Fast Forward Festival 6

How to live together when we come from different social and cultural backgrounds? How do we coexist in the contemporary metropolis? How can we interact, and how can we talk about things that are foreign to us, unfamiliar, different?

The 6th Fast Forward Festival once again disrupts our certainties about art and life, exploring the notion of the commons and of solidarity initiatives from several perspectives and fields of knowledge with the tools of art and culture. Hybrid performances, installations and video works, which arise from monthslong collaboration with experts and local communities, while also exploring atypical public and private spaces, are presented for two weeks in the heart of the city.

Participating artists: Raqs Media Collective (India), Koki Tanaka (Japan), Wu Tsang (USA), Franziska Pierwoss & Sandra Teitge (Germany), Marwa Arsanios (USA/Lebanon), Petros Moris (Greece), Tania El Khouri (Lebanon), Thomas Bellinck (Belgium).

Curated by: Katia Arfara

Production Management: Dimitra Dernikou, Vassilis Panagiotakopoulos

Line Production: Despina Sifniadou, Irilena Tsami, Kostis Panagiotopoulos

Assistants in Line Production: Dimitra Bouzani, Nikitas Vasilakis

Theatre Technical Manager: Lefteris Karabilas

Deputy Technical & Touring Manager: Philip Hills

Raqs Media Collective | Pamphilos

5 – 19 May / Patission 61 | 12:00-20:00

Commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

Free admission with entrance tickets

How deep do you have to dive to find what it is you are looking for? Inspired by the Antikythera shipwreck, and specifically by two of its lesser-known finds – the fragmented statue of a philosopher, and a cup inscribed with the name “Pamphilos” – the internationally renowned Raqs Media Collective from India are coming to Greece, invited over by the Fast Forward Festival 6 to dive deep into Athens

Opening hours: 12:00-20:00* *The exhibition closes at 18:00 on the following dates, when clusters are held: Monday 6, Wednesday 8, Saturday 11, Wednesday 15 and Saturday 18 May

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-pamphilos

The Pamphilos Conversations| 18:00-20:00

Free admission. Limited seats.| In Greek with simultaneous translation into English

6 May | Submarine Horizon

8 May | Wave

11 May | Current

15 May | Decompression

18 May | Buoyancy

The internationally renowned Raqs Media Collective from New Delhi are coming to Greece, invited over by Onassis Stegi and the Fast Forward Festival 6 to dive deep into Athens.

Inspired by the Antikythera shipwreck, Raqs investigate the concept of the commons in present-day Athens with an installation on the first floor of one of the city’s historic buildings, widely known as the House of Maria Callas. The same space will also host a parallel series of conversations that seek to explore the meaning of the word “Pamphilos”, found inscribed on a cup that was salvaged from the shipwreck.

Raqs deploy motifs such as diving and underwater excavations within the everyday life and urban fabric of a city in order to open up a space for discussion and exploration. All five of these evening discussions – titled “Submarine Horizon”, “Current”, “Buoyancy”, “Decompression”, and “Wave” – will be introduced by Raqs and chaired by Theodora Kapralou.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-pamphilos/fff6-pamphilos-conversations

6 May

Submarine Horizon

At the heart of “Submarine Horizon” is a Greek apophthegm by Socrates, which Raqs heard: “To help understand Heraclitus, you need the diver from Delos island.”

The key idea is to think aloud on what changes when one dives deep – into the sea, into thought, into life.

8 May

Wave

Does history have a sound?? What are the sounds of reciprocity and companionship, of the echoing and resonance of acts that reconstitute society?

11 May

Current

How does one swim for and against a strong current? Can this be taken as metaphor for the ways in which people orient themselves towards the presence of strong forces?

15 May

Decompression

The everyday acts of walking, sharing space and resources, and eating together make up the life-stuff of every city in the world. Undertaking them is like the decompression one needs to go through while coming up to the surface after a deep dive.

