Yota Argyropoulou - Critical Practices Program

My visits to the Οnassis AiR space started much earlier than the residency period for which I was selected, much earlier than the Critical Practices Spring Program. The reason for my attraction and constant return to the site was and remains the same: its energy, its vision, the desire for change and research, the belief in experimentation and the exploration of new horizons, the emphasis on the human value, the daily effort to self-improve and contribute to a community that is being built before our eyes.

I started my residency full of ideas and with a craving to meet peοple I do not know, to re-introduce myself to peοple I did not “really” know and to explore the way in which I would like to start a new path as an artist, parallel to the path I am already following.

Apart from the Οnassis AiR team, I had the good fortune to meet and work closely with two mentors/playwrights on my artistic idea, Miguel Angel Melgares and Igor Dobričić. The pandemic imposed its own flow on the progression of the residency and, thus, I continued to work online with both the Οnassis AiR team and my two mentors, who were based in Amsterdam and Berlin respectively. The development of an artistic concept was the reason and occasion of our online meetings, but, while we were fervently discussing ideas, philosophical implications, artistic practices, contemporary artists, my ideas and the script that I delivered each time, in the background of our individual screens appeared our partners, our children, and us having our good and bad days due to the quarantine and the fear of the pandemic.

The result: the beginning of a project, ALEX(A). On the occasion of the residency’s Open Studio Day, when we got out of quarantine and returned to the space, I acquired Alexa, an object of artificial intelligence, and started rehearsing with it, initiating discussions and inventing scripts. I chose a room in the house of Οnassis AiR to rehearse and then do the performative presentation of the project. I invited a teenager to participate in the project’s performance and I created a setting for the presentation made with simple objects and materials I found on site.

On the night of the presentation, just before we started, coming through the window we heard the sounds from the demonstrations taking place in the center of Αthens in favor of the right to march. With this echo in the background —another sign, like many others that we constantly encountered with my mentors and which connected us to the project we were working on— the presentation began. It was the result of my research during the time of my residency on ideas such as technology, democracy, contemporary Greece, the revolutionary nature of adolescents, the vision of youth and the frustration of adulthood, demonstrations, police violence, the confusion of our political identity, the fear of death, artificial intelligence, etc.

In the summer, during August, I spoke with one of my mentors online about the presentation and he told me that he felt like the “godfather” of my project. I thought about this for many days after and it made me smile. He was right. On the occasion of this residency, through this project and our meetings, wonderful new connections were made that feed us and unite us in the present and the future.

Mentors/Dramaturges: Igor Dobričić, Miguel Angel Melgares.