A gathering with talks, performances, films and sounds by: AMOQA, Eirini Avramopoulou, Astarti Athanasiadou, boychild, Rafika Chawishe, Yorgia Karidi, Learning from documenta, Maria Mitsopoulou aka Maria f Dolores, Evgenia Mylonaki, Panagiotis Panagiotakopoulos aka Taka Taka, Stefanos Pavlakis, Performance Biennale: No Future, Elpida Rikou, Despina Sevasti, Adrianni Simati, Wu Tsang, Kostas Tsioukas, Marina Vishmidt, Adonis Volanakis

This one day symposium will engage with the theme of “(non)performance as method” in order to explore the ways in which artistic and cultural practices, by way of their myriad articulations and forms offer methods and blueprints for compositions of social life. More specifically, the conference will study performance practices working against and through sets of constraints (economic, social, material etc), and is particularly interested in engaging with the entanglement of historical, contemporary (and potential) aesthetic processes and modes of political being and (un)becoming. Thus, in addition to an in-depth engagement with examples of certain strategies, actions and enactments, while always emphasizing practice as method and theory made material, we will also be grappling with formations of refusal and escape, which is to say, we will be thinking about the questions raised by those performances that refuse to perform in a certain way, that refuse certain calls to perform. Therefore the question of (non)performance as practice also becomes one of collaborating, improvising and living otherwise.

Program:

11:00 – Welcome and Introduction by Hypatia Vourloumis

11.30 – Panel 1: Theory/Praxis
Evgenia Mylonaki, “Dehumanizing Humanities”
Stefanos Pavlakis, “Excursions to the Other Side: Field notes on the poetics of artistic research”
Eirini Avramopoulou, “Refusing to perform the subject of crisis?: Reflections on the performativity of everyday life and epistemic violence.”

12.45 – Round Table: Collective performance as method
AMOQA - Maria Dolores/Adrianni Simati, "Performing (in) the fieldwork: Logos and representative practices in the Museum of Queer Arts."
Learning from documenta. Elpida Rikou, "Introduction to research project"
DIY Performance Biennale: No Future. Gigi Argyropoulou, Vassilis Noulas, Kostas Tzimoulis, "Reflections"

Common Platforms, Rafika Chawishe/Adonis Volanakis "A blind date"

14.00 – lunch break

15.30 – Talk - Marina Vishmidt, “Non-Performing Debt: Speculation and Negation in Aesthetics in and of the Present”

16.45 – coffee break

17.15 - Panel 2: (Non)performance lectures
Panagiotis Panagiatokopoulos, “Is it too Late to Speculate?”
Despina Sevasti, “Learning from Her”
Astarti Athanasiadou, “Performance as Subject and Refusal as Right”

19.00 – Screening of Wu Tsang’s films "Shape of a Right Statement" (5 mins) and "Duilian" (26 mins), with Greek subtitles and Q & A with the artist.

Closing (non)performances
20.15 – Yorgia Karidi, “playoffs”
21.00 – Kostas Tsioukas, “Imagine Peace”
21.45 – boychild, “ ”

All presentations will be in English. For more information and partcipants' bios in Greek and English please click https://nonperformanceasmethod.wordpress.com/

Location: Green Park, Mavromateon 22, Pedio tou Areos, Athens