18 May

Buoyancy

No one can learn how to dive without learning how to stay afloat. What are the factors that keep people alive and kicking the depths of a crisis?

Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective (1992, Delhi, India) follows its self-declared imperative of ‘kinetic contemplation’ to produce a trajectory that is restless in its forms and exacting in its procedures. Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with time in all its tenses through anticipation, conjecture, entanglement and excavation. Conjuring figures of cognitive and sensory acuteness, Raqs’ work reconfigures perceptional fields, alters the terms of somatic co-presence, and demands that everyone looks at what they take for granted, anew.

Raqs have shown at various international exhibitions including Documenta and the Venice, Istanbul, Sao Paolo, Sydney, Taipei and Liverpool Biennales.

Wu Tsang | Installation One emerging from a point of view

5-19.5.2019 | Exhibition Hall | Onassis Stegi | 12:00-20:00

Co-comisssioned and co-produced by: Sharjah Art Foundation και Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

Free admission with entrance tickets

Can two women cross paths and yet never meet? Collapsing the boundaries between documentary and fiction, Wu Tsang presents a video installation – commissioned by the Fast Forward Festival 6 – that offers a different take on the phenomenon of migration. Set on the northeastern shore of Lesbos, Greece, the work revolves around a scenario which took place three years ago. Since 2011, more than 850,000 refugees have crossed into Europe through the Greek island of Lesbos, located in the Northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. Rather than attempt to document “truth,” Tsang takes a magical realist approach as she works in collaboration with her subjects to create a hybrid fantasy. As part of her video installation, Wu Tsang presents a series of photographs by Eirini Vourloumis, documenting the refugee crisis on the island of Lesbos. In English with Greek subtitles

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/one-emerging-point-view

Wu Tsang | Performance Sudden Rise | Main Stage | Onassis Stegi | 5 May | 21:00

European premiere

Tickets: Full price: 7 € Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 € People with disabilities, Companions, Unemployed & Groups 10+ people: 5 €

“Sudden Rise” is the latest piece of work from Moved by the Motion, the performance group founded by artist/filmmaker Wu Tsang and performance artist boychild. Along with collaborators cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, DJ and electronic musician Asma Maroof, and poet Fred Moten they create a performance that gives the impression of a living collage.The words and actions of activists, poets and influential essayists engaged with civil rights in the 20th century meet the lyrics of Jimi Hendrix, the musings of Hannah Arendt on a performance that is is formulated like an “exquisite corpse” (a Consequences-like game developed by the Surrealists during the interwar period). An incessant shifting between voice and image makes us wonder what remains stable in a world in constant motion. In English with Greek subtitles

Commissioned by EMPAC’s 10YEARS celebration.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/one-emerging-point-view/fff6-sudden-rise

Wu Tsang

Wu Tsang is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. Tsang’s projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally; She has received grants from Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow (Film/Video), a 2018 Hugo Boss Prize Nominee, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Marwa Arsanios | Installation: Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 2

Assembly: Commons between land and landlessness

5 – 19 May | Mellissa Network | Feron 18, Victoria Square

Mo-Fri: 18:00-21:00,| Sa-Su: 12:00-20:00: 18:00-21:00

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation, co-produced by Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Vooruit Belgium.

Free admission with entrance tickets

Can a women’s movement that aligns itself with nature avert the destruction of the Earth? Marwa Arsanios’ camera documents life in a village in north Syria – a commune inhabited only by woman – and draws attention to an alternative economy operating on the basis of different rules. Might it prevail as an alternative means of survival in the modern-day world? Arsanios’ SB14 commissioned film, “Who is afraid of ideology? Part 2” (2019), and the accompanying installation continue her research into Jinwar, a women-only village in the north of Syria, and extend her work to a farming cooperative close to the Syrian border in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. The Lebanese cooperative has created an informal, NGO-like structure that has become a safe space for Syrian refugee women.. Critiquing the top-down construction of state and party ideology, Arsanios’ study of feminist approaches to organizing a communal life with nature and non-human species proposes a way of decentralizing the role of the human mind as the primary actor in this process. In English with Greek subtitles.

