Onassis AiR Open Day #7

19:00-22:00 {presented in loop}: Orestis Athanasopoulos, Stavros Chrysafidis, Victor Ehikhamenor, Arshia Fatima Haq, Stella Ioannidou, Laure Jaffuel, Christina Kotsilelou, Vishal Kumaraswamy, Will Rawls, Nikolas Ventourakis, Latent Community, Kate Marsh & Aristide Rontini

• 20:00-20:30: Nikolas Ventourakis | Presentation w/ Q&A
• 21:00-21:30: Will Rawls | Live reading
• 21:30-22:00: Noor Abed w/ Niki Dimopoulou | Performative reading

Noor Abed - The poet is late

Historical and urban mythologies between the island of Crete and Palestine – research presentation and a conversation, together with Niki Dimopoulou.

Orestis Athanasopoulos - Flour/Salt/Water

Using a story about the invention of Greek pitta bread as a starting point, Orestis will present his ongoing research on pitta and similar flatbreads through a split-screen video with material gathered during a recent trip around the Eastern Mediterranean.

Stavros Chrysafidis - Locality in food production

Victor Ehikhamenor - Why The Gods Are Not to Blame

Preliminary materials of the research project “Why the Gods Are Not to Blame”. A visual exploration of collective memories through the lens of Ola Rotimi’s “The Gods Are Not to Blame”, an adaptation of the Greek classic Oedipus Rex. Ehikhamenor will be interrogating memories and fates about past lives and artefacts that will create a tapestry for how memories are built.

Arshia Fatima Haq: The Archive of the Unsung

Arshia Fatima Haq | A work-in-progress for “Archive of the Unsung”, this approximately 10-minute video is a sketch towards a multi-channel immersive installation. The piece will be composed as an exquisite corpse based on testimonies of Afghan and Pakistani refugees and migrants, and chronicles in which they are both remembered and unremembered.

Stella Ioannidou: Re-assembling Imagination(s)

Stella Ioannidou | “Elsewhere is a Negative Mirror [pt 2]” is a short meditation on an imagined city in the form of a text and visual essay. Composed of film footage taken in Athens, Alexandria, and Marseille, it draws a fragmentary cartography of desires and experiences, contradictions and symbioses that arise from urban landscapes.

Laure Jaffuel: Mediterranean urban gardens

Laure Jaffuel | Thinking about gardens not only as a collection of living plants, but also as a cultural, environmental, architectural, social, and public space, the project explores the vernacular urban garden and its position today in the city of Athens within the critical context of the Mediterranean climate. A short sound-piece (approx. 15min) will present the early stage of the research around the “Mediterranean Urban Garden”, including interview extracts, musical tracks, text readings, and field recordings.

Christina Kotsilelou: “Let the food be thy medicine…”

Christina Kotsilelou | Exploring the therapeutic properties of herbs and plants, Christina will offer some edible herbal experiments, a herbaceous non-alcoholic drink, along with a presentation of plant specimens and recipes from her research in folk medicine and specifically the practical doctors of the Vikos area in northern Greece.

Vishal Kumaraswamy: Subaltern Futurism Gatherings

Vishal Kumaraswamy | In continuing with Vishal’s ongoing research around the hierarchies of food culture within the South Asian sociocultural context, “Foxtail” looks at the history of millets as heirlooms for Dalit & Adivasi communities across South Asia and its presence and relevance to South Asian communities in Athens. In extending his research into the context of Athens, Vishal draws threads between in-development audio works, photographs, field recordings, and texts that illustrate the interlinked history of migration, the import of social structures from another continent as these communities establish a presence in modern day Greece.

Will Rawls: Boi

Will Raws | Will Rawls will read excerpts of new and old writing about the erotics of the kouroi. He will also loop an excerpt from a parallel film project about queer calisthenics at an abandoned military gym.

Nikolas Ventourakis: Rituals for Our Safety Pt. III

Nikolas Ventourakis | “Hard Hat” is a video installation produced during the research for “Rituals for our Safety Pt. III”. The hard hat is a safety gear worn by workers in hazardous environments (usually in construction). Kafka was erroneously being connected to the development of an early version.

Latent Community: AVATO

Latent Community | Latent Community will present a video related to their research at Avato. The video is based on field notes, and acts as an audiovisual research diary from their fieldwork on a melting pot of ethnic, cultural, and religious identities. It reflects the real and imagined routes between past and present that shaped Avato, focusing on the opacity and discontinuity of a multilayered and fragmented narrative that goes back to the Ottoman slave trade.

Kate Marsh: What if I just stop? | Aristide Rontini: Lampyris Noctiluca

Kate Marsh & Aristide Rontini | Aristide Rontini and Kate Marsh will share the beginnings of emerging conversations, connecting their lived experience of disability and artistic work through dialogue and practice. Together they have explored what it means to be in their crip bodies, unmediated by non-disabled bodies, how they can stay open and curious to their own physicality, and experience also being curious about their sameness and differences as humans with bodies that mirror each other through proximal disabilities. Both artists are here busy processing what it is like to move and make dance work that is true to their own bodies and the unique movement vocabulary they are developing through ongoing practice and exploration.

Functioning like an open studio, the Open Days is a series of monthly events that will run throughout the year and are open to the public. This is an opportunity to meet and exchange with our Fellows as well as to learn more about their artistic research through short talks, presentations, workshops or screenings that aim to shed light on their research trajectory and work in-progress. The format of the Open Days is shaped based on the needs and artistic practice of the Fellows each time. Running between September 2022 to July 2023, the Tailor-made Fellοwships is an open-ended program offering time and space, tailored to the individual research needs of each participant.