Capitalising on the Life of Death: Death Series #3: Uninhabited.  Delos Island 2012

Performer: Apostolia Papadamaki

This is a third performance in a series of five. The idea was to walk, for the first time and without preparation, across the windy and uninhabited island of Delos, full with historical meaning, in order to give symbolic birth to  9 kg of salt, the weight of a real baby, near the altar of Zeus.

Performing at Delos, is about performing in an expanded time-space continuum.  Delos, the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, was a sacred space, but more importantly for today's economic condition, it was the bank of the Athenians for sea salt, an exchange currency in the ancient Greek world. The performer’s “room of one’s own” is expanded to this significant landscape,  that allows Papadamaki to perform the tensions of history and contemporaneity, and to inscribe her body in both mythology and economy.  

The performance is witnessed by a few random passers by, while the audience is extended in  the invisible historical witnesses and the contemporary art world audience, who have a chance to see the documentation of the performance. Papadamaki transcends the duality physical and non-physical by dealing with the  immanent production and delayed reception of the performance.

Abandoning the Ego / Embracing Collective UnConsciousness

Experiential aspect of performance are manifested in the fact that Papadamaki abandons the 'artist's" ego, by escaping the impulses of her mind and going to more into the instinct functioning, as a method of morphing her body in the context. She allows herself to  go back in ancient history, use archetypes in order to understand the morphic resonance of today.

The performance#3 is an attempt for an experience that brings her close to ecstasy an "altered states of consciousness” according to ancient Greeks. To perform in a sacred place like Delos  in an ecstatic way is to deal with the unconscious that according to Freud can not recognize death. So. by morphing herself in the landscape and embracing the collective unconscious, she manages to allow for the pleasure principle to prevail.

Moreover, her body becomes a place of collective consciousness that embodies multiple temporalities, contexts and meanings. It is not only a triumph of life, but also a triumph of the time of performance that expands the collective memory in another dimension that conquers time in general. 

Proverbial salt to the wound or…?

So, what does it mean to come close to death by symbolically giving birth on the island that used to be a bank of salt, the currency of ancient times? What are the politics of the performance and what is the role of the performance in a current cultural-political landscape of Greece?

Both giving birth and salt have strong symbolic meanings. To give birth is to start a new life, while salt resonates with wealth, power and fertility, but also  negatively,  in a sense that a proverbial salt to the wound can also be applied here. Just as both life and death are involved in the performance, salt is both a cure anda a poison to the existing wound in the social-political tissue of Greece.

The understanding of politics of  this performance is hidden in the individual interpretation of synthesis of mythology and political actuality. To perform  what is not permitted is to remotely evoque internal political and economic struggles. To give birth to salt in a restricted context is to  deal with actuality. It is to feel the pain and induce the dying Greek economy with power and wealth, simultaneously.

Moreover, what does this performance as an intervention in history tell us about  the current geo-political manifestations in the art world? In a situation when the Troika simultaneously drains Greek economy with austerity measures, the hegemonic art world  announces that they want to learn from Greek people (Documenta 14) and thus to objectify or (all over again) and colonise the  Greek art world. 

Papadamaki is  context-responsive, performing from a subject position and giving a contribution to the redistribution of power in Greek society and it’s symbolic perceptive order.

The act of birth in the time of crisis, at Delos, an ancient bank and a place where Eros was delivered, is now a pure symbolic economy at stake.

At least two capabilities Papadamaki and  the agents of the hegemonic art world have in common: while reflecting the Greek context  by the means of art: 1. they are capitalising on the life of death; 2. they are  capitalising on it through the survival of “idealization-the imaginary  that constitutes a miracle” and is capable of “transfering the meaning to the very place where it was lost in death or in a nonmeaning”.

Majia Ciric, Art Curator.