Katarzyna Dębska, Jerzy Mączyński, Anastasia Valsamaki
residency at Eight Critical Institute for Arts and Politics in Athens
1.10.2021- 22.10.2021
The residency project was supported by Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw.
work-in-progress project presentation:
October 19th 2021
19.00 - 21.00
EIGHT Critical Laboratory for Arts and Politics
Polytechniou 8, Athens
Videos, concept: Katarzyna Dębska
Electronics, composition, concept: Jerzy Mączyński
Performance: Anastasia Valsamaki
The space of the swimming pool from Sauna Studio in Warsaw is being transposed to the space of Eight in Athens. The abandoned SPA complex of the former Polish-Soviet Friendship House in Warsaw, which 4 years ago was transformed into a place of cultural activities, became a starting point for our work. Therefore the space has strong political connotations, exercising systems of social control from the past, but probably still up to date. Combining them loosely with the feelings and field recordings of urban athenian structure, the pool’s emptiness and the observations of water tides of the Attica’s sea, both physically and imaginary, we are trying to reflect on the un-existing spaces, its collective memory and functions of water itself in the contemporary society through mapping them with body, sound and video. We invite you to space and leave it for your thoughts to flow.
EIGHT is a collective space activated in the centre of Athens that attempts to explore anew the possibilities of a critical intervention in an ever-changing precarious landscape. Bringing together forms of artistic, political and theoretical production, urban research and social action and building on radical experiments of recent years it seeks to investigate forms of continuity and instituting that challenge neoliberal demands of sustainability.
Eight years after the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece that produced a series of radical transformations in social/cultural frameworks and after a series of public mobilisations that included cultural and political experiments and occupations, activist/direct interventions, DIY contexts, spaces and public programmes we seek to reimagine anew forms, tools and practices for the current and upcoming paradigm shifts. Through forms of unconventional collective study, research, critical intervention and cultural action we aim to repeatedly produce instituent moments of response implicated in the here and now of our city that we also hope reflects global challenges at this moment in time.
See more: https://www.facebook.com/EIGHT-ΤΟ-ΟΧΤΩ-critical-institute-for-arts-and-politics-1215615081926081/