"Undone and done again" - A conversation with Nuno Cassola

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I'm having a conversation with Nuno Cassola, a Portuguese filmmaker and cinematographer based in Athens. Working in the intersection of cinema, anthropology and fictional archaeology, Nuno's artistic practice revolves around the notion of alterity and body displacement through an array of different media, including video, photography, sound, installation, objects, texts and actions. Nuno is also one of the co-founders of Khora, a community center committed to provide services to anyone that needs them. Nuno is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement V, focusing on modes of governance through a collective research on the notion of self-organization. In this conversation, we discuss about the values of solidarity and community through experiences of moving in search for the other. Nuno welcome to Pali-Room!

Hello, Myrto. Thank you very much for having me here.

Thank you for joining me today. It seems to me that the experience of moving has been an integral part of your life, but also there is an ongoing thread in your body of work which has to do with movement, with the notion of crossing and the idea of the border as this in-between space. So I am wondering what is moving for you?

I think a lot of things are moving. I don't know how to pinpoint everything that is moving. Fortunately, I have the privilege of choosing where I want to go. I have a passport that allows me to go. Somehow these movements, I think, came from the perception that most of my life I was encountering or being crossed or getting to know people that were very similar to me. In the village that I was born, everyone was very similar to me, with similar backgrounds, similar images and similar ideas. Then at the city, close to my village and then when I went to university. It doesn't mean that everyone was thinking the same. I am not talking about this homogenous thing, but in terms of bodies and the way that bodies work and the way that they feel and interact with others, the way that they propose a different type of life or a different type of action in this planet. So I didn't have this confrontation with the others. When I moved outside of Portugal, traveling a little bit alone through Europe on my own and going to other places, I would start realizing that other people exist. It seems very nonsense or very common sense and very naive to say this, but it is kind of true. There are other people in the world. It is not just people that I see from magazines or newspapers or the TV or the internet at the time, but seeing on the street and so on. And then, when I went to Brazil to do this Master's degree and I traveled in some of the countries in South America, that was where I was confronted with the actual other that is very different from me, that moves in a different way and looks different from me. And of course, Portugal having this very old relation, a very tricky one and very problematic one -not understood from the Portuguese side- with Brazil -or at least not reflecting on the relationship that existed between Portugal and Brazil. This was when I was more confronted with my background.

How do you try to convey that through your works?

I think in the beginning, it was very reflected on me until this Master. I think the Master was the moment that I was pointing the work, the recordings -with an audio recorder or with a camera- or drawings or writing or performative or action based stuff towards me -what I was feeling, what I was experiencing, what I wanted to do, these curiosities of things that I would see. That was very pointed to me. I think I stopped looking at me. So I went to do this Master, I went back to Portugal and then I wanted to go back to Brazil because I enjoyed it very much. Then I returned and I stayed there for four years. It was the first time that I felt like someone that wasn't me. I think this was very crucial for pointing the camera towards the other. At the same time, starting to have the consciousness and being aware of the power of the camera to point to another one that I just met or with all the problematics that arise from cinema and from all this historical background that we have -who grabs the camera, who has the economical possibility to buy a camera, who points the camera to whom, who tells the story of the other, with all the problematics. It was for me a significant step or stage to point the camera to the other person.

Can you give an example of one of your earliest works when you started doing that?

I was in a village city in the Amazon, one of the villages which they call "ribeirinho", the people that live next to the Amazon River. I was invited to go there because I met a filmmaker, Jorge Bodanzky. He told me that he couldn't go to this invitation. He used to go there because there was this program from a university from Pará, in Belém, that they would invite artists and researchers from Brazil to travel for 15 days or more in a boat going up the river and present work and discuss and talk and hang out. Sometimes the boat would stop and they would be workshops done there, at these places that they call "ribeirinhos", that are the people that live in the villages that are settled next to the river bay. I think this was the first time that I went to the Amazon. I have been twice, both as part of this program, which was very good because most of the people that were part of the team and part of the group were from the region. It is very different from foreigners going there and hanging out and looking to the river and looking to the people and talking with people and so on.