Assembly | 9 May | 18:00-22:00

In Greek with simultaneous translation in English

Who does the land we live on belong to? What can we learn from the ways in which various communes around the world organize themselves?

Taking the question of dispossession as a starting point for this discussion, different speakers and participants will gather to think about possible common political grounds that can be activated in order to fight for a repossession of the commons today. What modes of resistance can be found in feminist approaches to the commons? What can we learn from a history of women's cooperatives and communes around the world and in Greece in Particular? What can we learn from self-organized camps in Greece? and most importantly, how can we fight mechanisms of expropriation?

Speakers that are coming from different political groups and academic backgrounds, will address these questions in short presentations and talks, leaving time for an open discussion with the audience.

Workshop | 6 & 7 May

Addressed to: Melissa Network of Migrant Women in Greece.

This workshop will consist of a collective sewing process bringing together different textile material that are relevant to the participants in one way or another. We will attempt at creating an image out of this process.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-who-afraid-ideology-part-2

Marwa Arsanios

Marwa Arsanios’ recent projects have revolved around questions of ecology, feminism, social organisation, nation-building, war, and economic struggle. She is a founding member of 98weeks, a research/project space and artists’ organization. She obtained her MFA from University of the Arts, London (2007) and was a researcher at the Fine Arts Department of Jan Van Eyck Academie (2011–2012). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna and also works as a part-time teacher.

Petros Moris | The Gift of Automation

5-19 May | 12:00-20:00 | The Hypatia Mansion Garden (Patission 55 & Ipirou st. - entrance from Ipirou)

Commissioned and produced by: Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

Free admission with entrance tickets

A series of anti-monumental public sculptures installed in the forecourt of the Hypatia Mansion. Petros Moris’ hybrid creations engage with ancient automata and their educational legacy while making reference to elements drawn from street art and Internet culture. The challenges of today and tomorrow arising from the technological proliferation of automation and its effects on human labor conditions is brought to the fore in an allusive, multilayered way and enter into dialogue with the legacy handed down to us from the time of the Neoplatonist philosopher, Hypatia.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-gift-automation

Debating: The Gift of Automation | 12 May | 18:00-20:00

The speakers will explore the concept of technological automation as a kind of binate intellectual flight of fancy, though its mythological and historical roots down to its contemporary manifestations: from the automation of work in the Anthropocene to the development of artificial intelligence.With: Debbora Battaglia (Research Professor of Anthropology), Daphne Dragona (Berlin-based curator and writer), Petros Moris, Matteo Pasquinelli (Professor in Media Philosophy at the University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe)

Anima | Performative readings | 19 May | 18:00-19:00

Free entrance. Limited seats

In Greek with simultaneous translation in English

Performative readings by Petros Moris and Lito Kattou, to the sounds of Khmer Rouge

An evening of readings, with texts taken from the latest issue of AM zine by Petros Moris, and accompanied by a live soundtrack performed by Khmer Rouge. "AM" is a literary, poetry and theory zine that brings together texts now in the public domain. Its second issue, "Anima", collates a peculiar anthology of texts and book extracts stretching from antiquity down to the mid-twentieth century, all of which concern themselves with the mythological and historical roots of technological automation and magical animism. "AM" is edited by Lito Kattou and Petros Moris.

Petros Moris

Petros Moris (born 1986 in Lamia, Greece) graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Thessaly’s Department of Architecture, on an Onassis Foundation scholarship. He was nominated for the DESTE Prize in 2015, and was an ARTWORKS 2018 program fellow. He has presented solo exhibitions in such art spaces and galleries as Project Native Informant (London), DUVE Berlin, Union Pacific (London), Point Center for Contemporary Arts (Nicosia), and the House of Cyprus (Athens), and has participated in group exhibitions at such museums and institutions as the New Museum (New York), the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art – EMST (Athens), the Museum of Cycladic Art (Athens), the Futura Gallery (Prague) and the OCAD University (Ontario). He has co-curated exhibitions and events for the third Athens Biennale (2011), Circuits and Currents (Athens), the Whitechapel Gallery and the Chisenhale Gallery (London), and has given talks on his work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the National Hellenic Research Foundation.

