5/02/2013

Video Bags, 2007 ongoing


Video Bag / The New School for Social Research , 2013 Portable DVD player, DVD (The New School, 2013, 18 min, 22 sec), headphones, Urban Outfitters bag on steel grab bar 58 x 39 x 8 in / 147 x 99 x 20 cm
 

Video Bag / David Hammons Toy with Egypt and Libya , 2011 Portable DVD player, DVD (David Hammons Toy, 2010, 2 min, 49 sec), headphones, leather bag on driftwood with ceramic dolphin 33 x 17 x 12 in / 83 x 43 x 30 cm
 

Video Bag / TROMI (horrors) , 2013 Portable DVD player, DVD (TROMI, 2012, 8 min, 56 sec), headphones, two bags on doorknob 23 x 15 x 10 in / 58 x 38 x 25 cm
 
Video Bag / Do you think I am human?, 2013 Portable DVD player, DVD (Do You Think I Am Human, 2013, 33 sec), backpack, paint 14 x 15 x 11 in / 35 x 38 x 27 cm

 all images installation view: Screens, Murray Guy, 2013

4/17/2013

At Le Potage De Madame Zazouf (Space Is Not Territory)


Space Is Not Territory 



Now that some have found a way to territorialize their concept of 'fight' with the hectic maneuvering of a closed group, and call social space the property of a door that allows them to determine who is in and who is out. Now that the only concern remains the never-ending search for new issues and new topics of investigation creating an eternal state of non-action; the question is if there comes a time when territories are created only to be immediately deterritorialized and reterritorialized, and if there will be moments where space expands beyond the determination of a life-style.  

As if we talk too much but we don't do much. 

We talk about life, our own life, and how to organize with others, and the talking somehow always starts with the question of the value of our own life but not with the question of how the decision to live our life can change others’ way of living. 

Can life be livable? 

One’s decision to live is not at issue here or even the starting point of this text. I would rather bring attention to the ambitious drive of inhabiting a space for it to become livable, through unpredictable ways of being, using, resourcing, and varieties of gatherings, all hubs without having to incorporate the Cartesian duality of an inside and outside.

Can we get unconcerned with the out or in?  

Walking on the same street with others next to us doesn't make us listen to them. To find a place to gather doesn't mean we found each other. It is as if our relationship we foster with history is merely accumulative, and that this suffices in a city that legitimizes any action, but if legitimization is actually chained to specific action, then all we have is absence. A formulaic distancing is occurring that is nothing else but a mere coincidence. Very selectively we have studied the struggles of others, and we seek to find refuge in the generic specificity of a history of images, opinions and comments by ignoring to consider the significance of experiences, our own experiences and how to talk about them. Isn't it the discourse with others that creates language? How can we create language when we communicate our thoughts only based on what is already written and what we have already seen? Why do we always assume that every time we talk we communicate language or make something visible? The denial of the vulnerability of speech is the very process to pacification. The continuation of conferences, events, and screenings within the institutional frameworks and under the conditions we are opposed to but insist not to speak out against is part of a process of social mutation. To be the constant spectators of the history we create is the most painful of all. Is this a form of self-policing? 

Is form self-policing?

To walk and be conscious of others walking with you and to do moments of living is resistance. Action is when bodies self-govern to be present and to communicate, sliding beyond the urgencies to either create or to be allowed to use fixated territories in totalitarian capitalism. When we act in disregard of any feeling of professional responsibility or entitlement, ignoring the predetermined sense of knowing the one and only truth, then we meet, and then we talk, and then we have space. 



Georgia Sagri 
New York, Spring, 2013 
For Cara Benedetto, Diego Singh, Whitney Claflin and
Pati Hertling at "Le Potage de Madame Zazouf". 


1/28/2013

OWEN at the Arnolfini Bristol on the 17th and the 20th of January 2013.