I was the only Portuguese there. All of them were Brazilians. I met this kid. We were playing chess, which I am very bad at playing. There were all these kids that they were very good. It is not very difficult to be very good in chess in comparison to me, but they were very good and I was playing there and hanging out and talking with them, getting to know what they were doing and so on. They were little kids from a school there. The other people from the group, from this project, were doing workshops, photography workshops or other stuff. I had my camera and was somehow telling the kids how the camera works, just giving the camera to the kids, but in a very informal way, without any clear intention of what I was doing there. I remember that the school was far away from the harbor where the boat was parked and we had a truck that they rented to take loudspeakers and people from the boat to the school. I remember that I went to the school by motorbike, but I knew that there was a pickup to bring people and to bring equipment from the boat to the school and vice versa. We were cleaning everything and then I was already inside of the pickup and this kid, Mario Alves, that I met before, asked where we were going and I said that we were going to the harbor and he said "Oh, can I go with you?" I said, "Sure, of course!" All the other kids from the school were just walking, which is like a very long walk for a kid because they have shorter legs, so it takes longer. In that situation I felt that somehow that this little kid who was wit and smart was taking advantage of the foreigner and taking advantage of the foreigner's facilities or privilege. So then we went from the school to the harbor and then he just walked towards his house.

At that moment, I felt that I had met him before. So I started filming him. I was taking advantage of him and he was taking advantage of me, of this access that I had to the pickup. I was taking advantage of him, him being this figure that was already inscribed on the imagination of the other, of the exotic other, of all the things that were happening at the time. Of course, it was a very unbalanced power dynamic there, because I had the camera, I was white, being there as a foreigner and older with access to more layers of materiality, let's say. It was a very interesting exchange. This was the first time that I ever filmed someone else that was not me. It was very cool because there was this feeling or this image or this impression that he was feeling proud, at the same time a little bit scared because he was with people that he didn't know at all, but proud that he was able to go in a pickup and everyone else was walking towards their houses and also proud that he was being filmed, proud that he was able to go on a pickup. So it was all these mixtures of the way that I was reading and the way that I was seeing the situation. It was this relationship whatever that means. So this was the first time that I recorded someone.

Nuno, what brought you to Athens?

I was living for four years in Brazil, in São Paulo. I was based there doing things and getting to know people. I was also studying. I studied documentary filmmaking there. I was also studying visual anthropology at the university in São Paulo, and I was working and meeting people. I was hanging out, I was falling in love and falling out of love, having heartbreaks, undoing and doing myself in this period. At the time, I was getting a little bit tired of having to apply for visas and going outside of Brazil and coming back again to have six more months of tourist visas. Then I started getting too close to -I think it was something like a missionary thing that existed in Brazil, like a church facility that existed in the neighborhood there that was one of the few places that were welcoming migrants and refugees that were coming from Haiti. I started hanging out there and I started getting to know people, again from another place that I had never been. I knew that it existed, of course, because of the historic importance that Haiti has. So, I started talking with people there and got to know a little bit more why they were there or why they were coming to São Paulo and then I started getting curious about why they were coming to São Paulo, that was very far away. Also, I learned there that there is a religion in the country that is called voodoo. I think this can also relate with the previous question about all these moves, why do you move and what is moving you. I was always very curious about why I would go to other places. This was very internalized. "Why do I move?" Basically because I can. So then I would do that and then starting to look towards the others, whether the others can or cannot and if they can choose or they cannot choose to move. I was very curious about why they would go to Brazil, why they would move to another place, why they were being forced, if they were choosing, not choosing, what amount of choice did they have when they decided to, or whether they were pushed or not. It is not so much black and white or one and zero, because I guess that even if you are forced to move to another country, there are some instances that you can choose. Maybe it is not the movement itself that you can choose, but you can choose what you bring with you perhaps, what you bring inside of your suitcase or what you actually bring inside of you to another country. So I was very curious about this.

