Greesis #9
Maria Topali
“Αt the Greek's Tavern”
A German story of our time
Tuesday 13 December 2011,
Time: 9:00,
Lecture Hall, Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
Dinner Space, language and gesture in a contemporary german-speaking narrative for the experience of immigration and intercultural identity, based on the book by Alexandros Stefanidis, «Beim Griechen- Wie mein Vater in unserer Taverne Geschichte schrieb», Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2010
will follow at the Meat Tavern ‘Yannis’
Address: 4,22nd May st., N. Ionia, Volos
Read Maria Topali's CV.
The educational trip to the city of Istanbul/Turkey, was realized between the 8th and 11th of December. 45 students participated. The tour into the city include the visit to the area of Sultan Ahmed (AgiaSofia, Blue Mosque, The underground Tank/Kinsterna and a formation of benches between the monuments), a walk towards Eminonu (the jetty in front of the Yeni Chami Mosque, the Egyptian Market (spice market) and the Galata Bridge), a walk through the Isticlal road, a visit to the exhibition “Becoming Istanbul” situated at the old Siniosoglou Building (SALT Beyoglou), the drifting by the Halic Bay, the Ottoman graveyard, the Asian side of Bosporus and a cruise to the Bosporus.
During the tour and the trip there were some short lectures in order to identify the core meaning of concepts such as: the area, the limit, the public square, the crossing, the urban density, the turning point (referring to urban phenomena), the cultural field, history, locality, architecture, topography, horizon, urban identity.
young architects’/researchers’ contribution to Greesis: Identity as Action
Thursady 8 December 2011, 14:00, Lecture Hall, Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
- Valentina Karga, Machine for Sustainable Living: The Berlin Farm Lab Experiment
Wednesday 21 December 2011, 19:00-22:00, Lecture Hall, Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
- Elsa Kiourtsoglou, Detecting crisis on a Researcher’s Scrutiny
- Angeliki Sioli, Constructing the Space of Desire
- Christos Kakkalis, Personal and Collective Space under Occupation: The Question of Common Place
- Ermis Chalvatzis / Natasa Lianou, Healing machine
- Anna Vasof, Hansaplast Greesis edition
Detailed programme and speaker's CVs.
07.12.2011 12.00
lecture
Elia Zenghelis: Athens
The project was addressed to undergraduate students (4th-5th year students). It focused on the time-based design approach for the development of a low rise building complex in Athens. The workshop explored the urban and landscape design of the complex through a three-stages programming of its design deployment. A masterplan with a proposal for the typological evolution of the existing buildings and landscape design were produced from the student groups during the six days of the event.
Greesis #8
Vangelis Vlahos
Remains
Wednesday 30 November 2011, Time: 21.00
Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
CV
Vangelis Vlahos (b.1971, Athens) lives and works in Athens. His work has been included in the exhibitions: The End of Money, Witte de With, Rotterdam ;“To the Arts, Citizens!”, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto;tanzimat,Augarten Contemporary, Vienna;11th Istanbul Biennial; After Architecture, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; ISLANDS+GHETTOS,NGBK & Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Monument to transformation, City Gallery Prague, Prague;“A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own”, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam;27th São Paulo Biennale; Behind Closed Doors, Dundee Centre for Contemporary Arts, Dundee; Manifesta 5, San Sebastian, and the 3rd Berlin Biennial.
Greesis #7
Blitz Theatre Group
Don Quixote
Night March in the City of Volos
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Departure time: 20.00
Point of Departure: Entrance, Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
blitz theatre group CV
blitz theatre group was formed in October, 2004 in Athens by Yiorgos Valais, Angeliki Papoulia and Christos Passalis.
Till then, the members of the team had studied drama and had worked in various ensembles.
blitz theatre group was formed, based on the following principles
- the common faith that theatre is a field where people should meet each other in the most essential way and exchange ideas and not a field for virtuosity and ready made truths.
- their need to find an answer to the questions what society asks and needs from art today and what theatre means in the dawn of the 21th century
- the equality of the members as far as conception, writing, direction and dramaturgy are concerned and the belief that everything is under doubt, that nothing must be taken for granted, neither in theatre nor in life.
Their goal, their orientation, their vision is towards a form that could possibly renovate theatre. To do that, they chose the (main) modern stream of combination of arts and crafts in the theatrical field. This was a way that enabled them to search new paths as far as dramaturgy, acting, playwriting, narration, representation are concerned.
In 2006, the group presents the performance ‘motherland’. A performance based on a world map, with elements of interaction between spectators and performers.
In 2007, the group presents Joy Division and New Order. A simulation of a weird game show where the spectators play the part of a jury. The contestants are two divorced couples that try to solve the dead-ends of their relationship, reading each other’s letters in public, dancing, singing, cursing or being violent.
In 2009, blitz co-direct Goethe’s Faust. It’s the first classical text the group is staging, proposing a new reading of Walpurgis Night. Later this year, the group presents ‘The House’. 7 performers meet in real time with around 20 spectators in their real residence in Athens.
In the summer of 2009, blitz present the performance KATERINI. It’s a 5-hour performance that takes place in a two-storey building, and more specifically, in a roof in the centre of Athens and 6 rooms, where the performers meet with the spectators, one by one, by appointment.
In 2010, the group presents Guns! Guns! Guns!. It’s the return of the group in a conventional theatrical stage where a review of the 20th century is taking place. A delirious review based on the idea of revolution and the question how could one change the world.
Later this year, blitz present CINEMASCOPE, a documentary about the last 9 days of the world. This time, the performance takes place out in the street. The spectators wear wireless headphones and are isolated by the spectacle behind a glass wall. They watch the characters of CINEMASCOPE during the last 9 days of their lives along with the real passers-by who participate in the performance, without even knowing it.
