Tone Glow 054: Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani
An interview with Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani
Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani
Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, and active since the beginning of the 1980s, Thanasis Chondros and Alexandra Katsiani are a unique artist duo whose activities touch on a wide range of media and approaches. Starting out as performance artists in 1981, they have also published artist zines and audio publications, run two different art spaces, and have been in charge of series of associated events.
Throughout their career they have made numerous unorthodox gestures, such as when they established the "Research Center for the Definition of Happiness in 1998, complete with an actual research trailer stationed in their city’s centre. They’re pioneers of performance in their country, but their activities have nevertheless remained under the radar, eschewing definitions, while keeping steadfastly free from commercial pressures or any need for canonical acceptance. Over the years this has allowed them the freedom to examine even the most ephemeral aspects of everyday experience with irreverent humour, rigorous inclusivity, and incisive wit.
Their bio highlights the joint nature of their activities, stating that they “have been coordinating their behaviour since 1974”. In music, one of their most widely known chapters begins in 1984 with the appearance of Dimosioypalliliko Retire, together with Ntanis Tragopoulos. DR has been known to go against the grain of musical convention, marked by a strong underlying conceptual approach both to its performances and its recorded works. Apart from live actions, the group also produced a series of cassettes and albums, culminating in a periodical CDr edition that appeared between 2004 and 2006.
They have remained active to this day, with works that nowadays often also feature the collaboration of their two children. As result of their lasting influence, they are lauded by many as forebears within the Greek artistic community, their work only ever increasing in its relevance. This interview was conducted by Kostis Kilymis and took place via email between November 2020 and January 2021. This interview is also available in Greek.
Kostis Kilymis: Good morning Alexandra, Thanasis! I have just received your latest publication [Traveling with Michael Mitras through roads without tolls - a poem (oikoi editions, 2020)] and thought it was time I started this interview. Where do I find you these days?
Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani: Good morning Kostis! You find us at the epicentre of the COVID outbreak… And by that we don’t speak of Thessaloniki in general, but of the area with the largest viral load! You see, it’s a neighbourhood mostly populated by students, who had been spending a lot of time outdoors. If you want us to be more specific however, you find us in our kitchen playing board games.
It’s good having something to do in these conditions! How does the new publication fit into all this, especially since it (and many others) arrives several years after your official retirement in 2004? What is it that keeps you engaged in these types of activities?
In 2004 we abandoned artistic creation because we felt that the conditions had changed, the whole environment had changed, the pleasure of it had diminished. Since then of course, old works of ours have been re-exhibited at various events, just like it happens with the works of the dead. If they have material substance, and as long as there is interest, they can be exhibited. When we talk of 2004, however, we are talking about works of art. With Dimosioypalliliko Retire [which translates to Public Servant Penthouse], on the other hand, we kept releasing records until 2006.
A few years ago we published a novel, the plot of which lasts 61 minutes, equal to the number of its chapters. Each chapter corresponds to one minute’s worth of plot development. We have now published this poem we meant to present at an event that was to take place in Munich, dedicated to the memory of Michael Mitras, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. The event would have taken place on March 21, designated as World Poetry Day at the initiative of the Mitras. In the end, it may have been us who failed to put it properly. We said we were abandoning artistic creation, while it would have been more accurate, though unfortunately vague, to say that artistic creation was no longer part of our behaviour. Because, from the outset, we were concerned with behaviour as a thing in itself.
For six years now, our behaviour has extended to the creation, together with our children, of a trail running team. As Rationalists Anonymous we participate in mountain road races. We chose the name alluding to Alcoholics Anonymous, seeing how in a world of irrationality, reason takes a marginal role. Following shortly after this, and once again with our children, we appeared as the group Oikoi [Οἴκοι, the ancient Greek adverb that means at home] making a few recordings, creating short videos… We also made a longer video that was ready in January, but these circumstances brought in by the virus led us to inactivity, and we did not present it anywhere. We sent you its audio track actually, but you did not reply, you were probably not impressed! The subtitle for the Oikoi group is moments of family play because playing is not, as you put it, just something keeping us occupied, it is our life’s core.
