Your poetics are closely linked to gender and women themes. What exactly are you interested in?
I want to create a strong visual world that addresses gender fluidity in context and aesthetics. How are we always already “singular-plural”. I want to destroy the fixed notions and categories of separation inherent to racial capitalism through the aesthetics of a transformative mode of history and time, through the aesthetic imagination as a transformative force. I am trying to create an original language, maybe a meta theatre that is the offspring of social distancing. In seclusion I embroider Antigone as part of my own lineage. “Traces of Antigone” is about tracing the lineage of courageous gender fluid people before us, who stood up and made themselves present. It is about LGDP communities as much as feminists.
Do you think that theater in general talks about gender’s issues?
Not as much as I would like and expect. There is a shift happening and our societies are gradually becoming more inclusive. But this is not a bloodless revolution. The question I guess as always is: “Who tells the story?” Marginalized communities such as the LGBT people have had their stories told by others over and over. It is a matter of agency.
Why did you choose the character of Antigone?
The mythological Antigone really stands out as a tragic heroine that has been mostly “wanted” and adored. A true idol, a rebel that defies patriarchy, a super star of the feminist mythology. We undermine this to unveil a more complex reality. In the play of Ouzounidis, Antigone is not the stereotypical rebel. She is a girl of 13 years old, a student in a Swedish school stepping into puberty and encountering all the mechanisms in place that enforce gender canonization. Ambivalence, uncertainty, ambiguity. These are the new ideas that my girly Antigone brings to the world. And as the words fails her, language fails her and she is a girl in a very perplex reality, in search of other words, of another way.
Can you describe the installation-perfomance ?
“Traces of Antigone” is an audiovisual embroidering, a live art piece that unfolds at the same time in parallel both in the digital and in the physical world. The work aims to stitch together the physical with the digital, the material with the immaterial and to mix the two audiences (the digital and the physical one) in the ether of a meta space. This is a weird animal of the internet, where women from their homes or (in a replica of their home on stage) weave together languages, images and sounds.
How is it interactive and digital?
We invite viewers to interact with the performance; in fact, we push them to the public agora, to an experience of going beyond digital and physical dimensions in a genderless space of technology where the public and the private merge into one. And of course, they pip on us. Are we trapped, safe or emancipated? It is up to our viewers to tell, as we grant them permission to invade our most intimate world. Zoom in to details, zoom out to our galaxies. The tagged names on our windows name us and reconfigure anonymity and objectification as our viewers turn into voyeurs. But we also get to expose them! This came as a great surprise when we opened the show. The fact that when they turned on their cameras, we saw our audience in their own seclusion, their private space was exposed as well. It was so great to be able to connect and talk at the end of each show. A network was created from all over the world. More than 50 countries connected and joined our Antigone.