My grandmother's uninhabited abandoned house, in which present time no longer exists and which will soon be sold, becomes the mark of an existence to which all connection has been lost. I return as a future materiality, a ghost which haunts my self—whom I meet there and who does not recognize me: the future and the past, in a constant state of conflict, producing the present self. In the self-portraits that occur from this interaction, all depiction of current characteristics is resisted, constituted through that which has passed and that which is anticipated; in a place between being and not being, life and death. An elusive persona emerges that does not mourn the dead, but rather its own state of being and forgetting.
A deafening dissonance between the body’s essence and that which it performs. A question about what constitutes me: that which I am or that which I do? The solo performance “[Untitled]: Plate Dance, Solo” is constituted by a formalist ritual that traverses through the denouncements that have shaped a rejected body. It performs the failure of gender(ed) performance, it dances shattered identity structures. All through plates; through the domestic, through the traditional, through the conventional: marking a Western history of bodies that have been forcefully made light and quiet, experts on navigating a foreign world, a world whose order and power can crack at any moment.
Environmentalists regard quarries as open wounds, calling for their restoration. However, to close a wound of this scale is totally unachievable. The site-specific durational performance “Notes on Recovery: Reorganization, Restoration, Cicatrization” connects human dwelling with exploitive catastrophe. Performed in one of Mt. Penteli’s abandoned quarries, it invited the audience to attend a ritual that spanned across gigantic hills of rubble, intertwining body and landscape. The body and the site, both in a state of aporia, reflect on each other’s unhealable wounds, merging their respective grief into a singular lament. For any kind of violent enormity, for any huge and impactful event, there will never be any ready means of adequately addressing it. Insufficiency is perpetual and fatal in the face of atrocity.