I still have the email with the audio, but unfortunately at some point it got buried under! Maybe it was because my own house has been upset through relocating constantly for the last two to three years, and I often lose track of things. Let it not stay an excuse though, I need to go back to find it!
This leads me to one of my next questions now, though, which is the meaning the house has for you as a centre of activity? Furthermore, is this a notion that was consciously there from the beginning, or did it emerge along the way? I’m thinking on the one hand about events such as the 51 Saturdays or Hyperdothe, but I also wonder to what extent this was an idea you were constantly carrying with you, whether in Thessaloniki, Stockholm, or in Sami at the very beginning.
We had no plan, neither in the beginning nor afterwards, about how we would proceed and what we were to do, so the house naturally became what for most people would be the basis of their activities. Of course, visual artists need a studio, musicians need their studio, creators of various things need dedicated spaces, and video-makers need so much more… Us, who never confined ourselves to one medium or material, had we followed this logic we would have needed a whole apartment building, but we did not even have a house of our own as we were renting.
On the one hand the financial constraints then, and on the other our various other needs and obligations (to prepare lessons for the schools we worked in, to look after our children, etc.) made the house the place where we could do everything and do it at the same time—different activities as one concrete whole. Just to give one example, in 1985, when we would put our daughter to sleep (she was one year old at the time), we would then be heading to the adjacent room to do the shows for the Schedia [Raft] pirate station.
It’s a familiar situation to many creators, yes. Something that I think is happening more and more, to the point where people from my generation often feel some sort of guilt when they get to have (or just feel the need to have) a separate space or studio for their work. You on the other hand seem to have arrived early to the point of consciously playing with this convention. Do you recall any moment where all this became too much though? I’m thinking of instances such as the month of Hyperdothe maybe…
An art historian and curator came to our house once (she asked to come to our studio, but we said there was no studio) to discuss a proposal, as she told us. We never got to listen to the proposal, because she left swiftly following a series of affection assaults by our son, three or four years old at the time. There were plenty of similar episodes, but Hyperdothe was a different case. Thanasis’s mother, coming to an advanced age, was leaving her apartment to stay with her daughter. The house was to pass to us, and it was this period when we had already decided that the visual arts environment no longer satisfied us.
We decided to put together a month of events before emptying the apartment of its old furniture. It was a house that had been lived in, with the air of another era, but it was habitable. It had nothing to do with galleries, concert or lecture halls. People attending the events had to move from room to room, and sometimes actions unfolded in different places at the same time, so it was impossible to get a full impression of the whole event. Situations that elsewhere might seem chaotic, acquired some consistency here thanks to the sense of intimacy that the house offered. Many people participated and there were some who asked to present their work after the month had ended.
I like how actions such as this essentially appropriate the somehow over-promoted or heavy-handed practices of contemporary art such as happenings, performances and installations, and seem to restore them to their more human and everyday dimension. Is there any action or individual moment that stands out when you look back on that month, after all these years?
It’s all so vivid to us! Anything we might single out would be unfair to the rest of the participants… But then again how can we not mention Marianthi Papalexandri who played the apartment, the whole apartment and everything it contained that is, as an instrument and medium itself. Nikos Diminakis and Yannis Papaioannou, who played with the apartment using different instruments from room to room. Talking about all this we feel our poor words falling short of the vitality of those moments.
Then there were the microactions of Tina Voreadi, Maria Mitsopoulou, Stratos Dontsis, Ektoras Mavridis, which followed one another leaving marks in the space. The choreographies (with the added participation of the furniture) of Filio Louvari, Ioanna Mitsika, Tatiana Mirkou… some names escape us right now but the images were strong. Then there were the unforeseen events, such us when, due to some issue with the plumbing, a gush of water was pouring out of our balcony. How can we not mention the Buddhist calm kept by Nicolas Malevitsis who was to perform shortly after, while we were frantically looking for a solution to the problem!
