Onassis Channel | Laurie Anderson in discussion with Afroditi Panagiotakou

Now, more than forty years later, and with dozens of releases and performance projects under her belt, Laurie Anderson remains one of the most recognizable, insightful, and ground-breaking voices in American art and letters. Her thinking, ever out of the box, never fails to startle, charm, and galvanize whoever it is she happens to be speaking with.

With works that seem more like political manifestos – marked by a complete absence of formal structure, a subversion of the rules, and the startling fusion of the spoken word, technology, and multimedia forms – Anderson brought her particular and personal style of storytelling, featuring a variety of human stories and spotlighting social issues that need remedying, to the fore of the art world.

On Friday, July 8, Laurie Anderson came to the Onassis Stegi Main Stage to flood Athens with her exuberant energy, appearing in a conversation with the Onassis Foundation’s Director of Culture, Afroditi Panagiotakou. Just two days before her highly-anticipated concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Athenian audiences were given a unique opportunity to have a close encounter with the high priestess of the electronic music avant-garde and to delve into her scattered thoughts that make sense, all together, and each separately: motivating fears, the end of life on earth, contemporary superstitions myths and legends, passion, tears, birds, democracy, improvisation, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Yoko Ono, Aristophanes, hypnosis, being in the dark, pretending to be asleep, slavery, democracy, different kinds of silence, loss.

Filming credits: Whatever productions