Koki Tanaka | Rehearsal for a Commons Future

Commissioned and produced by: Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

10 May | 18:00 | Khora (Kastalias & Spetson, Kypseli)

Free admission, on a first come first served basis

An unconventional “rehearsal” for a future founded on solidarity and the commons, by the internationally-renowned Japanese artist Koki Tanaka who collaborated with the Greek researcher Angelos Varvarousis. The project is the result of research undertaken in Athens and Thessaloniki, and on the island of Lesbos in the autumn of 2018, with visits to 24 collective enterprises, including collective kitchens, solidarity initiatives, community clinics, cooperative businesses, and migrant solidarity initiatives. The first part of the rehearsal – titled “Nine-word ‘Minifestos’ for a Commons Future” is a poetry intervention with anonymous phrases written on wall stickers scattered throughout the city’s public spaces. People involved in cooperative and solidarity initiatives were asked to contribute their own nine-word “minifestos” that either encapsulate their points of view or are more abstract wishes for the future. These nine-word phrases form an expressive threshold that allows for an oscillation between specificity and generality, and set the rhythm and tone of the intervention.The second part of the rehearsal is an interactive game that seeks to (a)rouse the collective imagination for the creation of better worlds in the near and far future. Through a range of imaginative and creative collective techniques, the game extends an open invitation to anyone and everyone who would like to play, to think, to dream collectively. This activity will be hosted at the KHORA Community Center on May 10, 2019 at 18:00.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-rehearsal-commons-future

Born in 1975, Koki Tanaka lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. In his diverse art practice spanning video, photography, site-specific installations, and interventional projects, Tanaka visualizes and reveals the multiple contexts latent in the most simple of everyday acts. In his early object-oriented works, Tanaka experiments with ordinary objects to explore ways to offer a possible escape from our everyday routine. He has exhibited his work widely in places such as: The Migros Museum, Zurich; the Kunsthaus, Graz; the Kunsthaus, Zurich; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven; the ICA, London; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Skulptur Projekte, Münster 2017; 57th Venice Biennale 2017; the Liverpool Biennial 2016; the 55th Venice Biennale 2013; the Yokohama Triennial 2011; the Gwangju Biennial 2008; and the Taipei Biennial 2006. He received a special mention as the national participation at the 55th Venice Biennale 2013, and the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2015 award.

Dr. Angelos Varvarousis lives and works in Athens and Barcelona. He is an urban planner, researcher, and activist. . His research interests revolve around alternative lifestyles, the study of the commons, solidarity economies, and degrowth. He has published with prestigious publishers such as Polity Press, and he is an active member and academic lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Tania El Khoury | The search for power

10 - 12 May | 20:00 | Meeting point: Onassis Stegi main entrance

Language: In English (with no translation into Greek)

Tickets: Full price: 10 € Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 8 € Νeighborhood residents, Groups 10+ people: 7 € People with disabilities, Companions & Unemployed: 5 €

A power outage one night in Beirut inspired Tania El Khoury to explore the history of power outages in Lebanon. Together with her historian husband, Ziad Abu-Rish, the artist set out on a journey that took them both all the way back to 1906, when Beirut still sat in darkness. At first, their research centered on collecting documents in Beirut, but access to some of these proved difficult or even impossible. As the pair delved deeper into the history of electric power in Lebanon, they discovered a transnational story involving businessmen, politicians, warlords, multinational companies and colonial powers. With her political performance installation "The Search for Power", El Khoury invites the public to immerse themselves in archival documents and inaccessible knowledge, in a personal quest for revenge. We recommend comfortable clothes and shoes.

