Open Call | Virtual Workspaces by Lola Arias
My Documents
Share your screen
A series of workshops under the general title Virtual Workspaces, become a symbolic, virtual workspace for artists to communicate.
"My Documents"
by Lola Arias
“My Documents” is a lecture performance workshop where artists present personal research, a radical experience, a story that secretly obsess them.
“My Documents” has a minimal format: artists with their documents.
A way of bringing to light the kind of research that often gets lost in a nameless folder in a computer.
Learn more about "My Documents | Share your Screen" (pandemic version 2020)
For “My Documents | Share your Screen” (pandemic version 2020), Lola Arias invited several artists, from dance, documentary film, visuals arts, and theatre to delve into their personal archives.
In the new global version, artists from different parts of the world were virtually there, in their new domestic stage, showing their archive on a shared screen with the audience. The audience could see the performance live, make comments and exchange visions and insights afterwards.
In “Doing It,” the Portuguese actor and director Pedro Penim confesses a secret passion that takes him very far across the sea of the internet.
In “Make me Stop Smoking,” the Lebanese writer and director Rabih Mroué reconstructs the radical heterogeneous landscape of Lebanon, destroyed by crises and wars, with the aid of countless anonymous and personal documents.
In “Blue House,” the Chinese dancer and documentalist Zhang Mengqi shares her diary of the time she was locked in quarantine in Hubei province, as well as her art experiments in her father’s village.
In “Lázaro,” the Mexican theater company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol reconstructs the story of an actor who decides to change his face and name and become someone else.
In “Desireless,” Tania Bruguera, visual artist and activist from Havana, Cuba, will reconstruct the story of her mother – who recently died – and her country, through the things she found in her mother’s house.
Task for the Participants
For the workshop look for a personal archive (from photos to letters to videos to diaries, or any kind of obsession of collection that you never worked with before).
Start organizing the archive and think about a way to present the archive in a short lecture performance in front of the screen.
If you are looking for some inspiration, you can visit: https://lolaarias.com/my-documents/"
Lola Arias has presented "Audition for a Demonstration" as part of "Transitions 2: Central Europe festival" and "My Life After" as part of "Transitions 3: Latin America" festival by Onassis Stegi in November 2014 and 2015.
True to its mission to forge links with important institutions beyond Greece’s geographical borders, to support the professionalization of younger artists and to offer opportunities of connections within the international artistic community, Onassis Stegi is co-organizing the project Virtual Workspaces.
Artists from diverse artistic backgrounds, maintaining a transdisciplinary approach to their practice, offer the opportunity of a creative working space, involving a group of professionals from various backgrounds.
Embracing the digital shift that we are experiencing, this series of online workspaces is to be seen as an area that aims to bolster cultural fermentation, to encourage creativity and to build constructive exchanges in relation to specific goals and problematics. It will strive to maintain interactive processes within this safe-space of a temporary, but so valuable virtual framework of a selected group of peers.
Each Virtual Workspaces workshop is designed to foster the circulation of ideas between professionals, very often also involving non-professionals, with the hope to provoke sustained engagement within each group, and nurture the potentiality of new collaborations beyond the frame of the digital environment.
We hope that Virtual Workspaces will prove especially useful in times of upheaval and uncertainty, and offer comfort when things feel out of control.
Dates: FEBRUARY 15, 19 & MARCH 1, 5 2021
Time: 2:00-5:00 PM Central European time / 3:00-6:00 PM Eastern European time
Duration: 3 hours each session
Place: Zoom platform
Application Deadline: Friday 5th February 2021
Notification of participants: by Friday 12th February 2021
ORGANIZERS:
Onassis STEGI (Athens)
Coordinators:
for Onassis Stegi: Christina Liata
for STUDIO teatrgaleria: Anna Lewanowicz (Initiator and Head of the Project)
Applications from artists with different activity profiles are welcome.
Selected participants need to have a laptop (or desktop) during the sessions, with Zoom installed on it.
Selected participants need to be willing to have the camera on in Zoom during the workspace sessions.
A group of twelve participants will be selected to take active part in the workspace.
Additionally, a group of participants will be selected to attend the workspace as observers.
There is no participants’ fee.
The sessions will be held in English.
The meetings will be video recorded via the Zoom platform.
