Lived Imagination - Mary Zygouri
This presentation is formed through the display of a series of site-specific performances, both personal and collective in several public spaces: an ex- prison, a canyon in Sardinia, a historical hammam in Istanbul. Mary Zygouri approaches these performances as examples of a poetic temporal-spatial collective occupation/re-use of public space through transformations in “practiced place” (De Certeau). Focusing in particular on the performance in the hammam in Istanbul she will present on how the key element of this transformation of space is the collective action of the participants, who announce an ephemeral Constitution. Grounded on theoretical and political thought, theatre and literature, the articles of the Constitution spoken in this hammam named the ‘Bath of the Constitution’ perform the safeguarding of the rights of freedom, equality, expression, knowledge, movement. How do artistic-political gestures redefine our capacities for action? What kind of knowledges, affects and effects are produced by and after collective performative experience? Troubling the notion of human agency in public space by working at the interface of art and pedagogy and focusing on conflicting spatial politics my practice questions and performs a somatization of politics, the gendered body as a physical medium of political discourse, and performance work in the collective memory and imagination. Where do these new actions, memories go, stop? How and why does artistic practice become a form of reflecting knowledge-production? What of the status of the cultural producer as nomadic, stateless worker constituting new creative tools? What of the artist as worker?