The Onassis Foundation Invites you to Athens’ Most Historic Yard – The Mandra – To Enjoy An “Opus Just For One Person”

October 14 – November 14, 2021 | Monday through Sunday | 14:00-22:00 |

The Mandra (2 Dionysiou Aeropagitou Street)

Opus Just for One Person – for you. Walking up Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, next to the Onassis Library, you’ll come across a musical “yard”, the only example of a Belle Époque stage in Athens. There, at "The Mandra" – the open-air stage being reactivated by the Onassis Foundation after many years of disuse – a black box entitled “Terrarium” invites us into an intense experience inside a dark chamber installation, a large-scale terrarium, from October 14 to November 14 – into Ioko Ioannis Kotidis’ work titled Opus Just for One Person. Just one visitor at a time, entering into an expression of thanks, a dedication, a personal celebration of the loves we’ve lived. What does it mean to dedicate my most beautiful love song to someone no longer present? It means that I end up with an act of creation for My-One-and-Only-Human, while trying to put in order everything that I hold dear. Opus Just for One Person is a trilogy – a combination of visual, musical, and performance art on the theme of confession.

Part One – which is being presented in the heart of Athens in the only yard-style theater still surviving from the start of the last century – is inspired by the greatest poem to have been written by the first Greek female surrealist poet, Matsie Hadjilazaros, described by G. P. Savvidis as “the most precious female erotic poet in the Greek language”. The voice of Matsie Hadjilazaros echoes round the dark chamber installation for just one person at a time, with the drag performer Imiterasu borrowing the voice and words of Matsie Hadjilazaros without mimicking her physical person. Another human body as an intermediary; as an agent of memory, words, gazes, gestures and tears – an agent carrying remembrance into an acute present. The visual artist Ioko Ioannis Kotidis, through a video installation and words firmly etched within us, goes against the tide of cynicism. He utters all that we struggle to say, every confession that was not made. Tries to preserve, in every possible way, the all-but-lost tenderness of today, leaving spectators and listeners to ask themselves about everything they didn’t have the chance to say. The resistance to convenience. The readiness of the eyes. The selflessness of smiles.

On February 7, 1985, Matsie Hadjilazaros presented us with the poem “Reversed Dedication”, addressed to her beloved Andreas Embirikos, ten years after his death. And though the couple may have split many decades earlier, having gone through a turbulent love affair, Matsie herself said in an interview: “perhaps we were too egotistical, and not as generous as we should have been…”.

As noted by the creator of the video installation, the work is “an attempt to ‘share’ this poem with every person who has the need to be a You for someone else. An opportunity for the poem to be heard in the present day, to continue to be heard, to not be forgotten. Not it, nor its maker, the world, and its instigating cause. To whom am I addressing this de profundis confession, now that its first addressee is not here? To mine own self. Because you and I are now one and the same. Forever more…”

This work of video art is screened inside a dark chamber installation, a large-scale Τerrarium, like a seed that will gradually be revealed. A private place inside the public sphere is seeking to create a safe space for contemplation and meditation for each and every one of us, individually. A personal connection between the work and its receiver.

At the end, spectators are invited to write down their own dedication, if they so wish.

INSTALLATION CREDITS

Concept & Creation: Ioko Ioannis Kotidis

Construction Design & Supervision: Eleni Stroulia

Lighting Design: Eliza Alexandropoulou

Construction Design & Supervision Collaborator: Zaira Falirea

Construction: Lazaridis Scenic Studio

Electricians: Vaggelis Mountrichas, Konstantinos Mavrantzas

Production Manager: Yorgos Katsonis

VIDEO ART CREDITS

Concept, Direction & Editing: Ioko Ioannis Kotidis

Video performance: Imiterasu

Original Music: Panú

Assistant Director: Iliana Kaladami

Camera: Christos Symeonides

Special thanks to Christos Daniil

A few words on the Mandra

The Mandra is situated on a pedestrianized precinct in Plaka (at 2 Dionysiou Aeropagitou Street). This seemingly abandoned plot, located directly beside the neoclassical building that houses the Onassis Library, is opening its doors to the public once more, following in the footsteps of Attik’s “Mandra” and interwar Athens’ variety shows – an inclusive and interactive performance form that created masterpieces using just “the boards, a little paint, and quite some trailblazing”.

Lying hidden at its heart is the most representative example of Athenian Belle Époque open-air theater architecture: an outdoor stage built in 1909 belonging to the “mandra” (“yard”) theater type, which is to say an outdoor theater taking the form of a rudimentary stalls area with an Italianate stage. Athenians of old knew it as the “Athinaikon” (“Athenian”), as the “Arch of Hadrian Theater”, but also as the “Germaniko” for a time, when German operettas were all the rage.

The Mandra is bursting into our daily lives to break through boundaries and create freely, without limits. To become a point of discussion and reference within the city, open to powerful experiences and emotions, accessible to every passing anyone without a ticket. Not in the soothing sense of some picture postcard showing a listed Athens monument brought back to life, but as a buzzing hive of uncensored culture and expression, fully embedded in the dynamic Onassis Culture ecosystem until 2069.

