VIGIL: 2XU

“2XU” is a performance-research project that unfolds in-between spaces and human-specific elements. The research practice highlights a set of tasks based on a communication archive made of texts, sounds, voices, movements, and videos of the Athenian sound/landscape and on interviews with local and international artists, activists, and other practitioners. This archive tends to form a “third” common language that will be practiced and re-approached, suggesting a collage of different phenomenologies related to the city. This notion of a “third language” is based on the writing of Ocean Vuong: “Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.”

This “language” works as an adaptive mechanism to re-understand and rewire a newly perceived space. As a process of living bodies overwhelmed with chaotic and numerous stimuli and memories, a process that reincarnates and adapts between a personal and public space, rageful and aware. “A matter of now” and a matter of an honest approach to our coming-of-age journey.

Athens bursts with sensory, architectural, and physical chaos, multiplicity and complexity. Effort therefore arises as an adaptive mechanism and as a performative practice, creating a possible manual of survival, growth, and friendship in the urban cavity of Athens. Moreover, this survival effort seems crucially linked with Athens, as the city undergoes a rapid and violent change. The empowerment of a community engaged in loving and protecting the ecology of Athens from alienation appears to be central to our practice, artistic or otherwise.

Qualitative research methods (interviews) will activate participatory and city-specific practices to connect with a community and to create a sensory and honest “language” of resilience in chaos.