At the end of 2010, the group presents GALAXY. A 4-hour performance in a garage with 8 performers and one endless list of persons, ideas, words, movements, objects that have died, that have been lost or forgotten.
Our works invite the spectators to share an experience with us, challenging them to free themselves from the conventional part of a passive voyer. To a certain point, we are covered by the definition of post-dramatic theatre as Lehman has put it. ‘Presence rather than enactment, sharing rather than ready-made experiences, procedure rather than result and stimulus rather than information’, a motto from the Venice Biennale, ‘more ethics, less aesthetics’ and the phrase ‘aesthetics vs. anaesthetics’.
blitz theatre group has presented their works in BIOS Cultural Centre, in National Theatre, in Athens and Epidaurus Festival and in various European festivals.
The group is funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture since their first production. Below is a brief list of the productions the group has conceived, written and directed.
- • motherland bios cultural center, Syros, Herakleion, Giessen, Aix-en-Provence 2006-7
- • Joy Division/ New Order bios cultural center 2007
- • Faust National Theatre 2009
- • The House 30, Agisilaou str. 2009
- • ΚΑΤΕΡΙΝΗ Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2009
- • Guns! Guns! Guns! National Theatre 2009-10
- • CINEMASCOPE, a documentary about the end of the world Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2010
- • GALAXY (work in progress) Michael Cacoyiannis Foundation 2010
Greecis #6
Lecture Εva Stefani: “Idleness”
23/11/2011, 21.00, DArch Amphitheater
Biography
Born in 1964. Studied political sciences at the University of Athens (1981-1987), documentary at VARAN in Paris (1989), cinema studies and ethnographic film at New York University (MA), (1989-1991). She then followed a 4 year documentary course at the National film and TV School in England (1991-1995). At 1997 she obtained her Ph.D from Panteion University, Dept of Media Studies. Since 2000 she teaches cinema studies at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Athens, She works as a freelance documentary film director and video artist.
Selected Filmography
1987 Gutters,11min
1989 La vie en vert, 16min
1993 Paschalis, 17 min
1995 Athene, 36min
1995 Letters From Albatross 26min
1998 Inner Spaces , 8 x 26’
2001 Prison Leave 28’
2001 Akropolis 46’
2000 Reveille 3’
2001 Avraam and Iakovos 28’
2004 The Box 11’
2006 “The hole”,3’
2006 “Mr N.S.P”, 1,5’
2007 “The kiss 1,5’
2007 What time is it? 26’
2007 ”National Anthem”,1’
2008 Bathers,46’
On Tuesday 22 November, XYZ Outlet in conjunction with the 3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME, presenting, the performance DE HOMINIS APPARATUS by a group of tutors and students from the Architecture Department of the University of Thessaly.
The structure of the performance DE HOMINIS APPARATUS, is a type of a labyrinth with no ‘outside’, where each person’s narratives and research start from a different concept each time (such as Dispositif, Eco-nomy, Biopolitics, Sovereignty, Desecration, Law, Body, Knowledge, Desire,Fear, Dignity, Subject, Object, Thing, Disaster etc, concepts described by Giorgio Agamben) , to be led back into the same centre, the Apparatus. During the performance a type of an archive will be compiled from online resources and a printer will become the “nightmare of documentation”.
The performance will attempt, in this way, to communicate another type of speech, “hypertautological”, based on the psychoanalytic tactic of hyperidentification. In this way a linear and hierarchical narrative character will be prevented, creating the impression of a claustrophobic atmosphere, a type of inverted Kafkik tower, where any attempt of exiting the Apparatus, draws the subjects back inside.
This action was triggered by the department’s recent workshop What is an Apparatus? - drawing from the book of the same name by Giorgio Agamben. The concept of the “apparatus” allowed the workshop to trace what binds together contemporary architecture with art practices and with what we mean when we talk today - at a time of acute crisis - about biopolitical and humane communities. Moreover, during the workshop, the participants encouraged reflection upon the way we understand the world, relationships, behaviours and objects, in real time.
The term "apparatus" ("dispositif " in French - a mechanism ) is a key term introduced by Michel Foucault, and is widely used to refer to an unspecified order of techniques that encircle, limit and, finally, define the human subject. Agamben traces the origins of the term within the territory of economics - by recognising the same conceptual genealogy to that of the science of economics. The author supports that our lives depend entirely on a set of "apparatus" that we are unable to “destroy”, or even to transform into a fascinating, radical privilege.
The workshop explored and evaluated “wild thinking” and the practices of everyday social relationships and exchanges, or rather, every possible or latent forms of personal and social creativity, as apparent in atypical behaviours and do-it-yourself practices.
Tutors:
Nadia Kalara, Maria Papadimitriou, Lois Papadopoulos, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis.
Co-ordinator:
Yorgos Rimenidis.
Students:
Danae Avaraki, Despoina Georgiadou, Aggelina Dagka, Avrokomi Zavitsanou, Maria Kotoula, Aggeliki Meli, Yiorgos Berdos, Chrysa Daflouka, Chara Stergiou, Grigoris Tsantilas.
Greesis #5
Dimitris Papanikolaou
Tuesday 22 November 2011, 21.00
Lecture Hall, Department of Architecture, Pedion Areos, Volos
Dimitris Papanikolaou is university lecturer in Modern Greek Studies, and Fellow of St Cross College, at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Greek cultural studies, gender and queer theory. His monograph Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece, was published in 2007 by in the British Comparative Literature Association series (Legenda).