There was particular significance for us in the performance titled, “One last meeting, a few images for you to remember” (on March 28th, 2004), as it was the last one we presented. Three days later, as the month ended, Hyperdothe came to an end, and we announced we were leaving artistic creation behind. There is an added emotional charge due to the fact that three of Hyperdothe’s participants, Lazaros Zikos, Yorgos Tselikas, and Michael Mitras, are no longer with us.
I’ve cursed myself many times for not having come to it. It was a time when I was beginning to hear about your activities, but had yet to take the leap to see what was going on with my own eyes. I specifically remember that I’d already encountered a track by Dimosioypalliliko Retire in a compilation published at some point by the circle around the Lotus record shop. The CD was filled with electro, ambient and techno tracks from the city’s producers, with your own track appearing more as an odd coda that took me some time to process. How did your relationship with music and sound begin?
We always felt out of place, but the most amusing story occurred during a concert celebrating some anniversary of the Ano Kato label. A rockabilly band had played, followed by us, Dim. Retire, who performed with knives which we kept sharpening in front of the microphones for a considerable time. There was surprise in the audience, as well as puzzlement, and as time passed there was nervousness and protests. When we finally stopped, we informed them we had just presented the piece, “My sister is dating an Albanian” [Editor’s note: immigration flows during the ’90s revealed hitherto unacknowledged layers of racism which the Greek society is still coming to terms with today].
As for our relationship with music and sound, first we should point out that we were born in 1953 and 1954, which means that from a young age we experienced the flourishing of music, but also that of thinking in general, that called for the widening of perspectives (even though we had seven years of dictatorship, there was a fertile mood in the air, with cinema as its main vehicle). Then came our meeting with the art world, art history lessons at university, the various avant-gardes, dada (which had little to do with music, but its overall practice is liberating), futurism (where noise now is decisively present). At the same time, Sakis Papadimitriou’s radio shows on improvised music and his organising of similar concerts, were also a factor. Thus our first performance, in January 1981, dealt with sound. It was titled “First Contact” and we accompanied it with the following text: “First contact, as we say first performance. But here we have no roles, we are not the stand-in for a composer, nor do we ourselves compose, we are not playing music, we are creating a sound environment, we are not depicting, we are not presenting. We are touching musical instruments for the first time, and the emergence of sounds is not based on memories and skills. The process is as important as the result.”
Was declaring the context in which the performance was taking place already important for you at the time? How did the audience perceive this as a gesture? From these concerts of improvised music you mention watching during those years, do you recall something that left a mark?
To be fair, that declaration-like text was the most interesting part of the performance. Other than that there was a sustained cacophony that people—astonishingly—kept following until the end, with no one getting up to leave. And the hall was full. As for concerts, one that was impressive and special was the Han Bennink performance that Alexandra saw at the ICA in London in 1979. We didn’t have the opportunity to see many things though, because from 1977 up till 1979, for 28 months, Thanasis was in military service, and afterwards from 1979 up till 1982 we were together in Sami, a village with a population of 600 in Kefalonia where we were appointed as language teachers.
From what I understand though, you already had exposure to this sort of music? What would you be listening to at the time? Was there something that influenced you later on when Dim. Retire was getting started?
Of course! There is always some sort of exposure. And our preferences would have been towards rock, but the spirit of the times, as we’ve said, in broadening our horizons, led us to follow different musics, not only for pleasure, but also to find out what else was out there. But the case of Retire is different. Retire did not come together to express our preferences. We would have been hard-pressed to find common ground on these anyway with Ntanis Tragopoulos, the third person in the group.
In the spring of 1984, when we decided to become a group, our thought was to create sound environments within different spaces. Hence it was a non-issue that us two were not able to play any instrument. In order to create a sound environment, we could be using any kind of sound source. So this relationship with space had more to do with ideas coming through art, and much less with music. In the first two tapes we recorded with Retire we could say that this spirit is kept, since we didn’t have the means for mixing and processing, so everything that happened was immediate. Entering the studio to record the Η Άλλη Πλευρά [The Other Side] LP though, things changed, because there first emerged the perfectionist musician that was Ntanis. This is when the second period of Retire begins, one that now had more to do with recordings and much less with performances. This second period comes to its peak when Ntanis acquired a home studio and we release Retire’s CDr periodical [To Periodiko], with 9 issues from 2002 until 2006.