Then I applied to this university, to this program of visual anthropology with a research project for two years to hang out basically with this population, with these communities in São Paulo and to research about what they would bring -material and immaterial. This was in 2015. This was the moment that people were arriving from the Mediterranean, from Turkey, coming from the Middle East, from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and all these places. Because I was getting to know all this information by newspapers and media outlets, I decided to come here at least to get to know from my experience, my eyes and my body and my hands and so on. So then I came here, I stayed here for a month and a half. I traveled. I stayed two weeks in Athens, I stayed two weeks in Idomeni and then stayed two weeks in Athens and then I went back to Portugal, I grabbed my visa and went back to Brazil. When I arrived to Brazil after a couple of months of applying for the thing getting the paperwork for this project, there was the coup d'etat and they changed governments from Dilma to Temer and then the new president cut all the scholarships for new projects at universities as an austerity measure and the way that he dealt with the country. So then I was there with a research visa that didn't allow me to work in any other field, in any other university or company or whatever. Then, I decided to come here, to Greece.

What did you do here when you first arrived?

I arrived, I stayed for some weeks at Yorgos's house, that is a friend of a friend of mine. I arrived here without knowing any single person. The same thing that I did the first time that I went to Brazil. Curious enough, one of the times that I was leaving my house and going to the center -these were the first weeks or the first days of living in that area of Athens- I passed in front of a building that existed on Asklipiou, in a corner, and I saw some people working outside, cutting wood and bringing buckets of paint and bringing trash from inside out. Everyone was dressed in a funny way, let's say, not in a conservative way. I just saw them and felt very inquired by what was happening there and then I just went to the center. The second time that I came from my house I did the same route from Asklipiou, passing in front of the same building, different people still with non-conservative outfits, doing similar things, bringing trash out, bringing trash in, bringing furniture in, bringing trash out, buckets of paint and all this old hardware equipment, somehow a construction thing. I don't remember with whom I talked. I think it was with Sam who doesn't live here anymore. And then I asked what they were doing there. They said "Oh, we are fixing this building because we are starting a community center here that is called Khora". So, I said, "I have some ideas and this is very cool. I just arrived in Greece and I have this idea that I want to have cinema workshops to teach people how to make movies and so on. Do you think it is possible to do something inside?" And they said, "Yeah, maybe, just come to the meetings or just come inside and then help us fix this". It might be this conversation or it might be another one. "Just come here and just come on board". From that day until now, I have been part of Khora. I think they had been there for like a month and then we still had two months of fixing the place and opened the building in October 2016.

But now you are in a different building.

Yes. This building was closed, the one that was operating for two years. We had to close this one because of the municipality of Athens. Now, we have three other places, one that is on Aiginis street that is a three storey building. We have a community kitchen on Spetson and Kastalias street and we have the free shop, which is still on Asklipiou very close to the old building. So now we have three spaces, but this is mainly one of the big things that I am doing in Athens, or this is what I did almost exclusively I would say for many years. And now, it's been a while that I try to balance the work that I do in Khora with the rest of the city and the rest of my interests and my desires that I have in the city. Khora taught me a lot. I learned a lot. It is one incredible school. It is one incredible rite to go through, but the rest of the city also exists. Khora is inserted in a neighborhood, in a city. So, it is also part of this.

I was about to ask you, actually, where do you see your filmic practice stand in relation to your more activist and collective work?

I can say that this initial idea that I had of coming to Athens after spending here a month and a half and then arriving here again and being granted access to this space, that was Khora at the time, and having this idea to make workshops and teach people how to make movies and so on, is still a big interest of mine, but at the time, there was one realization that I had, that was that through the work that we were doing there, through the amount of work that was demanded in the building to be done in order to do something, as I wanted to do, teaching people how to make movies in order for other people to make movies as well, that this needs to have sustainability. Sustainability not in the sense of things staying forever, but to stay there for a long time. From my previous arrival to Athens, in Greece and then at Khora, I was seeing that there was a lot of this European fetish, the saviors that come here, they do a workshop, they come here, they do a documentary and they leave. They do a workshop of photography or painting in fabric and teaching people how to make movies or to work with the camera and they leave.

