IFPA 2019

Return to the body

The request for a “return” does not coincide with the wish of the subject enrolled in it. Especially when it comes to the body. In the biological, in the symbolic, in the imaginary body and finally the request, it is about the relationship with a “body that I have but I do not know what to do”, to remember Lacan and his famous text, “Joy’s the symptom”. This ignorance “gives birth” to the intention to locate my body as matter but also as an image. Even when the denial of its existence dominates the limits of a consciousness that subjugates the subject to a repetition of the control of his physicality. His physicality is his relation to space or, according to Merleau-Ponty, his spatiality. And it all has a lot of body.

After all, the representational quality of man (Leroi-Gourhan), highlights his ability to embody the interaction he has with an externality to which he belongs. The unconscious flows into the body and the conscious act of a living action, either as a ritual structure or as an expression, is a uniqueness of the human condition. It is the moment when the “lost” body becomes visible and folds in space. This folding and meeting with the Other is full of “flesh”, that is, of the necessary “intermediate” with which one body meets the other. But what is the desire? And how can we escape from the cliché of “imitating” the truth of the moment when the body space / becomes “returning” to its essential truth? Does desire itself refer to the truths produced by both the substance of the body and the body of the substance which appears as an expansion of a consciousness of a Being who recognizes his deficit and opens up to the body, as a “return-passage” to / from the idiot of the subject acting in the present tense?

The performance records about 100 years of progress. With the Dada incident still delivering “pulses” of “living” art born of the desire for a radical break with the systemic logic of art and the ridiculousness of a bourgeoisie that kills young people in wars and forbids the body to enjoy and expose itself, creatively intersects the Bauhaus and emerges through the immediate desire for a universal “return” to the body and the mental trauma after the fall of humanity in World War II, where the “trauma” is the event of mass extinction, report in the holocaust. The live action conceives violence and self-punishment, a reference to the activists of Vienna, the concealment of the “wound” through Messianism and the “suffering” body of J.Beuys, the Fluxus highlights the creation and heralds the new physicality. On the other hand, the Gutai (Japan), the “knights” of the refusal of the art centers, parade with a corporeality, full of the truth of the action in the here and now and of the political meanings, depicting the rupture in the unconscious caused by the violent transformation of a ritual society to a capitalist ideal. And the journey continues with diversity and individuality, with extreme exposures of the body to the late Abramovich and so on. And the “return” as a turn to the different, a turn to the body limited by the barbarity of the dominant patriarchy, involves the perch with protest movements but also other feminists or queers with intense political action, to remember the England of the early ’80s. The fluidity of gender and the assertion of our gender choice, seek a body that is not trapped in the absolute of a sexual identity. Here the body in action undertakes to be recorded as another truth within the public sphere.

The living element that constituted the necessity of “returning” to the body, weakened between a historicist academia and a realization of the very action that once confronted the system and its successors. So what performance can we talk about? And for which body? How can I produce a true ritual without the mimetic framework of an already existing form. So to reinvent the ritual body within art.

The desire for a meeting in the name of performance, in a border place, where galleries and museums are disappearing, where the spaces still have the smell of a physicality of work, a reference to the tobacco warehouses, gives a peculiar relationship with the significant body. The “return”, therefore, contains a quality that meets the real. So the meeting is addressed to the new “look”, as an embodied state, which will be seen through the Other and will accept the punctum caecum of the living art of a body that does not-cease-to-want-to-return, in its primary aspects.

IFPA 2019

Return to the body

The request for a “return” does not coincide with the wish of the subject enrolled in it. Especially when it comes to the body. In the biological, in the symbolic, in the imaginary body and finally the request, it is about the relationship with a “body that I have but I do not know what to do”, to remember Lacan and his famous text, “Joy’s the symptom”. This ignorance “gives birth” to the intention to locate my body as matter but also as an image. Even when the denial of its existence dominates the limits of a consciousness that subjugates the subject to a repetition of the control of his physicality. His physicality is his relation to space or, according to Merleau-Ponty, his spatiality. And it all has a lot of body.

After all, the representational quality of man (Leroi-Gourhan), highlights his ability to embody the interaction he has with an externality to which he belongs. The unconscious flows into the body and the conscious act of a living action, either as a ritual structure or as an expression, is a uniqueness of the human condition. It is the moment when the “lost” body becomes visible and folds in space. This folding and meeting with the Other is full of “flesh”, that is, of the necessary “intermediate” with which one body meets the other. But what is the desire? And how can we escape from the cliché of “imitating” the truth of the moment when the body space / becomes “returning” to its essential truth? Does desire itself refer to the truths produced by both the substance of the body and the body of the substance which appears as an expansion of a consciousness of a Being who recognizes his deficit and opens up to the body, as a “return-passage” to / from the idiot of the subject acting in the present tense?