Your first appearance as Retire?
October 11, 1984, at a construction site in Ano Toumba. Between piles of sand, metal and cement, it was a very fun afternoon. We took power from a nearby apartment, where Costis Drygianakis was living, and Ntanis had an electric guitar, Alexandra was playing drums with a flowerpot fit on top of her head, while Thanasis, who had two raw chickens hanging in front of his chest, was handling two small electric keyboards (Casio and Yamaha, if you recall those). There was a small group of friends and acquaintances that presented small happenings at each other’s houses at the time, something like a pocket festival. We drew out a route from the city centre, a bit like a treasure hunt, and led them to Toumba to the construction site without them knowing what was to take place. Most of the people that gathered though were passersby, or neighbours that were drawn there by the sounds. There was some curiosity, puzzlement, conversations, high spirit. It was a nice start for Retire, a pleasant feeling.
It sounds like a very warm evening, especially since you had this initial circle of people you were appealing to. What feeling did it leave you with though, for what could come after with Retire?
There was enthusiasm, and if we were free to do so, we’d have repeated everything the following day, so to say. But we weren’t free, as our daughter was an eight-month-old baby. It wasn’t simply the first appearance of Retire, for us it was also a very notable occasion in terms of getting out of the house. And you can imagine, when two months later, on December 15th, 1984, we went to Volos for a joint bill with Optiki Mousiki [Optical Music], it was a family excursion for us. In an indoors space at the French Institute, with stage and seating, advance notice and posters. Light-years away from the construction site, where someone had mistakenly found themselves in a lime-marked off-limits area. We announced the concerts on the posters as “The Other Wave,” making wordplay on the New Wave that was then in fashion, but also on certain concerts titled Next Wave that had taken place in New York around that time. It was nice in Volos as well, but there weren’t a lot of people.
Did the recordings come as a natural extension, or as a result of the limitations you describe?
Ha ha! It was completely the opposite. Not a result of limitations, but a result of summer relaxation. We made a three-day trip to [Costis] Drygianakis’s house in Volos. Drygianakis had a 2-channel console, and our plans were, apart from swimming, to also record this song we had prepared. In the end we recorded all of the material that appears on our first tape, and we mostly recorded it when our daughter had gone to bed. The material for our second tape came in large part from assorted recordings that had been made for various compilations. They were recordings that had been made with even simpler means, a tape recorder. The leap was made with the material for the Η Άλλη Πλευρά LP, when we went into a studio. Ntanis had become acquainted with the studio owner, as they were using it with his other band, A priori. There, the atmosphere was different. There was stress because we were billed studio time and thus had to take decisions quickly, conversation breaks had to be reduced, which meant there was little space for experimentation.
If we were to take stock, what is the part that has stayed with you after all these years—was it the concerts, the laid-back home recordings, or the limitations of the studio?
Such different experiences! You can’t even compare between the concerts. When at the festival of Thourios we were breaking chestnuts and the sound was being diffused everywhere through speakers, while around us a chorus read this fragment by Kafka that says that breaking chestnuts is not art, the atmosphere was very joyful and festive. When we appeared in the School of Architecture, the event turned into an academic discussion on art, the city, and language. In contrast, when our appearance at the Kalamaria Café-theatre ended, a well-known local architect said it had brought her to the brink of suicide. This was shocking. We always presumed that everything we do is characterised by humour, but the way each of us perceives stimuli is nevertheless different, and this shows how dangerous something can become. Thoughts like these brought us in 2001 to spread out flyers that wrote, “How do you deal with that which you don’t comprehend?”