This was an initial sense that I had when I arrived and when we started with Khora and then it was more developed and became more complex throughout the years that I have been living in the city. This city needs structures, needs places and needs projects and structures that stay in the city. It is not a workshop that we need, a workshop in the sense that there is a limited amount of time, like four-three months. We need a space that is a cinema school to teach people how to make movies like a free one, with free access, with equipment and teachers, that questions the relationship between teachers and students. So I think this has influenced me. This is not so much the way that I have been filming. It is somehow my reflections about cinema and the importance of cinema as a tool for change and a tool for telling stories, other types of stories. Making movies and making food in order to create and allow for different ways of relating with the other and hopefully abolishing racism and inequality and all this colonial background and processes that still operate until today.

I think food and cinema are two very good tools. One, because we need to eat every day, so we just cook and somehow the food that one cooks goes inside of the other person's body. In a very poetic way, somehow the other person is inside of another person, like one person eats the other one. I was discussing this with Harry, one of the times that we were hanging out. We were talking about food and I was saying that when I cook for you, Myrto, for example, I choose the ingredients or I choose the spices. So somehow I am represented, let's say, in the food that I am cooking. When you eat the food that I cook, somehow this representation goes inside of you and then your body processes this food. So somehow there is this anthropophagic element when one cooks to the other and one cooks to a collective or when a collective cooks to the other collective or when a group cooks to another group. There is this exchange of organic matter that went through a transformation that that group or that person did on that organic matter.

It is also the elimination of the self through the other and the transformation to something else.

Yes, it could be because your body then absorbs the nutrients and the vitamins and the minerals that exist in the food. So in a way it is one projection of the self that goes inside of the other -an image or an action or a shape, a form that goes inside of the other- in the sense of a dish that would also feed you. It is something that doesn't eliminate you. It doesn't erase something from you. It just adds.

This need for structures that you mentioned before and what you have been talking about also brings me back to this notion of autonomy that you mentioned before in relation to self-organization and how we have to create the structures in order to exercise our own autonomy.

Yeah. Well, I didn't say this. It would be amazing if I had said that.

You were inspired.

I am very inspired by Judith Butler. Yes, and I am not saying this in a general sense. I think the preciousness of all these thinkers and people that act and at the same time, they think and they try to reflect while they act and while they discuss with other people, for example Judith Butler and others, is that they say it in a way that we can reflect on the place that we live. They are not a global strategy or a universal strategy of saying, "Oh, we have to have these", but somehow these sentences and these ideas and these proposals or this need basically resonated a lot with me in the place that I am right now, which is Athens, which is a city that lacks of structures, just lacks of places that people can meet. She was talking about it in very basic terms. I think it was food, shelter, safety, health and education, if I am not mistaken. Most likely I am wrong or I am mistaken of what she said or what she wrote. When these things are covered, not in the sense that they are covered by the state, which would be ideal, or that they are covered by a private company that just makes profit out of it, but they are covered by the neighborhoods, by the people that live in the neighborhoods, by the structures that need to exist in a neighborhood in order for a healthy relationship to exist with the place that we live in, with the locality of the place that we live in. When we have these -and I believe the same- this is when we can start exercising our autonomy, because when we don't have these structures to support us basically... We need to have all these basic needs supported in order then to start exercizing it and to start questioning it. I am not saying that this doesn't happen when one doesn't have the structures, but I think it is just to allow for more people to exercize that autonomy.

Was Khora the first time that you were involved in a self-organized initiative?

Like completely dived in, yes. I was in contact with others. I was part of other collectives. I didn't start any collective before. I started one in Porto, which was an art collective. It was in São Paulo, basically. That was the place that I was confronted with self-organization, with collectives towards political movements and anarchist movements and squats. I was involved there, but to some extent. I was there just hanging out and also at the same time learning, participating in the assemblies, trying to do stuff, proposing some ideas, but never fully involved as I was in Khora. Again the consciousness about the other came in that place, in that geographical region, the consciousness about the city as well, the consciousness of who has the right to live in the city, who has the right for the city, for whom the city is built -the debate that is an ongoing debate in São Paulo of who has the right to the city, who can live there, who can use it and how to use it. So it was very stressed in a good way, for me in a very healthy way or let's say in a productive way in a good sense. This was in 2013, all the movements and the clashes in the streets in São Paulo in 2013 that then ended up in Bolsonaro being a president now. But it was very vibrant. Everyone was in the streets demanding for cheaper public transportation. That transformed to what we see now in Brazil. But the whole situation, very exciting, the four years that I lived there, to have this consciousness, to have this contact, to have these processes. I learned this expression from Dona Haraway that says "undone and done again". So my self is undone by a situation and then it is done again. That relates a little bit with Suely Rolnik, this resonance of how we meet the other and all these things. It is a very cool one. So I think I was undone and done many times for the four years that I lived there as, in a way, in Greece or since I moved to Athens and other places that I have been since I have been living here. I have been undone and done many times, which is great because this is how I want to live my life, actually.