The performance records about 100 years of progress. With the Dada incident still delivering “pulses” of “living” art born of the desire for a radical break with the systemic logic of art and the ridiculousness of a bourgeoisie that kills young people in wars and forbids the body to enjoy and expose itself, creatively intersects the Bauhaus and emerges through the immediate desire for a universal “return” to the body and the mental trauma after the fall of humanity in World War II, where the “trauma” is the event of mass extinction, report in the holocaust. The live action conceives violence and self-punishment, a reference to the activists of Vienna, the concealment of the “wound” through Messianism and the “suffering” body of J.Beuys, the Fluxus highlights the creation and heralds the new physicality. On the other hand, the Gutai (Japan), the “knights” of the refusal of the art centers, parade with a corporeality, full of the truth of the action in the here and now and of the political meanings, depicting the rupture in the unconscious caused by the violent transformation of a ritual society to a capitalist ideal. And the journey continues with diversity and individuality, with extreme exposures of the body to the late Abramovich and so on. And the “return” as a turn to the different, a turn to the body limited by the barbarity of the dominant patriarchy, involves the perch with protest movements but also other feminists or queers with intense political action, to remember the England of the early ’80s. The fluidity of gender and the assertion of our gender choice, seek a body that is not trapped in the absolute of a sexual identity. Here the body in action undertakes to be recorded as another truth within the public sphere.

The living element that constituted the necessity of “returning” to the body, weakened between a historicist academia and a realization of the very action that once confronted the system and its successors. So what performance can we talk about? And for which body? How can I produce a true ritual without the mimetic framework of an already existing form. So to reinvent the ritual body within art.

The desire for a meeting in the name of performance, in a border place, where galleries and museums are disappearing, where the spaces still have the smell of a physicality of work, a reference to the tobacco warehouses, gives a peculiar relationship with the significant body. The “return”, therefore, contains a quality that meets the real. So the meeting is addressed to the new “look”, as an embodied state, which will be seen through the Other and will accept the punctum caecum of the living art of a body that does not-cease-to-want-to-return, in its primary aspects.

Artistic Director: Ioannis Mitrou

General Director: Vicky Konstantinidou

Speakers: Vassilis Alexandrou, Antonis Diamantis, Maro Theodosiou, Alexandra Katsiani, Vicky Konstantinidou, Ioannis Mitrou, Alexandros Plomaritis, Filippos Takis, Giannis Frangoulis, Penelope Hatzidimitriou, Thanassis

Performance: Maro Theodosiou, Aneta Popova, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Maria Harela, Chryssa Tzelepis, ToPikap – AlmaKalma

Video-Performance: Fani Arapi, Angeliki Avgitidou, Manuel Baldassare, Ioanna Skantzeli, Chloé Jourdan, Chryssa Tzelepi

Residency: Paris Antonakis, Konstantina Antonoudi, Fani Arapi Nikoletta Gouli, Konstantinos Dimitriadis, Vasiliki Kapetanaki, Eleftheria Kofidou, Costas-Elamin Pavlidis, Orestis Papakonstantinou, Evelina Stolitou, Ivelina Stolikou

Artistic Director: Ioannis Mitrou

General Director: Vicky Konstantinidou

Speakers: Vassilis Alexandrou, Antonis Diamantis, Maro Theodosiou, Alexandra Katsiani, Vicky Konstantinidou, Ioannis Mitrou, Alexandros Plomaritis, Filippos Takis, Giannis Frangoulis, Penelope Hatzidimitriou, Thanassis

Performance: Maro Theodosiou, Aneta Popova, Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Maria Harela, Chryssa Tzelepis, ToPikap – AlmaKalma

Video-Performance: Fani Arapi, Angeliki Avgitidou, Manuel Baldassare, Ioanna Skantzeli, Chloé Jourdan, Chryssa Tzelepi

Residency: Paris Antonakis, Konstantina Antonoudi, Fani Arapi Nikoletta Gouli, Konstantinos Dimitriadis, Vasiliki Kapetanaki, Eleftheria Kofidou, Costas-Elamin Pavlidis, Orestis Papakonstantinou, Evelina Stolitou, Ivelina Stolikou