The Onassis Foundation supports the bilingual publication of The Feel on the creative process of the Athens-based photographer Tasos Vrettos
How are you feeling for everything that happens on and off stage? The Onassis Foundation is the exclusive sponsor of the publication of a bilingual, extensive book on the photographer’s whole oeuvre. The publication is completing a broader presentation of Tassos Vrettos’s 40-year work, titled The Feel.
Tassos Vrettos’s photographic work The Feel. Backstage carries us to the largely unseen part of the lives of Greek and international performers of the clubbing, BDSM and drag scene in Athens, mostly a little before or after their acts on stage. The work’s material intersects with the history of gender activism, with social claims to sexual liberation, with the right to pleasure and self- determination, with the rituals of desire, with precarious living and free expression, as they surface in public spaces organized and established in an improvisatory and unofficial manner. From the extroversive, affluent years of post - Olympic Athens and the establishment of the Greek crisis, this photographic work reaches us today through differentiations linked to the dynamics of trans visibility and the complexity of queer culture.
The Feel. Backstage is presented, as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, at the industrial Hall A of Peiraios 260, in a way that invokes its visible relations, obscure mixes, affective possibilities and impossible representations: it takes the form of an ensemble, a multimedia installation that enacts an original choreography of moving images, a light installation, a sound environment, printed materials, scheduled live performances and the movement of the public.