‘Promote only acts of poetical terrorism’
Lisa Alexander and Vassiliki Dimou
Performance action-occupation, University of Athens Philosophy Atrium, Athens, 26 April 2010
Title appropriated from BOMB’s A Manifesto of Art Terrorism, R. S. Marmon
This action interpreted instructions submitted by Konstantina Georgelou, one of thirty eight contributors to the project 'Travelling Ideas An (In-)complete Manifesto' (Lisa Alexander and Gigi Argyropoulou 2010) for Performance Matters. The phrase ’Promote only acts of Poetical Terrorism’ was selected from the composite manifesto sent out.
The instructions required that Dimou and I use our bodies as spaces to be occupied by printed excerpts from news media and we decided to draw on reportage of the then current 2010 election campaigns in the UK and simultaneous political reportage in Greece. We performed an action in the public space of one of the University of Athens’ campuses. Up until the summer of 2019 Universities in Greece were still places of political asylum. Protest, performance and free debate could not be inhibited. Police were prohibited from entering university property – a law unique to Greece put in place after the dissolution of the military junta in 1974. In April 2010 we began by undressing and started fixing the excerpts of mediaspeak onto each other. The process took over two hours until our bodies and the hall floor were covered by the printed papers.
Images: Jana Erbes and Carina Dreve