Are there enough holes to fill everyone’s pleasures? ~ by Alkmini Gkousiari

Alkmini Gkousiari's “Are there enough holes to fill everyone’s pleasures?” was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliano) on the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).

Here you find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.

Are there enough holes to fill everyone’s pleasures?

Alkmini's question: Are there enough holes to fill everyone’s pleasures?

Alkmini's intro:

We cross from home beyond poetics and dive right into romantic nonsence, and they thought of our tongues as tongues but also of our tongues as language. So, we put our new ears on and listen to the sounds that just crossed the door.

We feel ripe and ready for it!
We rub our earlobes and consentrate on the sound that our hands are making against our skin.
The hot hand carresing the cold ear is something else!
Its hard to extract this pleasure from ourselves and to give to another.
In the distance we see a treasure, with gold in the middle,
and we run towards it ecstatically.

Here we are, all together, ready for the pulling of fingers, full bellied, suffocatingly and lovingly tight. We are bouncing from different feelings, imagining ourselves becoming whole/hole in another place than the places we are from.

chins tilted upwards
mouths slightly open
tongues dry
bellies full

The wasp exited the fig and thought to itself; “relationships are a series of loving misunderstandings” this thought made her sad and at peace.

She then had more thoughts like; seahorse dancing, grandpa’s loneliness, the type of caterpillar that sat on her dog’s tongue, the robustness of the Balkan plastic chair she loved so much, if the tortoise she saw at the park knew she had a fig on her back, if they missed her, if she should stop writing. She thought of a lucky knot, her belly button.

We will love forward with these legs and our bodies will follow after in a rush,
and we look forward to seeing you all then.

Grant's report: 

The work takes place in the large upstairs room with windows. Several elements have been installed, including a piece of fabric with a classical Greek statue printed onto it suspended at the front of the room where the audience sits. This has a hole cut out of it at face height and a microphone on a stand poking through the hole. There are bells hanging from ropes, a pile of figs in a metal dish, and what looks like a papier-mâché crown with red heart-shaped lollypops poking sticking out of it. A group enters the space and gather around some plastic chairs where they change into white costumes. They from a circle around bird whistles on the floor, pick them up, blow into them, then move about the space producing whistling noises with the whistles. They come to the front of the room and one of them puts their head through the hole in the fabric and smiles at the audience. Another pushes a second head through the hole and the two heads appear side by side. One of the heads says: let’s begin with the fact that wasps are carnivores, a fig is cluster of seeds and fruit, and meanwhile the rest of the group hand out figs to the audience. The person speaking through the hole in the cloth describes the reproduction of the wasp and the fig, the mating of the wasp, the wasp laying its eggs, spreading the pollen, and dying. The rest of the group move about the room eating the figs while this narration continues, with a series of sexually explicit words. They convene around a CD player and play some folk music. They pull the heart-shaped lollypops out of the papier-mâché, lick them, then perform a dance with them. The music changes to include speaking and singing and the group line up the heart-shaped lollypops against a window. They form pairs, kiss, hug, and bump against the bells so that the sound of the bells combines with the music coming from the CD player. They move to the back of the space and form a line, shaking their bodies as if doing a warmup. Somebody places a fan in front of the group, one person splashes another with water from a bucket, then tips the bucket over their head. They apply gold foil to their skin, decorating themselves it, then comparing how it looks on each other’s bodies.

Barby Asante found it to be a very playful but that the artist knew the container of each thing. That even though the elements were improvisational the artist was able to hold them together. She loved the sounds, the whistles, the speaking into the fan, the gold, and she was trying to link everything. There is still some background to the piece she feels she needs to work out. There seems to be an expectation that the audiences knows what is happening. A work can play with opacity but there should also be a relation to the audience.

Sandi Hilal says the piece made her think about something she has been seeing over the last few days to do with community building.  There is a sense of knowing each other very well, and of feeling comfortable, but that it would be nice to push the piece further, to explore what it includes and what it excludes. Even looking at it from the outside you see how intimate it is. But she was wondering if the student who were not part of the piece felt excluded. So she was wondering in what way it includes and excludes. Being aware of that might be helpful. She would like to ask the group what kind of community they have been building?

Zairong Xiang says that this piece makes for a great finale. He found it to be well-rehearsed, and that it used props in spectacular way that made sense. He liked how the two voices spoke through the hole in the Greek statue, the ritualistic changing into white clothes, people moving in different groups, doing things that were evocative, the bird whistles brought back childhood memories, the erotic licking of the lollipop turned it into something weird. He thinks that the piece has a lot to do with holes. That it provides a very queer description of nature. That nature is very queer. That this is a weapon against the right. He invites the artist to read ‘Evolutions Rainbow’ (by Joan Roughgarden). He liked the way the artist cut a hole in the Greek statue and observes that there is one place where we don’t think a hole exists, which this the penis, and how his current work concerns the penis as a hole. He says that everything wrong with the world is to do with the representation of the phallus as not having a hole. The other thing he enjoyed about the piece is how it was also rooted in tradition, which shows that tradition is not our enemy. That it can be turned around and queered. He thought the mythological element of applying gold was a wonderful finish to the piece and the day.