https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-search-power

Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and is concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. Her work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the International Live Art Prize 2017, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award 2011. Tania is currently a visiting professor and festival co-curator at Bard College’s Fisher Center. She is associated with Forest Fringe in the UK and is the co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and performance collective in Beirut creating site-specific performances that question our relationship to the city and redefine its public space. She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thomas Bellinck | The Wild Hunt

12 – 15 May | 12 May 22:00 & 13-15 May 18:00 & 22:00 | Main Stage of Onassis Stegi

World Premiere | International co-production Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

Tickets: Full price 7 € Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 6 € People with disabilities, Companions, Unemployed & Groups 10+ people: 5 €

How clear-cut or reversible are the categories of 'the hunters', 'the onlookers' and 'the hunted'? Thomas Bellinck’s audio performance "Simple as ABC #3: The Wild Hunt" unravels human hunting stories of today. During this audio performance, you will hear snippets of Arabic, English, Farsi, French and Greek collected from around the Mediterranean An imaginary museum, constructed by voices, as well as a theatrical audio essay about cutting edge detection technology and a documentary musical about the digitisation of the European Union’s borders. In English with Greek subtitles. https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-wild-hunt

Thomas Bellinck

Born in 1983, Brussels-based artist Thomas Bellinck often places questions on the European construction at the heart of his work. He is known in particular for his work focusing on power, politics and systemic violence. Thomas Bellinck studied Germanic Philology and graduated as a theater director in 2009. The same year, selected for the Flemish Theater Festival for a political initiative with illegalized immigrants on hunger strike, he opened the festival with a speech entitled "We were dying and then we got a prize". In 2010, he co-set up the Steigeisen theater company for the staging of documentary plays. In 2013 Thomas first created "Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo", an ever-evolving futuristic-historical exhibition on “life in the former European Union”. In 2015, Thomas co-established ROBIN, an artist-run production structure for tailor-made artistic work. From 2017 onwards, he has been working as a PhD researcher at KASK / School of Arts at the University College in Ghent, where he is one of the founding members of The School of Speculative Documentary. Thomas Bellinck is currently developing "Simple as ABC", a series of performances and installations about the apparatus of Western “migration management” and the visual economy of the illegalisation of migration.

Franziska Pierwoss & Sandra Teitge | From the Mountains of Fyli

A dinner on waste management and its economies

15 May | 20:00 | Secret Location

Commissioned and produced by: Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

For your participation in the dinner, you will need to submit this form. If selected, the invitation will be strictly personal. In Greek language only

Only a few kilometers from the center of Athens, Fyli is competing to be one of the largest landfills for household waste in Europe. Pierwoss and Teitge will gather experts from the field of waste management and the public around a dinner table to discuss the actual reality of the Greek waste sector. Guests are invited to discuss the duo’s research in Athens, Thessaloniki and Volos, the role and interplay of the private and public sector, recycling, circular economies, possible scenarios for energy recovery from waste, as well as how the issue of waste management links to the economy of the commons.https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/fast-forward-festival-6/fff6-mountains-fyli-dinner-waste-management-and-its-economies

Franziska Pierwoss & Sandra Teitge

Since 2014, Franziska Pierwoss & Sandra Teitge have been staging performances related to historical meals, which involve artists, amateur chefs, writers, and researchers who investigate historical menus and their context, affirming the political dimension of the culinary. Using storytelling as an explorative methodology towards History, together they have presented different formats at Sharjah Biennial 13 in Beirut/Lebanon (Nov. 2017), Galeria OMR and MUAC in Mexico City (February–March 2017), at Spielart Festival in Munich/Germany (October 2015), in Beirut, Lebanon (January 2015), and in the context of the Humboldt-Lab in Berlin,Germany (May 2014).

Franziska Pierwoss (1981, Tübingen, Germany) is a Berlin-based performance and installation artist, who also works as an organizer and initiator of various cultural projects.

Sandra Teitge (1982, East Berlin, Germany) is a curator-programmer, researcher, and sporadic performer, and currently director of the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis.