Soma sto ON | Selfy Apocalypse

A research workshop is intertwined with the creation of four performances dealing with physical identity and self-image presented on streets, squares and parking lots of Athens. The workshop co-researchers become an active part of the performance piece, which seems to play with the boundaries between performativity and the everyday. With an emphasis on practices of gazing, they converse with public, private space, but also with the digital realm. The body becomes a malleable canvas and transports us between primordial images and images familiarly current.
The research on the body as place beyond identity, as an attempt to transcend towards a poetic of freedom, sits within the core of the piece while constantly stumbling upon a raw current reality. The group seeks to capture the collective embodied experience during this historical conjuncture, through the paradoxical dialogue of fluid embodied temporalities and the brutality of the political-social here and now.
This necessity brings us against a blurry, uncertain context, at a time when culture sits last in the government priorities. That’s why we decided to proceed with our first artistic performance, despite the official line for cultural events. These first two performances, as public interventions, are organized with conscious autonomy from the irrationality of the restrictive measures and bring us into a practical confrontation with the government policy for culture.
Perhaps the liminal – hybrid stance of this performance between autonomous action and a state-funded artistic product is another manifestation of its core research tensions.