atlas, 2015
An interactive, 5 min, occasional performance intervention, bean soup and single-use cups and spoons, dimensions variable.
21 performers are sitting around a dinner table. Each one has 5 min to present a performance. A cook enters the space. Walks towards the artist no 11. Picks up a black lighter resting on the no 11 artist’s empty plate. Walks back out, to a temporary cooking set up, where a gas cooker is placed, holding a covered pot. He lights up the gas cooker and stirs the bean soup. Once warmed up, he calls for the audience to help themselves with a full bowl.
Atlas was site-specifically made for participating in The Bankorgs, a long duration performance, which consists of 21 short individual performances and draws inspiration from Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-feminism in the last twentieth Century”. For The Bankorgs performance event, twenty-one participants, who met each other just a few hours before the event, were invited to creatively respond to Haraway’s notion of the ‘cyborg’ in relation to the emergence of an imaginary entity, that of the ‘bankorg’, an organism that has been affected and deeply transformed by the current dominance of the banks on multiple socio-political terrains. The performance participants, mostly creative practitioners, fine and visual artists, choreographers, film directors, art researchers, curators, art historians and performers, deposit on the dinner table
objects of their choice that symbolize survival and/or resistance under the regime of the ‘bankorg’.
The event is part of the research project Performance Dinners organized by The Subjectivity & Feminisms Research Group (S&F) of Chelsea College of Arts, London. For the Performance Dinners No 8 in Athens, the S&F has invited the artist/researcher Maria Paschalidou to select the theme of the project this year and curate the related creative event in Athens. Many thanks to James Moss for performing and to all the project’s supporters and participants!
Performance Dinners no 8, The Bankorgs, curated by Maria Paschalidou, Bios Tesla, Athens.
Documentation of the performance.