Everything was always different. Same thing with the recordings. Okay, the recording of Η Άλλη Πλευρά was made under the worry of whether we’d have enough money to complete it, thus we wouldn’t describe it as being that pleasant. Even the space of the studio itself was foreign to the two of us. A space designed for instrument players. In Drygianakis’s house, on the other hand, we’d be using anything that was available as a sound source. It’s this first recording then that the two of us prefer. There was a fervent feeling when it came to creativity. It was a game which we enjoyed. This sets apart this first recording from the later ones made for the periodical, that by then were taking place at Ntanis’s home studio. Ntanis loves processing, but processing takes something away from spontaneity.
Was this another reason why you re-released it as part of Παλιές Ηχογραφήσεις [Old Recordings] with the periodical? If I’m not mistaken, this is the only reissue that the band itself has made.
Yes, indeed, this first recording of ours was reissued in its entirety, accompanied by a few more pieces from our second tape, as well as two unreleased ones…
I’m asking because you don’t have the habit of revisiting old works.
It was the era though when cassettes had become a thing of the past, and we wanted to rescue the material.
Something that clearly worked! There are pieces such as “Eidiseis” [The News] that unfortunately were to become relevant again [Editor’s note: “Eidiseis” consist of cut-ups of news reports on the shooting of 15-year-old protestor Michalis Kaltezas by a police officer in Athens in 1985, an event that was tragically mirrored by the shooting of the equally young Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008], but there is also an overly subversive musical approach that was almost unheard of in the years around 2000 when I myself was growing up in the same city. I think the realization that there once was fertile ground for such subversive approaches to sound, especially when placed alongside the activities of Sakis Papadimitriou and Floros Floridis, was something that opened up things for a lot of people. How would you compare the creative environment then to that after 2000?
Indeed, both Papadimitriou and Floridis played a very important role in shaping a certain creative environment. They were performers themselves, organized jazz and improvised music festivals, radio shows, a publication on improvisation, many things that mutually promoted one another. As for ourselves, up until the ’80s we kept closer track on what was happening in music and art, and in other forms of expression. But it’s not easy for us to make comparisons, as we don’t have the full picture from then on. In the ’90s on the one hand we had a second child, and on the other we were operating the Alli Poli [Other City] art space, so each night we would be there while in the morning we were at school. There was no time to properly follow what was taking place.
Of course in the ’80s, seeing the development of synthesizers, we anticipated there would be a dramatic shift in music. We didn’t of course expect everyone becoming Xenakis all of a sudden, but we also didn’t imagine finding ourselves led to all this repetitive monotonous banging. Then came the internet, and we quickly saw its effects amongst our students. It used to be there was a film playing on TV and it’d be possible for us to talk about it the following day, while with the internet one would be watching A and someone else would be watching X, meaning there’d be no shared ground for discourse. The criteria we all develop are getting increasingly disparate, because they are based on different givens. Over-information ruptures social cohesion, which is also something we didn’t expect… We keep missing the mark!
The period you spent in Stockholm, how did that affect you?
It affected us in many ways. January of 1989 we found in Stockholm a society that was shaken by a large teacher strike. Strikes were something unusual for Sweden at the time (we do not know if things are different now), since issues were normally resolved through arbitration and negotiation between the workers and the employers. Whereas we were coming from a country where strikes would very often take place as a matter of custom, and were considered to be successful not when demands were met but when there was large participation. We found ourselves in a different world with different attitudes. We found out there was an electronic music festival taking place and we knew records that were coming out each year with works from this festival. We were excited to attend, but were stunned to see that, bar the musicians themselves, the audience was made up of two or three people. It was a cold atmosphere that only got warmer around the buffet at the end.
Although we took part in one group show, we mostly gave up on art during our time in Stockholm. We preferred wandering and getting to know the place. We recorded more. There we also wrote “Contrapunto,” which was awarded by the RNE2 Spanish radio channel, a piece that was designed to accompany the news ([it had] pleasant sounds that follow each piece of negative news with equal duration).
