Parrhesia Talks: My life as counter-rhythmical interruption cat

In the organizer's words:

The term ‘counter-rhythmical’, invented by Friedrich Hölderlin, describes art’s role as an agent of rupture in an order, an interruption that also allows us to enter the world of solidarity, kindness, and empathy. These are big words. But as part of this tour of my artistic practice, we will have the chance to feel them together with a performance of ancient Greek hymns and melodies of indigenous Europe supported by my playing an ancient Greek lyre.

Against a socio-political order that separates, divides, classifies, and excludes, my work endeavours to create counter-rhythms, or moments of Oneness that in-separate, through the use of a wide range of media, a mix of indigenous cultures, and by gathering people, by doing collective actions. My talk with present a procession of these examples of Oneness, which I understand as the creation of times and spaces for living the good life, in a Greek sense of the word.

This procession will start with my ongoing durational art work, Avtonomi Akadimia (http://avtonomi-akadimia.net), a self-organized, grassroots university I founded and organize in Athens and elsewhere. So far, it has included 600 philosophical lectures, performances, actions, screenings, shamanic healing occasions, ecofeminist workshops, and artist talks, all of which are part of initiative to rewrite the media war between Greece and Germany, to create a space for the agony of the conflicts that emerged due to the austerity policies imposed around 2014.

The organization of spaces and times for a good life helps us to abandon the assertion that the world is ruled by techno-oligarchic force: it is ruled by resiliency and an adaptability to today’s multi-catastrophes: Avtonomi Akadimia has its roots at the Akadimia Platonos, a unique site and public space that BlackRock and other criminals have sought to attack, and in the victorious protection of which Avtonomi Akadimia actively participates.



Further, around 2012, a ‘movement of movements’ emerged, a reloveution. I will present some rare documentation of parts of this ongoing process that challenged cultural institutions to transform radically so that they can be used for reloveutionary purposes: occupations of museums such as the Pergamonmuseum, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, and of the director's offices of the Berlin Biennale 7.

Forwarding to today, the far-right has stolen the idea of this ‘movement of movements’ to use today’s digital interconnectedness for a large-scale political movement. But this pseudo-victory of Nazi techno-feudalism is only a weak revenge for Step 1 of its Reloveution. The surviving part of the world is ruled by the realization of oneness, the protagonists of which will be on screen as political monuments.



Also, especially for Parrhesia, I will revisit my early interactive 3D sculptures, which deploy pre-Socratic mathematical structures, once part of a unity of knowledge, into synthetic sculptures called ‘Cat Notation’. Taking up the a-disciplinary effects of Berlin Media Theory, Cat Notation presents a musical structure that can be said to carry the ‘DNA’ of ancient Greece prior to the invention of the state as a dispositif of exclusion and borderization. It thus presents itself as a political model of diversity and interconnectedness.

Lastly, at the aptly named ‘Village’ of Tak Theater, I will daylight some originals of my current artistic practice: energy drawings, shamanic plants, portraits of Avtonomi Akadimia's professors as their spirit animals, as well as wild cats and other beings who dwell in the Akadimia Platonos Jungle.