Con mucha alegría respondí a la invitación de Hablarenarte para colaborar en su periódico Caravana. En este caso, compartí algunas reflexiones en torno a mi experiencia como residente de su proyecto Planta Alta, a donde fui invitada por la curadora Violeta Janeiro. Las ideas que entonces surgieron quedaron truncadas por la pandemia y entonces… puedes leer el texto completo aquí.
After the intense and wonderful event with the 21 finalists in Radialsystem, Driving the Human announced the 7 selected projects which will be developed through 2022, including Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning.
In the context of IMPACT 21, which happened in 10-14 November, Imayna Caceres, Nuno Cassola, Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki and me showed some results of our shared research Unearthing Memories, Feeding Practices for Plural Knowledges and Beings. This research was part of JUNCTIONS 21, a generous opportunity organized by PACT Zollverein.
From October 22th to 31st 2021, the show I curated, Lost and shared: Approaches to collective mourning towards transformative politics could be visited at One Minute Space in Athens. Ten intense days of workshops, performances, screenings and discussions happened as part of the research for my PhD project.
«Acknowledging the simultaneous processes of loss that shape contemporary local and planetarian crises, artists, thinkers and performers address the current meaning of mourning. For it is within grieving and struggling realities that new political forces shall be created to reconnect ourselves with love, desire and transformation.»
Artists: VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas and Kostas Tzimoulis), Valinia Svoronou, Grigoria Vryttia, Maria Varela, Christina Phoebe, Sphinxes, Antigoni Bunny Tsagaropoulou, Eliana Otta
Talks, performances, workshops (COVID allowing) by: Marios Chatziprokopiou, Christina Phoebe, Fotini Gouseti, Gene Ray, Marina Miliou, Xanthoula Dakovánou, Marianne Tuckman, Theo Ilichenko, Nuno Cassola
More info and the full program can be found here.
(All the pictures by Thanassis Gatos)
As one of the selected projects for Driving the Human, Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning participated in the festival 21 Visions for Eco-social Renewal, from October 15-17 at Radialsystem in Berlin.
More info about my project here.
More info about the festival here.
(all the beautiful pictures were taking by Camille Blake)
Thanks to a kind invitation by Hansel Sato, I made in October a workshop as part of the series Drawing is Political at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. We discussed about drawing and politics, reincarnation and how our future selves could communicate better among each other. The results were very gratifying and thanks to the participant’s enthusiasm and curiosity, we saw how drawing and politics have in common being tools for negotiating what is impossible…
On September the 26th Oi Mouries and Other Trees participated in Το Athens Garden Festival στο Πεδίον του Άρεως organized by the French Institute in Greece.
«The trees in Pedion tou Areos, as well as the sky that hangs above it and the rock beneath those trees, may have a lot of knowledge that we as humans wandering on those hills, may not know. How can we learn from them? What do we want to learn from them? Are we ready to hear what they have to tell us? How do we relate to them, how do they relate to us? What is their experience of the city? How would we develop the means to hear their stories? We believe that by asking the right questions, one can begin to hear the stories of the trees. And as with any conversation, by listening to others we listen to ourselves. We aim to bring to light the stories, conscious and unconscious, that we relate to the hill, the trees, the parks, the public green spaces of our city.
We are a fluid group composed by different women at different times. At the time of writing this proposal we were Auriane Blanc, Thalia Dimitropoulou Maria Juliana Byck, Fotini Gouseti, Eliana Otta and Sanem Su Avcı.»
Invitation text in Greek:
«Mouries, κάτω από τα δέντρα»
Οι Mouries είναι μία ομάδα γυναικών απ’ όλη την Ελλάδα και όχι μόνο, αποτελούμενη σήμερα από τις Gutierez Sanchez, Βασιλική Σηφοστρατουδάκη, Auriane Blanc, Θάλια Δημητροπούλου, Maria Juliana Byck, Φωτεινή Γουσέτη, Eliana Otta και Sanem Su Avcı. Οι Mouries συνεργάζονται με τον ανεξάρτητο πολιτιστικό φορέα σύγχρονης τέχνης, Yellow Brick, για να δημιουργήσουν από κοινού ένα χώρο απελευθέρωσης των θεραπευτικών και μαντικών ικανοτήτων μας, μέσα από τη βαθιά σύνδεση με την φύση. Μας προσκαλούν να τις ακολουθήσουμε, ανεξαρτήτως της γλώσσας που μιλάμε, για να μάθουμε να συνομιλούμε με τα δέντρα.
Thanks to Ila Ilarus’s great idea, The Garden of Nurturing Knowledges became a crepe’s lovers hotspot, as one of the closing events of the beautiful School of the We, which finished in October. Another great event hosted by rotor, which in this case was very much appreciated by the children passing by!
This Wednesday the 8th! We open our intervention in FLUC’s billboards around Pratersten in Vienna.
How to breathe in public?
Eliana was born in Lima, Olia in Minsk, Petra in Rijeka, Ruthia in Almaty, and Sonja in Naarm / Melbourne: three and a half different continents. We got to know one other in Vienna in the trembling summer of 2020: a year in which coming together and creating new collective ties was particularly unlikely, and in that sense all the more significant.
Thinking about the question how to breathe in public space ?, we adapted the game “exquisite corpse” to the digital spaces in which we work and communicate. We felt the urge to divorce public space from its modern attachment to the nation-state, legal property structures, and therefore the exclusion of othered geographies and bodies.
The layered, complicated image files we built together over a period of eight months engage with ornamental obfuscation and illustrative illusion, a wild, hopeful tessellation of more extra-human than human elements. Right now, the images lurk in our laptops and on our file-sharing platforms, waiting for the right moment to proliferate in the world.
As you see, the images didn’t quite make it to the fluc billboards. Here, you instead find a short story of im / possibility: a deep inhalation containing the promise of a collective, coming exhalation. (1)
ELOLSOPERU / Eliana Otta, Olia Sosnovskaya, Sonja Hornung, Petra Mr ?? a, Ruthia Jenrbekova are artists, organizers and researchers living in Vienna and other places.
(1) The font we chose for the text on the billboards, “OCR-B”, was created in 1968 and intended to be easily legible for both machines and humans.