Speaking of news, the times we saw their prime minister appearing on the news were counted on the fingers of one hand, unlike the daily appearances of Greek prime ministers on our TV. Nevertheless, it was a period when social democracy was being challenged, and we’d be hearing criticisms such as that the state wasn’t allowing citizens to take initiative, anticipating their needs before they themselves realized them. Of course in Greece the thing most commonly invoked is, “where is the state?”, even in cases of absolute personal responsibility. Undoubtedly, we grew considerably through all this. It widened our perception. Despite its difficulties, it was a fertile period. We could talk for hours about our experiences there, when in Greece, in Thessaloniki especially, the creed of Apo Michanis Theos [Deus Ex Machina] was well under way.
I think the best known page from this chapter is the Από Μηχανής Μουσική [Music Ex Machina] compilation on Ano Kato Records (if indeed there is a connection beyond the name…) in which we actually find a lot of artists from Stockholm taking part. How did all this come about?
It must have been in 1986 when we began to discuss the notion that, in the same way that the many religions use art to promote their ends, we could be using religion as material for art. In any case, in 1987 we were talking with friends about creating the Από Μηχανής Θρησκεία [Religion Ex Machina]. At the same time we put in a transfer request to the ministry, asking for placement at the Greek schools in Egypt. The positions were announced in June 1988 and we were turned down. Since we weren’t leaving then, we took this talk of religion more seriously, and with Dimosioypalliliko Retire we recorded the material for the Άλλη Πλευρά LP, with references to the Ex Machina endeavour.
In December 1988, the Μπιτόνι [Jerry Can] zine came out, featuring religious content. It was right at that time that we were to leave for Stockholm on short notice, as two positions had unexpectedly been vacated there. In January and February two further issues of Μπιτόνι were released, which, since we were away, was decided should appear every winter. In February, Η Άλλη Πλευρά also came out. The most fertile years for the Ex Machina religion were the years we were away for. Nevertheless we’d still be working towards its ends from afar. Producing an album of «religious» music was something we were very much after. And we wanted it to have pieces of varying temperament, which is why we got in touch with numerous different people, Jello Biafra being one example, but this correspondence kept dragging on. On the contrary, from Gothenburg, Carl Michael von Hausswolff who ran the Radium 226.05 label was game, and offered us the sum of the Swedish material for the album. We have never met him, and we cannot recall how we came to ask him to work with us.
Of course you later worked again with Carl Michael, and also with Leif Elggren, as ambassadors for Elgaland-Vargaland, but that is another story… I’m still curious about Μπιτόνι though, can you give us an idea of what was on its pages? From the compilation credits on the other hand, one can see that the circle of people participating or joining along in the recordings of that era had widened (I’m thinking of the Μηχανολόγοι [The Engineers] in particular here). What were some of the ideas or acts, not necessarily coming from the core trio of DR, that kept this interest alive during that time?
Yes, we put together a religion and they took part in it, they put together a state and we took part in that ourselves, ha ha! Great things! Μπιτόνι contained holy texts to begin with. Holy texts are necessary as a starting point, in order for one to know what we are talking about. They record the activities, the meetings, and the words of Deus Ex Machina and its three female substances (Chance, Hope, and [Sexual] Arousal), and through all these, the Ex Machina perception of things. Other than holy texts, which are reference texts, there are pieces of theology that detail a number of issues, there are poems, accounts of rituals enacted by the friends of god (we use the word friends and not followers), and commentary on current events.
A common element in all this was humour, which is the element that is missing from religions, especially monotheistic ones. And since you mentioned the group of Μηχανολόγοι, not only is their name connected to the Ex Machina religion, but their piece on the album is also the product of a certain ritual. Within ten or so poems by [notable 20th century Greek poet] Seferis, nouns, adjectives and verbs were randomly replaced with ones from other poems. The new poems that resulted were sent to literature professors, poets, and critics, soliciting their opinions. The conflicting opinions that were gathered were published in Μπιτόνι, without the poems themselves ever being published, with the exception of the one sung by the Μηχανολόγοι.
It was only their echo that came out then. Any interesting reaction that has stayed with you?
There was some noise, and a few pieces about this were published. Who knows where we keep the clippings… If we even have them and they’re not lost.
With the way your work has developed, how difficult is it to maintain an archive?