So it is again about a lot of movements, I would say, the way that you describe it and perhaps it is not a coincidence that you are part of a movement at The School of Infinite Rehearsals to move a bit the discussion. Since you are so much actively involved with Khora what was your urgency to apply for the program?

I think the urgency comes from having the time to think, the exclusive time to think, from the privilege of having time to question or to research, to share and to make questions and to listen to what other people say about issues of self-organization, about ways of organizing together, about how food arrives in the city, how food is produced in Athens and Greece. Also, having the privilege of having time. We got a fee from the program that covered the seven weeks, for the period that we were doing the residency and also from me choosing to be exclusive during these seven weeks for the residency. I think the urgency comes from the five years being part of Khora and part of this city and trying to learn more about the city, but at the same time always on the move and always responding to emergencies in the way that Khora has been operating, unfortunately or fortunately. We have been responding too much to urgencies and emergencies rather than proposing things. Also, we didn't have much time to reflect. I also didn't have much time to reflect on the five years that we have been as Khora, for example, on the ways of organizing, the ways of thinking, ways of deciding and so on, which also blocks a little bit the learning from other experiences and from other people, from what other people have been doing. Maybe it is helpful, maybe it is not helpful. Maybe we can apply some things or maybe not. Maybe we can apply everything. Maybe we apply a few strategies or a few tools. This was the urgency to apply for this program, to have these seven weeks of immersion in this topic.

At the same time, the immersion in this topic and also the immersion of the six people that were part of the movement, of talking or reading or going through books or proposing things, or even us just trying to decide on things was already a part of it -where to go or how to do this, what other spaces to go to. Even everything that we didn't do and we wanted to do is part of it, because there was a reason for that. We can take something from why we didn't go to all the places that we wanted to go. It was part of our decision-making, how we were organizing and how we were sharing responsibilities and say "you take care of this and you take care of that", and maybe the person didn't take care of it. Maybe the other one did. And then this came out from the seven weeks of the residency. Even just "living" together for seven weeks when everyone came from collectives, from collective governance. It was very good. It was very inspiring. I think this is the reason that I applied for this. Also to question the sense of -and this is why I brought this book and this came later in the residency- the word and the concept of self-organization -self-organization and this idea that is the self that organizes oneself. At the same time it can be a very individualistic thing even when we have a structure or a group that self-organizes it might tend to a blindness towards the other structures that already exist in the city or that exist in the country or that exist in the continent. And this is where I bring a new concept. I'm going to open up the book here.

What book did you bring?

I brought Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chtulocene by Donna J. Haraway. Well, I did this thing. I wrote in all the languages that we were speaking -no, actually, we are missing Indonesian. Well, Harry, sorry for this. I will try to update it on another version. So, there is self-organization in English. This was the common language that we were using. There is "auto organização" which is in Portuguese. Then, "αυτο-οργάνωση" in Greek, "auto organizacíon" in Spanish and " örgütlenme" in Turkish. The circles around in red are the elements that refer to the self. So the self/auto -which is similar to αυτό, me- and then "n" in örgütlenme is referring to the self, like organizing the self. Haraway has this part of the book that she talks about sumpoesis. Can I read a little bit?

Of course.

OK. This is chapter three from "Staying with the trouble". She calls this: Sympoiesis, Symbiogenesis and the Living Arts of Staying With the Trouble. This is still the title, it is not the text itself. "Sympoeisis is a simple word. It makes making-with. Nothing makes itself. Nothing is really autopoetic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer world game, earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated historical systems. It is a word for word linguists in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generative unfurls and extends it." So, having this notion of sympoiesis I propose that we stop saying self-organization and we start saying symorganization or "sym organização" or "συν-οργάνωση" or "symorganizacíon" or I don't know how it would be in Turkish.