The space hosts events that seek to startle, and spark discussion about everything that’s happening and everything that ought to be happening – works that perfectly align with the realities of the city and world in which we live to form a diverse mosaic of human experience.

A few words on Matsie Hadjilazaros

Born in Thessaloniki in 1914 and raised in a cosmopolitan milieu, with frequent trips to European cities and countries, and an intense social life and society lifestyle in her early teenage years (hers was one of the most socially significant and financially flourishing families in the city), Maria-Loukia (Matsie) Hadjilazaros would go on to face the family’s gradual social, economic, and finally physical decline. In the mid-1930s, Matsie found herself in Athens, working to support herself in the wake of two divorces. Seeking solutions to her problems, Matsie turns to a new science that was then making its emergence in Greece – psychoanalysis – and meets the psychoanalyst and poet Andreas Embirikos. The pair’s meeting led to a romantic affair, followed by marriage. Andreas Embirikos initiates Matsie into the worlds of poetry and surrealism. Putting the surrealist tenet of free expression into practice, and adopting the associative technique of automatic writing, she sets about creating an intensely personal and singular body of poetic work.

Her first published poetry – the 1944 collection May, June and November – is also the first modern Greek poetry written by a woman that touches on love and life with such freedom, immediacy, and experientiality, in ways that are guilt-free, uninhibited, and direct, yet without being vulgar or unnecessarily provocative. It is, at the end of the day, a lyric form of poetry, addressed completely and absolutely to another person, the one whom this love entails – addressed, in a universal way, to each one of us. A universal form of sensory poetry that demands the active engagement of its readers, activating their own senses, and bringing up similar memories in their minds.

And then: her separation from Embirikos, her 1945 journey on the legendary Mataroa ocean liner to Paris, her encounters with the surrealists living there (Breton, Tzara, Domínguez), her life with Picasso’s nephew – the painter and engraver Javier Vilató, and with Cornelius Castoriadis. Matsie Hadjilazaros would continue writing poetry in Greek and French, and returned to Athens once and for all in 1973. In 1985, ten years after the death of Embirikos, Matsie published her most important poem, “Dedication in Reverse” – a completely liberated, total, and absolute surrealist confessional, a “concert for one man alone”:

you to me are Dinosaur a most amazing one

you to me are pebble soft fruit ripened by the sea

I belove you

I jealousy you

I jasmine you*

– Christos Daniil, PhD in Modern Greek Philology, Matsie Hadjilazaros Archive researcher

*Poetry translated by Nikos Stabakis (Surrealism in Greece: An Anthology, University of Texas Press, 2008)

A few words on Ioko Ioannis Kotidis

Ioko Ioannis Kotidis was born in Veria in 1990. He is an Athens Conservatoire Drama School graduate, and an Athens School of Fine Arts honors student.

As an artist, he has directed the visual poem Dokidoki *the boy who wanted to fly, created the drag persona Imiterasu and the performances Billet-doux for Beginners and Deep Mourning Spectacle in partnership with Panagiotis Manouilidis (Panú), and taken part in such projects as Natasa Exidaveloni’s Extra Tuition, and Michalis Siganidis’ Unlimited Shrimp and WHO[’S] IS WHO[ON]. He has also worked with Adonis Volanakis and Iosif Vivilakis, while his illustrations have appeared in printed theater programs and elsewhere.

As a film actor, he has worked with Vasilis Kekatos on the short The Distance Between Us and the Sky (Acting Special Mention – Drama International Short Film Festival; Best Actor – Villeurbanne Short Film Festival).

As a stage actor, he has worked with Mihalis Panadis, Argyris Xafis, Konstantinos Arvanitakis, Io Voulgaraki, Michail Marmarinos, Martha Frintzila, Tonia Ralli, Nikos Karathanos, Amalia Bennett, and others.

As a set and costume designer, he has worked with Argyris Xafis, Artemis Flessa, and Vassilis Mantzoukis. He has also created masks for performances by Mihalis Panadis.

Info

The Mandra (2 Dionysiou Aeropagitou Street)

October 14 – November 14, 2021

Monday through Sunday, 14:00-22:00

Duration: 8 minutes

Free admission. Booking required, here: https://tickets.onassis.org/showProductList.html?idEvent=2005533

The venue is accessible to people with disabilities.

Visitors must arrive 15 minutes prior to their booked time slot. In the event they are delayed, they will have to wait for the next available slot.

In accordance with Greek government guidance, and as part of measures combatting the spread of Covid-19, everyone entering the Onassis Stegi venue must present either a vaccination certificate (valid 14 days after final dose) or a recovery certificate (valid for six months after diagnosis).

An ID card or passport must also be presented, for verification purposes. Specially appointed staff will check these certificates by scanning the relevant QR code using the official “CovidFreeGr” app.

Face masks must be worn.

Hand sanitizer stations are provided in all spaces.

Tickets are strictly for personal use and are non-transferable.

Please follow the instructions of our security staff and ushers as you enter and exit the space.

Onassis Stegi reserves the right to eject any ticket holder refusing to follow the rules and regulations set out here.

Tickets can be purchased on our website (onassis.org) and via our call center.

Visitors must print out their own tickets before arrival, or present them in digital form.