It used to be impossible. We had no time, we had no space. Now we have time, but find it hard to get to the end of it.
It certainly is a great luxury most of the time. How did the recent release by Oikoi on Bandcamp come about?
As we were saying: moments of family play… We realized that recordings that were made during this whole coronavirus period constituted a whole, and could be published. We say recordings, but in reality they were videotapes, they were made with a video camera. We used the name οίκοι2310 to set the sound production apart, while we use the name οίκοι for videos or publications. This is to answer your question about archiving, ha ha!
But I never for a moment accepted the notion of you not keeping an archive or a classification of some sort! Let’s talk about classification then! Is this something done for your own benefit, or in order to organise your “product”?
It’s both. We share here a Facebook post that was made two hours ago by an art historian: “The artist couple of Katsiani-Chondros were pioneers in the field of artistic action and performance. With humour, participatory spirit, political thought, originality and creativity. With a pedagogical aspect. Decades now. With interventions, publications, with the first hybrid-museum of experimental art, the seminal Dimosioypalliliko Retire”. What does one make of Dimosioypalliliko Retire when reading this? And there are many pieces published out there that are utterly confused as to what we did or didn’t do.
Hahahah, to be honest, reading this description I would imagine some sort of futuristic avant-garde art apartment-museum in the middle of Thessaloniki! If you had to choose to be known for (positive) things you didn’t do, or unknown for things you did do, what would you choose? I agree of course that staying in control of how our work is outlined is critical, on the other hand though, isn’t this play with the dividing lines between different means terribly interesting as a way of breaking boundaries?
Yes, we have said so in our lectures, that performance in particular gives birth to rumour. Meaning that the rumours that each performance in its character allows to be developed are part of the work. And the question you put is the most challenging one we have ever faced. When you’re not out looking for the genius masterpiece the future will admire, if you’re aiming to converse with your time, the fact that what you did gave birth to new ideas that people attribute to you without you actually realizing them, is something very important.
I think all of us, whenever we read or hear about something without having experienced it first hand, always more or less perform some sort of “creative translation” that can lead us on to new paths. This was a conversation I came across on Twitter recently, to what extent it is worth mentioning and reviewing albums that are out of print or unavailable. And there was a very acute observation in that in other eras inspiration often came about through the simple mention or description of some hard to find or “strange” album, less so from its actual content.
Finally, what is more important, the work itself, or its influence—the permission if you will, that the work gives its audience to think and position themselves differently?
There is no perfect answer. Every case is different. The works are different, the times and the conditions in which they are made are different. The ideas and intentions, and most of all the recipients are different. That which is positive can be distorted into something directly opposing it, just like reason during the Enlightenment was used as a tool for justifying the barbarity of colonialists. No, there is no easy answer.
And as we were saying in the beginning of the interview, conditions are changing rapidly these days, so we definitely need to be very careful. In a reflection on your work though—commenting on the absence of any formal artistic education in your bio—you mention: “We began presenting artistic actions without having witnessed any artistic action”. Looking back, do you see this as luck, or as circumstance?
We brought it up as a paradox. On the other hand, we think we always had luck and circumstance on our side. We began our performances having heard about a few things, but without having watched any… And it was 1982 when, first in Kassel and then in Florence, we were to watch actions for the first time, and felt troubled and puzzled by them as they seemed to us irrelevant and superficial. Had we witnessed them before attempting anything, they may have suppressed our enthusiasm. We were also lucky because our first attempts got publicity and visibility, which served to encourage us precisely when one needs it most, when they are starting out.
Circumstance helps one draw associations and clarify their ideas. In 1981 for example, one of our actions in Patra, where we were verbally attacked, took place almost at the same time as a large show of environments and actions, organized at a formal venue in Athens by the Greek Association of Art Critics. They were presenting actions as something new that the unschooled public needed to be educated on, and there was this overall looking-down on the audience. In contrast, we were welcoming the audience into the process itself, handing out bread buns that on their side wrote, “the meaning of a gesture is the method with which it’s validated”. It’s the audience that validates our action.
