum medicinae) performance is a sonic experience inspired by models of ancient healing rhetorics. Verbal charms establish a new relationship with (inner) nature in the coming era of posthumanity, and inform the current sonic imaginary in our techno-environment with poetic and healing sensibility.
Ancient linguistic / sound patterns were considered as healing transformative and medicinal agents, and as the missing link between man and nature. Practices such as ancient Greek rhetorics, word magic, ritual poetry, as well as contemporary cognitive science and wellbeing methods, utilise the primordial power of utterance, rhythm, and sound to affect our animal senses, and consequently our body biology, brain chemistry, sensory and cognitive clarity.
The work explores the psychoacoustic effects of ancient verbal and sound formulas used in healing ceremonies, and abstracts and reapplies them into the matrix of contemporary sounds. Sonically and visually, we enter the liminal space between Earths rhythm and noise music, between digital and animate, pre-modern and hyper-modern.
Sound: beepblip
Visual and costume design: Brina Vidic
Video DOP: Rajko Bizjak
Friday 12 May, 21Q00
Ayşenur and the Orientalist Ballet*
Deep Green Orient: trauma and healing in a decolonized Aegean ecotopia, 45’
In light of the upcoming elections in Greece and Turkey, activist-entrepreneur Ayşenur and the Orientalist Ballet perform a lecture on the traumatic history of the regions in and around the Aegean Sea through the prism of climate change. The lecture looks back on the shared human (and nonhuman) traumas in that geography and points at the instrumentalisation of nature through political ideologies and human practices, such as the establishment of national borders. Ayşenur and her team suggest an alternative to those ideologies and practices; the replacement of nation-states by a de-nationalised symbiotic ecotopia. The proposal is to imagine the geography in and around the Aegean as a therapeutic microcosmos, a green post-imperial (de)colony, and a laboratory for political, cultural, environmental, and technological change for a peaceful future.
Ayşenur: Persefoni Myrtsou,
The Orientalist Ballet: Aylo Tsarouchaki, Maita Chatziioannidou, Archontia Makri.
Dance instructor: Aclan Sezer Genç (Horon Evi Istanbul)
Kemence Player: Filippos Kesapidis
Saturday 13 May, 21:00
Eva Giannakopoulou
Ichthyolatry, 45’
Inspired by the theorist Astrida Neimanis' book "Bodies of Water" (2017), which introduces for the first time the concept of Hydrofeminism, according to which water, femininities, embodied practices and ecology are interconnected creating "new" future synergies, ICHTHYOLATRY is a hybrid performance with confessional elements about elderly, floods, fluids and menopause. It is based on research conducted in communities linked to rivers, lakes, torrents and groups of women, during the course of research and creative residency programmes carried out in Greece, Portugal and Italy.
The visual artist-director and the creative community jointly developed the dramaturgy and texts through personal confessions and interviews with individuals from the local communities of Piraeus (PCAI), Torres Vedras, Portugal (Artemrede) and Mondaino, Italy (L’arboreto), in such a way that their content is an intellectual co-creation of all participants.
If water is the element from which all organisms originate, how could we possibly return to this original state of existence, removing the boundaries between evolution, genes, history, culture and nature? The answer to this question is what ICHTHYOLATRY attempts to answer, bridging the "gap" between past, present and future, between human and non-human forms of existence, jellyfishes and dogs.
The eccentric creatures of ICHTHYOLATRY - a warrior, a post-human creature, a female phenomenon and a fish - will inhabit the space to take a dive into a dreamy ocean of fluid possibilities. This is a performance that "dives" into an immersive universe of emotional and underwater coalitions.
Are you ready to swim?
ICHTHYOLATRY is a co-production of PCAI (Greece), Artemrede (Portugal - in collaboration with the Municipality of Torres Vedras) and L'Arboreto (Italy) in the framework of the European project Stronger Peripheries: a Southern Coalition, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
*The material of some costumes was created during a creative workshop with the audience attending the open rehearsal during the artist's artistic residency at Teatro Dimora L'Arboreto (IT).
** The performance contains scenes of nudity and is recommended for those over 16 years old.
Direction and original concept: Eva Giannakopoulou
Performers: Zoe Antypa, Eva Giannakopoulou, Calliope Voulgaroudi (replacing original cast members: Marianita Karakosta, Eva Koliopantou, Maroula Papanastasi, Evgenia Vacalopoulou)
Texts: Eva Giannakopoulou
Lighting design: Nyssos Vasilopoulos
Sound design: Pedro Pascoal
Costumes design: Eva Giannakopoulou, Marianita Karakosta, Eva Koliopantou, Maroula Papanastasi and Evgenia Vacalopoulou
Costumes construction: Eva Giannakopoulou, Marianita Karakosta, Eva Koliopantou, Maroula Papanastasi, Evgenia Vacalopoulou
Μasks design and construction: Stefanos Chandelis
Performance flyer can be found here