Part of the theatrical show “”WHAT WE OWE ΤΟ DEMOCRACY‘’ directed by Nikos Diamantis. A co-production of Athens-Epidavros Festival and the Municipal Theater of Piraeus. The project “”CENSORED”” is an interactive installation-performance by Christina Mitrentse. It is based on her own, long-term, participatory art project in progress entitled Add To My Library, which has engaged over 3,000 citizens of the world, with the aim of contributing to a critical/fruitful dialogue with international geographic communities. Banned books – banned by totalitarian regimes and authoritarian ideologies -, borrowed from four libraries (Laskaridis Foundation, MIET/ELIA, American College and Piraeus Municipal Library), “”build”” an ephemeral, META- LIBRARY (i.e. the ideal set of human knowledge, together with the tools to store and access this knowledge) and collide conceptually to form a new reading experience at the National Library of Greece in the context of the Piraeus Municipal Theater’s collaboration with the Athens Festival. Books always reveal the most secret, hunted, strange and forbidden things ever published. Who were those once-holders who did not want to release and kept the knowledge “”locked up”” and “”secret””? The work explores how our body can be the book itself and vice versa, and how it turns into sequences of meanings about democracy, censorship, free speech in global communities, the age of internet culture and artificial intelligence. The action/performance invites users to enter the psychophysical space of the library and the final “”destruction”” of the books is reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 (temperature of burning paper and destruction of knowledge, subject of Ray Bradbury’s book of the same name from which François Truffaut inspired the film of the same title in 1966), to violence, media and environmental destruction. The gathering of damaged books, in the manner of Christina Mitrentse, urges us to recover their absence. N.P. Paisios, May 2024 images & project copyright of the artist & Citronne Gallery”