Earning a living outside the art world, as teachers, is this something you feel helped you maintain such a grounded approach?
This was our starting point. Having our school salaries, we didn’t need to engage in commercial practices, seek prestige or publicity. This gave us freedom of movement.
Your connection with children and with teaching though, didn’t that have some influence over your actions or the way you approached things?
Contact with children is very beneficial. Children don’t simply accept something they are told just to get over with it and move along, as adults often do. They need to comprehend, to perceive what you are presenting to them. A daily contact of this kind will influence the way you approach anything.
I mention this because, even though I’m new to this field myself, I already see the influence on how much more care it makes me put into my thoughts and in what I communicate through my ideas. Did you even perform actions within the school environment?
Not ourselves, but students did under our guidance. And not with reference to art and performance, but as school events, sometimes common ones (celebrating the new year or the day of poetry for example), other times invented (a celebration of chance, on the occasion of the invention of penicillin, celebration against prejudice, some 13th day of the month, these kinds of occasions).
These invented causes sound amazing! Did you suggest the occasions yourselves, or did the students choose them? It is also a great opportunity to get us thinking maybe about how we end up with the social conventions and habit surrounding these days. Is there some day that you would like to suggest as a new invented celebration today, something we could be celebrating more?
We’d be selecting a few dates through reading about certain events, little things even, that might give us the starting point. We would pass on our initial thoughts to a group of students two or three weeks in advance, prepare whatever resulted from this, and end up with an activity taking place in front of the rest of the school, who had remained clueless up until then. They were unforeseen events, this is what they had in common. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, this scanning for things that happened “on this day” and can offer a starting point for events, is very very easy.
Of course “on this day” works for our age groups that still live on Facebook. I wonder how the TikTok and Stories generation now forms its memory. Back to the events themselves though, how would the unsuspecting students usually react?
We mentioned “on this day” not as a memory process, but as a source of material that can offer a starting point. Contrary to established celebrations that aim to monumentalise something, these events could be even set off by something foolish. We had a celebration of symbols, which began from something silly—we can’t recall details, it was something silly and fun though—but it touched on serious issues.
As for students and their reactions… What can we say? At the age of 13-14 everything is so fluid. Some of them are shy, some are enthusiastic, some have so many ideas that they cannot put them in order, while others are methodical, and some refuse to participate outright, but we’d have students from other years and classes coming in asking to take part… How can we describe all this? It was very lively.
It sounds like you managed to pass on the same kind of creative spirit that also appears at the root of your own work. Have you kept in touch with any of your students by any chance? How do they recall all this?
We kept in touch with very few, but reconnected with many of them years later thanks to Facebook. They seem to have good memories…
I can imagine! Any final thoughts about the future?
We have a number of old projects still at work. We are publishing three short stories titled Uncertainty in three phases. They were written in 2007, 2011 and 2017, and so deal with the atmosphere of this very particular decade, most of the duration of which Greece was in crisis. The COVID crisis is not included of course, but in the story from 2007 the hero meets a girl who is undertaking a doctoral study on the influence the plague had on the articulation of a common European narrative. Coincidences such as these, appearing unexpectedly but fitting in with today’s events, can be quite amusing.
Then, we have the video produced by οίκοι, which as we mentioned has been ready since January ’20. We will publish it at some later point, as the upload of the οίκοι2310 music on Bandcamp is still fresh [Editor’s note: the video was eventually published on YouTube in the beginning of February and appears below]. Also produced by οίκοι will be the second round of virtual conventions. In 2019 we presented conventions as an aesthetic experience, this year the subject will be conventions as play. But we haven’t worked on this yet. You asked for thoughts about the future, and we gave you our plans. Was this what you had in mind, or did you expect something about the future in general, say how optimistic we are about the future of humanity?
Hahahah, no. I didn’t mean for it to sound so pretentious. I think you’ve fully covered it with the above. Thank you very much for your time!
Thank you, Kostis!
Thank you for reading the fifty-fourth issue of Tone Glow. Make play a central part of your arts practices.
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