And we still need to find out how it would be in Indonesian.

Indonesian and Turkish. Proposing that we change the way that we relate also to self-organization because words carry a lot of meaning and are part of the way that we relate. This is a layer of how to relate with reality. I think this proposal of "symorganization" allows for more symbiosis in-between organizations that exist and in-between collectives that exist in the city, for example. For us to have inside the word the way that we operate in our groups, having the consciousness of this new word, of this new concept, is that we are aware that we are not alone in the city or that we are not alone organizing a community kitchen, for example, that there are other structures in the neighborhood in Kypseli and somehow having this sense that we are interdependent and we need other people and we need to have a network in-between these places -at the same time now that it has become very trendy to use this scientific word, the mycelium, for the mushrooms that have all these structures and they are all connected.

It is really weird that we have been involved or talking about a self-organization within our groups and always expressing the desire to work more horizontally, work collectively, and we have never kind of questioned the very own term that includes the self.

The self, yeah.

So I am glad that you are bringing that up and I want to move a bit and ask you during these seven weeks -you mentioned before food, which was one of your research interests- how did your individual research interest come to relate to the more collective research that you did together as a group?

I think this initial research came and went. It was also very interesting to understand the dynamics of the group and listening to how the group operates, functions, performs and acts; to understand that perhaps some ideas that we had in the beginning we had to put them to the side and then bring them later or not; but also to understand the space or to understand that maybe we are talking too much. Let's leave the other people -maybe through the privilege perspective that I feel that Margarita and I have because we are from the city, so we have a lot power of proposing some things because we are from here. If you are from outside you can say, "OK, do your thing because you know more the city". We are here researching about this topic. So it is also to understand these dynamics of knowing to listen more than to talk, and I think this is a good skill to have, to listen.

Speaking of listening, one of the exercises that you proposed for the group during the seven weeks and you did that twice was that you cooked silently. On the first instance as well we ate silently together, which was really fun for me to be part of that and I was wondering, what was there for you?

One of the first times was us going to the fridge and seeing what is in the fridge and deciding what we were going to do before we cook. This was the first attempt. The second attempt was deciding on the recipe or someone proposing a recipe, we all have the recipe in front of us printed on a piece of paper and then cooking silently, ordering the food, ordering the ingredients to do that recipe that we did, the vegetarian makloubeh. The third one would be for everyone to bring stuff, to bring products, to bring ingredients -we wouldn't know in advance what we were going to do-, put them on top of the table and then deciding from what everyone brought what there was going to be cooked in silence. What that was for me? It was to decide without talking, to exercise other ways of decision-making, because we talk a lot and we use a lot of sounds. It was just to try out how it would be to decide on things and to decide how to cook and the amounts of salt and which spices or not to put and which ingredients and who does what throughout the whole process of cooking. Cooking together already demands an organization in order not to be a mess and not to be a chaos, because you would need to have the food in the end. So having the sense that already cooking together demands levels of organization. If we erase the layer of speech with words, we have to act in and we have to exercise other languages. For me it was this, to see how we can we decide on things without talking.

Interestingly enough, the first time that you didn't have a recipe the process was much faster.

Actually it was, yes. We didn't have a recipe, but we had a sense of what we were going to cook. So it was just more about how to use other other tools, other languages too.

Also language is a form of power because, of course, not all of us share the same first language. So the way that each of us is more fluent in English, for example, would also create certain power dynamics, I believe. For me, it is really interesting that you decided to eliminate that part and try to make a decision otherwise.

Yeah. Actually, I never realized this. So thank you very much. But I guess yes, for sure. So then we were just operating with gestures which had to be translated. Even those gestures have to be translated for example.

True.

