Love Letters to a (Post-)Europe
02/10/15 - 03/10/15 BIOS main, Athens
Love Letters to a (Post-)Europe was an international festival of short works in the context of austerity and escalating humanitarian crisis that summer. Artists were invited to respond to a provocation (see below) with a work of no longer than 15 minutes in length - in any format - to be presented live.
Concept and curation: Lisa Alexander
Production: Lisa Alexander & BIOS
Contributing artists: Kate Adams, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Brian Catling, cris cheek. Robin Deacon, Tim Etchells, Alec Finlay, Matthew Goulish, Guy Harries, Steven C Harvey, Catherine Hoffmann, Wendy Houstoun, Mikhail Karikis, Brian Lobel, Claire MacDonald, Georgios Makkas, Ivana Müller, Mariela Nestora, Kira O’Reilly, Florence Peake, Erica Scourti, Maria Sideri, Anna Sherbany, Jungmin Song, Yoko Tawada, Nikki Tomlinson.
https://lovelettersposteurope.tumblr.com/artists
Long-form interview with Lisa Alexander by Diana Damian Martin: Exeunt feature 15/12/15
Images: Eftychia Vlachou
Provocation:
In the Greek language there are more than four words for Love. Five years ago Europe entered a deep crisis indicating something that ran a lot deeper still, 'a crisis of social imagination' in which economic dogma had 'taken hold of public discourse' according to Berardi. This also marked the start of Europe's uprising by its people: the encampments in Madrid, Athens, Rome, London and beyond. The body's presence in public squares confirmed something infinite and unquantifiable to a global system. Now we seem to have come full circle and economic dogma is being used to inflict regime change. There has been a lot of debate on what has been enacted in the name of Europe over the last few months.
This event asks artists to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter. Of now. It may also be ending it. An action approaching another, a double listening.
Levelled at this crisis of social imagination, economic dogmatism and neoliberal tyranny is imagination, empathy, sensuality, presence, being together, singular witnessing, living manifestos, stories, acts of friendship, fellowship, solidarity, refusals of order, nonsense, gifting, calls from and to the wilderness, rants, tough love, seductions, messages in brokenness, adoration, utopias and post-utopias, songs from the margins, addressing the now.