evá papadakis: Gynaekokastro

Inspired by Spyros Karydakis' novel "Gynaekokastro" (Women's Castle), the play proposes to create a (post)feminist social manifesto that combines traditional and contemporary elements.

Women, kerchiefed Amazons or Sarakatsani, live autonomously in a unique commune on the Greek mainland's Pindos highlands, free from the outside world and oppressive male presence. There, a young man lives a life that is both ascetic and sexual because the women only want him for his masculine traits; he first works as a hunter and then fathers dozens of children. A metaphysical event exacerbates his sense of alienation from what he had hitherto considered reality and eliminates the concepts of space and time. The women turn out to be fairies, and the village transforms into a world on the verge of reality and fantasy, the modern and the primordial.

"Gynaecocastro" addresses both topical and timeless issues such as patriarchy, female empowerment, gender identity, and sexuality. It is a work that is rich in fantasy, myths, and pagan overtones, comprising an orgiastic blend of realism and surrealism.

Foregrounding paradox, surprise, and the seemingly incongruous as new ways of seeing the world, the performance will also combine polyphonic singing, electronic music, elliptical polyglot speech, traditional and ritual choreographies, and more. The final product will also incorporate concert film and visual poetry elements to highlight the features of the Greek mainland and create a distinct sci-fi ambiance.

This process of "grafting" will combine elements that were previously unconnected. Based on ethnological and folkloric research, it will bring to the stage the customs and traditions of the Greek countryside, with particular emphasis on public and private rituals, which will be given new significance through their juxtaposition with contemporary elements. Articles and studies on the interaction of gender oppression, sexuality, order, and the environment will be used as theoretical references.

It all began in Elafotopos about seven years ago, when I visited the alpine-zone village in Zagori region for the first time. Since then, something inside me shifts whenever I visit it, as I learn more through materials, myths, memories, and folk traditions about the numerous little villages, their local speech, the everyday life of their inhabitants, how they make rennet, and how the weft becomes the weave.

My research focused on shaping a (meta)feminist manifesto that emerges not as a slogan but as lived experience, through the friction between the primordial and the contemporary, the earthly and the metaphysical, the real and myth. It was organized around a practice of ‘grafting’: rituals of the Greek countryside, polyphonic songs, electronic music, cinematic fragments, customs of public and private domains, and narrative mechanisms that stretch from paganism to contemporary texts of feminist ecocriticism.

My aim was not to collect material; it was to inhabit it. To let it shift the way I perceive place, body, gender, community, and power.

A pivotal moment in the process was when I realized that the work would be neither ‘about place’ nor ‘about the heroines’ but about what is born at the point where they meet. “Gynaekokastro” began as an idea for a stage piece, and during the residency, I ended up writing a short film. The methodology I follow is never linear, nor entirely fixed. I embarked on a kind of wandering, sifting through notes not as a linear narrative but as a fragmentary palimpsest: poetic shards, words like bursts of breath, images like small gestures. A personal way of inhabiting collective memory, at times rewriting it and at other times erasing it.

The archival references (articles, films, photographs, sound documents) that accompanied me during the research always had a political backbone, intersecting the oppressions of gender, sexuality, class, and the environment. In practice, the multimedia installation I created for the Open Days in order to present textures from the forthcoming film gave me the space to say that “Gynaekokastro” is neither a revival of tradition nor a folkloric invocation, because “Gynaekokastro” requires a multilayered ‘Epirotic sci-fi’ atmosphere that allows tradition to become unfamiliar once again and the future to speak with the voice of the ancient.

My residency also gave me a sense of community: brief encounters, conversations with mentors, and exchanges with other Fellows, which became pillars of support. A significant milestone was the research trip we took with the Onassis AiR team to Elafotopos and the surrounding villages, and the stories of people I came to know better or for the first time. My writing began to ground itself more in the tension that arises in the attempt to graft heterogeneous elements and practices so that the delicate balance between the personal and the collective, the familiar and the metaphysical, is not betrayed.

In the end, what was born is not a closed work but an open glossary of experiences, translated into scenes and prepared for shooting. “Gynaekokastro” remains for me a continuous transition. A place that calls me to return, just as happens with the stories my grandmother used to tell me, which do not close but open again, and perhaps this is the most essential fruit of this period of research.

In conclusion, in this work, the personal and collective come together like the ingredients of bread as we knead the dough, with force, with tenderness, with ritual. It is a process that leaves marks. And “Gynaekokastro,” as I feel it now, is exactly that, a mark that tradition leaves on the future, and a future that dares to look back without being afraid to break apart and be born again.