OWEN is a sniper's text who fought in Iraq, wish to become an invitation to be listened in public, spoken in the space by mouths, heard in time by ears. OWEN is the detailed elements of a presentation, the performance's steps come from Beckett’s play Footfalls, offering a rhythmical, more of a metronomic aspect to the duration of the piece. The performer learns the text by heart through the help of the passers. When the text is learned and spoken a few times by only the performer, without the adding of words or possible corrections of linguistic errors from the passers that moment marks the end of the performance. The repetitive reciting of each word, sentence and paragraph which is spoken by the passers who sit on the benches and read again and again to the performer creates a module where the text is heard many times in various ways by many different people. The people engage to the words than what is the performer's representational accomplishment to the role of the sniper. Instead we look each others position in speaking and listening the sniper's words. The passers read and speak the words, look how and in which way the words that the performer speaks are correct and even allowing some errors to exist. This whole process produces, how I call it an oral-monument. When I hear the word monument it comes to mind a stable, fixed representation, a resolved event of the past. Through this piece I'm trying to make a monument that creates history, through a text from the past. History can't be only representations from the past which we suppose to mimic, but words, actions which we learn to share and translate to each other we perhaps allow history to be created, a history of our own in the present moment. When the piece is taking place the performer is one of the elements, she/he is amongst the participants to the piece and not the only one to be exposed or to present something. The performer is not the virtuoso but creates one variation of the piece. OWEN is an object standing on a shelf, a record that includes the script, the plan that is the formation of the benches in which the performance is taking place and the contract that describes it and enables everyone to do it- to learn the text by heart with the help of others. The record was made through the expertise of typographers and bookbinders from Athens. Without their work the record wouldn’t be made. OWEN then is a chain of relationships; exchanges of thoughts, ideas, associations and those are not limited only to the moment of the performance. Previous relationships constituted the piece and the ones to come is the reason to do it, to do the performance, nothing else.



1/06/2013

Diana Very Dog

                              Diana Very Dog                                                                                                                               

  
                                                                                                                                                                               
November 29th, 2012-February 20, 2013 / Opening reception Thursday 29th, 2012. From 12-9 pm.CENTRAL FINE presents its inaugural exhibition program with Diana Very Dog, a solo project by Georgia Sagri.


Diana belonging to the Roman Pantheon of deities poses a question here. One cannot help to wander why Sagri invokes her name rather than the Greek goddess Artemis.  May be that Diana, belonged to a model, such as the Roman one? And maybe Sagri, an Athenian, is purposefully advocating for a repulse of her national deities, by choosing a 'newer' and more 'arrow-minded' version of Artemis? Is Sagri observing the mandate of not using Artemis name in vain? Or is it that Sagri is interested in the meteoric trajectory of Diana's arrow and that her name starts with a D, such as Dog or Diogenes' School of Cynics?
 
Diana has the capacity to speak to animals and she is also an accomplished hunter, qualities that Sagri is after, as seen in her video piece where dogs bark, her wall text or her photos as a naked nymph with a Rimbaudian haircut; Sagri speaks a speech that seems delivered by a person with a triple Id: Action & Action & Action. Such a triple Id subject is, surprisingly, in total consciousness and control over the notion of own-her-ship. And let's be clear here, rather than being spoken, Sagri speaks to It, first and foremost to herself, and later to us with a present and yet ancient own-her-ship.

She navigates the streets/ while delivering a voice/ that tongue/ that form of speech outside the limitations of the History of Speech/ that shadow of mystery daily embodied and experienced by herself.


Sometimes one thinks that she is made or built by phrases that carry within themselves the problem of force. In that unstable ground, Sagri as a topos where one can load content hunts for titles, for sounds, for forms that direct her trajectory-the structure of action. On ACTION-PLACE-SPEECH we observe an interest in links and hyper abstraction while participating. A Chorus in the broadcasting of the destabilizing omnipresence: SAGRI HERE, SAGRI WHERE, VERY SAGRI, DIANA VERY DOG.




EMBROS OCCUPATION in Athens

With the dynamic action of groups and individuals the EMBROS opened a year ago and still operates as an occupation until today despite the pressures and obstacles of the so called protectors of the state wealth and culture.  We at EMBROS want to learn what is culture through every day actions. Culture is a common. Art is not a product and cannot belong only to the few. The creative and artistic work in extend cannot be part of the ideals of an oligarchic system of values in which the person suppose to simply produce, consume and shut up. EMBROS is an open, self-organized, cultural, political and social space.  It is the initiative of individuals and collectives from the arts, theory, and the sciences.  The space which is shaped through relationships, solidarity and openness, asks everyone to participate, to create, organize and dip reality to the dream.  By our continues effort we suggest ways of life and creation for social inspiration, transformation and empowerment, with a clear revolutionary vision: a society without passive viewers but active free organisms.  
We invite artists, visionaries, educators, theorists, travelers, groups and individuals without the need of identification, without any perceptible or aesthetic criteria of difference to be in EMBROS.

FOR MORE INFO SEND EMAIL TO:
embrostheater0@gmail.com