When you speak, you don't need to be looking to the other person's body to understand what the person is saying, because it sounds and sounds travel, right? But gestures, when you don't talk, you have to actually look to the other person and look into the eyes or look into the body and translate what the person is saying. This demands more attention. So this demands more dedication to the other, to the other's way of expressing, to the other's language, what the other person is trying to say through another medium that is not voice or words. This makes it more focused on the other and not so distracted, let's say, that you can just do whatever while the other person is saying. As we do, for example, with music. We listen to music while we are doing other things. We put a podcast while we are doing other things. We don't need to be looking to the person talking to understand what the person is saying by using that language.

You also cooked at Khora as a group together. How was that?

Well, it was very fascinating. It was very fascinating. I have to thank everyone. That was very lovely that all of them accepted to cook there on the last day of the residency. It was my first time as well being the chef there, kind of leading the decision-making somehow or facilitating a little bit more or having a little bit more power on the decision-making of what we were cooking, even if there it became more open. Joey and Harry were cooking something else. They were frying some onions, but I was in charge of the quantities in order to have the amount of meals that we needed to have for that day.

How many meals did you make?

I think we did between 350-400.

In collaboration with the team of Khora?

Yes, with other volunteers from the kitchen. It was wonderful, going there, arriving there at 9:00 a.m. in the morning and coming out of the kitchen at around 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon. Chopping, cooking, cleaning, serving, packing and then cleaning the whole building before leaving. Everyone stayed until the end from our group and it was a privilege for me. I felt very lucky that everyone said yes, that everyone supported and cared for my proposal, for my suggestion to cook there. It was a way of sharing with others that are not from the city and with whom I have been sharing the last seven weeks together a part of myself and it is also another way of relating with a space that exists in the city that is not just you going there to have a conversation or asking for stuff or making questions and going through like a small interview or doing a tour of the space. It is just a different level of relating with a space.

I would like to close our conversation today with a quote from Ailton Krenak, from the book Ideas for postponing the end of the world that you proposed to me. Actually, you were reading it and I took the chance to read it as well. It is a very small book that talks about indigenous and other forms of knowledge. Krenak says: "Our time is specialized in producing absences in the sense of living in society, in the very sense of the experience of life. This generates a great intolerance towards those who are still able to experience the pleasure of being alive, dancing and singing, and it's full of small constellations of people around the world who dance, sing and make it rain. My provocation about postponing the end of the world is exactly to always be able to tell one more story." So this idea that we always have time for one more story and I am wondering, what is your next story?

I think there are a few. I think continue being undone and done constantly. Understanding that situations, feelings and emotions can live in the same body and that it is not such a dichotomy between two elements inside of me, always a struggle. I think this is one of them, to understand that a lot of things that can live inside of me and then can be nourished and that they are not conflicting. They don't erase each other. I just wanted to say one thing before. I think when Krenak says "to always be able to tell one more story" is to have more people to tell more stories. Because we can still tell stories, but if there are the same people telling the same story or if there are the same people telling stories then the diversity of stories is not very big, it is not very wide. So I think when he says this, and of course he comes from the Krenak nation, it is also for them to be able to tell the stories. I think this is one of the teachings that I got, the learnings.

To have more people that are able to listen.

And to tell stories, because I think this is what we are doing here in this planet, which is just to tell stories and to listen to stories and then we just produce all these fictions around us, like the houses, the cities, the bureaucracy and the money and so on in order for us to tell stories -love stories or hate stories or disputes, a murder or mystery, all these things. But what he claims and this is the thing that I learned from reading a lot of indigenous knowledge and indigenous stories from Brazil is that what they claim is not so much "everyone should live the way that we live and everyone should change their ways of living in order to save the planet because we are dependent on the planet that we are living", but he is just saying, "let us live this way", meaning that you can also find other ways, other types of ways of living, meaning that you can also create and can tell other types of stories. Our imagination is very captured by the place that we are living in and the structures that we are living and what they say is that we can tell other stories. If we told these stories until now, -we told the story of money, we told the story of democracy, we told the story of cities, we told the story of marriage, we told the story of education- we can also tell other stories. These are all fictions. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is crystallized. So it is just a matter of telling other stories. Everyone has a single story and everyone has a different story that we can nourish and we can facilitate more and more people to tell more and more different stories.

I will keep that, that everyone has a different story and thank you for sharing yours. It's been lovely talking with you. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much Myrto!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more Conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.