The purpose of this lecture is the study of performance art, which was accepted as an artistic medium of expression in the late seventies. Performance art is the live art in which the human body is being used as it’s main tool. My research goes back to the last decades of the 19^th century describing the activity of the futurists in Italy and Russia, and follows a course through time reaching the present. In this course I find performance in many artistic movements and tendencies and I discover every time the influences which gradually transformed it’s character. I choose three Greek artist’s, Leda Papakonstantinou, Georgia Sagri and Evangellia Basdeki and by acquiring a personal relationship with them I manage to view performance through their eyes. Their work accompanies me in my attempt to study the spatial dimensions of performance.

In a world where everything moves with the fastest rhythm, performance represents a momentary pattern of inhabitation. It is the moment where the performer communicates his energy into another man, the spectator, the passer-by, while both of them are bodily present in a highly charged space. Both of them experience space while inhabiting it in a peculiar way. The outcome of this symbiosis is not some aesthetic item, but an ephemeral psychokinetic and aesthetic event. For as long as a performance lasts, performer and spectator transform the void into a shelter for the body. The body’s movements define the void, create shapes and spaces inside the void and transform it into an ephemeral place of inhabitation. Performer and spectator become one body and together the claim the experience of the void and it’s inhabitance. Performance is a space producing mechanism. It is also what Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as “relational aesthetics”. Performance is an authentic moment where a person is being liberated from the artificial conventions of society.

“performance is important for it’s moment” All of us in this moment where we become witnesses of the artist’s truth, we are prompted to search inside us for our truth. Performance is a constant mutuality and the opening of the inner self to another.