FFF4 | Evros Walk Water 1 & 2

5 May | 23:30
After performance talk with the participants
Moderated by Katia Arfara, Concept and Artistic Direction of the Fast Forward Festival

The title "Evros Walk Water 1 & 2" takes us back to 2012 and the agreement between the Greek and Turkish governments to build a 12.5 km long barrier between Nea Vyssa and Kastania on the border to prevent foreigners entering Greece from Turkey. The wall left immigrants with no choice but to risk the more perilous and costly Aegean route to Greece, crossing the sea from Turkey in boats and on rafts.

In 2015, the Society for the Care of Minors in Exarcheia, Athens, was home to 16 unaccompanied minors who had survived such journeys, having walked from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria then crossed the Aegean from Turkey only to spend months living in miserable conditions in Greek immigrant holding centres. Six of the kids worked with Daniel Wetzel in Exarcheia over a two-month period. Three have stayed in Greece, but the other three have since moved on to other European countries: Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden. "Evros Walk Water 1 & 2" features a host of languages—the refugees’ mother tongues (Kurdish, Farsi, Arabic) as well as the languages of the countries they passed through and now live in.

"Evros Walk Water 1 & 2" is a new, extended version of the initial project. Developed over the two-month workshop in 2015, "Evros Walk Water" took the form of an audio-play, consisting of the musical improvisations and first-hand testimonies of the six unaccompanied minors and referencing "Water Walk" by John Cage. Though never performed in Greece, this work did feature at international festivals in Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and elsewhere, though without its six young creators—they were prevented from attending by international regulations. Click here to see the trailer and get a taste of "Evros Walk Water".

"Water Walk" by John Cage (1912–1992) is a work for solo television presenter which the composer performed live on CBS's popular TV show “I’ve got a secret” in January 1960. In essence, it is a composition of sounds which Cage produced using a cooking pot, a blender, a mixer, ice cubes, a bath tub, a vase of flowers, a watering can, a plastic duck, a whistle and five radios. Water in all its forms was also a core constituent of the work.

The Onassis Stegi staged a six-day retrospective to the great experimenter John Cage and his work in 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth and the 20th anniversary of his death.

It is the third time Rimini Protokoll have collaborated with the Onassis Stegi to stage work in Athens. Their most recent collaboration was on the radical theatre-documentary "Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, volumes I & II" (2016).

Daniel Wetzel was one of the artists invited to take part in a major Fast Forward Festival production, "X Apartments Athens" (2015), the peripatetic site-specific performance curated by Katia Arfara and Anna Mülter based on an original idea by Matthias Lilienthal. The project was staged outside the Onassis Stegi in apartments and houses in central Athens. Viewers could choose between two different routes— Wetzel curated one of the spaces on Route 2 (Agiou Meletiou—Kypseli).