Skoupidia - pilgrimage

Site specific walking endurance performance in desertifying region of Greece, Viotia close to Livadia. The walk took place in an area which was irrigated for farming by British colonists, and is currently a site of mass water extraction, and mountain decapping for wind energy. Despite the region’s rich natural water systems via mountain ways, and a long history of rural small scale economies/ecologies, it faces intensifying yearly environmental disruption via drought and ruptures to human and non-human ecologies, generating stories of invasive species (fig tree parasites, wolves), material matters (noise from wind turbines, industrial vibrations), and die offs in the region.
Long-term exploration of the area via listening walks, paying attention, and ethnographic research, amounted to a performance walk carrying a shrine to offer to a plastic factory situated in the irrigated lake. The performance was documented as a film which, alongside collected audio-data, constituted material for the video installation for A retrospective on the anthropocene. Stills from the film were used for the chapter '“Pilgrimage to the deadzone’’ co-written with Sabrina Buehn, in the Toxic Temple volume (ed. A. Lerchbaumer and K. Joerg; pub. De Gruyter). The chapter and the walk are speculative ethnographic fictions on the relationship between human rituals and plastic.

walk: Aghia Triada to Livadi, Viotia, Greece, 08/2021
sound and visual excerpts: A retrospective on the Anthropocene PS Communitism 02/2022, Open Arts Collective, Empros Autonomous Theatre 03/2022 with Panos ‘Kalimeris’.
book chapter: pub. 05/2022 with Sabrina Buehn.

camera: Konstantinos Argyriou.

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