φρούτα ονείρων • dream fruit is an artistic research and performance project developed during a residency at Xarkis Festival in Kornos, Cyprus. It explores gendered and racialised social reproductive labour through the practice of traditional black-eyed pea ("louvi") preparation, a ritual familiar to most people who have spent time in Cyprus. Like many other time-consuming domestic tasks, the practice is an opportunity for gathering and "κουσκούς," meaning gossip or chit-chat.
I approached the labour of this practice as an area of embodied technique - as epistemic in nature, containing and encoding knowledge not only about cooking and nourishment, but about identity, place-making, gender, rituals of gathering and being together, and histories of violence and dispossession that always, in Cyprus, lie just beneath the surface of everything.
I took the ritual of louvi preparation as a social form to be reenacted and expanded, and the artistic research process was guided by this aim. I sourced 30kg of fresh louvi for the performance, which I estimated would take four hours to shell, with the help of the public. I met and spent a morning with the couple who produced the crop in their field, located in the buffer zone near the village of Akaki. During this visit, Mr. Kostis and Mrs. Toulla shared histories of the land and their relationship with it, as well as local histories of conflict and struggle. I created a multi-channel sound installation using these oral histories, as well as my own vocal improvisations and sounds derived from found objects. I wrote a script (with both English and greek-Cypriot versions) to be performed by the audience during the performance itself. The script included aspects of the oral histories not included in the sound installation, as well as theoretical material on Nancy Fraser’s concept of “boundary struggles,” and narratives on place-making and situated feminisms drawn from the symbiotic relationship between louvi and nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, which, together, regenerate the soil in which the plant grows.
Below is a short video intended to give an impression of this project. I am currently working on an academic video article, a written article, and a non-academic video work, each of which will draw out and expand on different themes and approaches from this rich and multi-layered project.
Oral histories - Mr. Kostis and Mrs. Toulla; script-readers - Belinda Papavasiliou, Ioulita Toumazi and Miriam Gatt.
æ æ / αἰ αί / ay ay: lessons in love and loss
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This piece is a work of creative non-fiction and sound art published in Chicago Review of Books’ online magazine Arcturus, and in print,
in Issue N.4 of Icelandic multilingual literary journal Ós. I originally wrote the piece for a performance at Perdu Poetry Institute in Amsterdam. The full text can be viewed by clicking on the image above.
Below you can listen to the sound piece that serves as the coda for the work, entitled “
Epilogue (and Moirológhi for Alkēstis)” (linked to by QR code in the print pubication). It is intended as a funeral lament for
Alkēstis, the heroine of Euripides’ eponymous tragedy. In it, I play with the sonic equivalent of erasure, or blackout poetry; the chorus’ lamentations are distorted almost beyond audibility, serving as rhythmic punctuation for an improvised (live) lament. The text of the lament is taken from the syllablic vocalisms that the tragic poets used to indicate grief:AI AI; E E; IO GONAI; IO MOI MOI; OTOTOTOTOTOI.
Abundance
In November 2021 I released
my cross-genre debut album Abundance, co-produced with ECM artist Fred Thomas and
featuring my own songs, folk songs in five languages, and reimaginings of Bach
and Schumann. Tracks from Abundance have been released on London label
Nonclassical and played on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Cymru, KEXP Seattle, The Wire
Magazine’s radio show, NTS radio, Avopolis Radio (Greece), and many others. BBC presenter
Sara Mohr-Pietsch called Abundance “one of my all-time favourite albums of
2021,” while
Fresh on the Net’s Neil March wrote:
“Reimagining classical works and traversing the [needless] boundaries between contemporary classical, folk and experimental music, she has the kind of resolutely individual approach that has made artists as diverse as Anna Meredith, Esperanza Spalding and Polly Harvey so intriguing.”
Instead of physical copies, the album was released digitally along with a votive beeswax altar candle, realised through collaboration with researcher Savvas Avraam at CYENS - Thinker Maker Space (3d scan and print) and artist Vasiliki Riala at ÷χρονικό (silicone mould and candle). The candle was created by making a silicone mould from a 3d scan and print of myself, in the pose in which I appear on the album cover. Votive candles are used to aid prayer in many spiritual practices. I imagine them to clarify and illumine the intention of the one who prays, and to act as offerings to the forces that help bring about what is desired. This particular candle is modeled on the Greek Orthodox τάματα (tamata), votive offerings (often in candle form) that are dedicated to a saint, and act as a link between individual human desire and infinite, divine life force. I'm drawn to these objects because of their association for me with the healing power of art.
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Quad
Play by Samuel Beckett. I staged repeated performances of this work in parking lots and abandonned buildings in Huddersfield, using it as a premise to explore public art and the boundaries of what is considered a “performance.” For the excerpt of my doctoral thesis that addresses this project, see here (opens pdf). The project was later reprised with a performance at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
Click here for video documentation of the performance.
Videos by Vera Goetzee
Performers: Eleanor Cully, Gaia Blandina, Vera Goetzee, Sophie Fetokaki; Percussionists: Fred Thomas, Maurizio Ravalico, Colin Frank, and Johnny Hunter.
not the telos of a process, but the augur of an arrival
meta/morphē is performance art, community art, installation, experimental music, durational performance, recycling project and much more. It first took place in June 2018 in Reykjavik, Iceland, when a group of interdisciplinary artists spent two weeks disassembling a grand piano and re-configuring it into a plethora of material and immaterial objects. The artists were present in various configurations throughout the duration of the project, working both independently and in groups. Performances and performative events of various kinds took place around the central activity of the piano disassemblage, relating to and making use of the piano in many and varied ways.
meta/morphē Facebook page
meta/morphē: “after the form”, from Greek meta (prep.) “after”, “along with”, “beyond”, “among”, “in pursuit of” + morphē (noun) “shape”, “form”, “appearance”, “figure”, “outline”, “kind”, “sort”.
meta/morphē is an act of collaboratively transforming a piano into something else. If the piece had a score, it might read: “Carefully disassemble a piano over a period of time with the assistance of fellow artists and the public. Use the disassembled parts to make new things”. Behind the act is a central question: what comes after the form?
meta/morphē is an inverse Argo. Instead of replacing each piece of the ship until it is entirely renewed, without having changed either its name or form, here the ship is gradually taken apart and the pieces are used to create new forms.
What becomes of the name, after the form? How do we relate to the object during and after its transformation? How does the transformation help us to know our relationship to the (former) object?
The form of meta/morphē itself is the combination of the piano and the situation of its disassemblage and transformation. This form constitutes a relationship to the world.
The form of meta/morphē embraces the piano itself, the time of its disassemblage, the social space in which the disassemblage took place, the multiplicity of shoots that sprouted from the work (text, audio, video, photography, performance, interaction, sculpture...). Within this form are sets of relations – between each of the artists; between each individual and the piano; between the various things that are the plethora of the piano; between the piano as it begun and the various artefacts into which it transformed; and so forth.
meta/morphē is performed by a group of individuals who spend long stretches of time together, remaining open to the inclusion of passers-by. It takes as a departure point the notion
that “the form of an artwork is a relation to the world,” and that an artist produces “relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects” (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics).
The piano is the ‘aesthetic object’ by way of which we create relations between one another, and between ourselves and the world. It is the axel of our activity, but it is also merely the occasion for it.
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The following are recordings from my daily practice of playing songs and improvisations at the piano as it transformed, including the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Gillian Welch’s “Dear Someone.”
Click here for a documentary video of the2018 performance of
meta/morphē in
Reykjavík.
Artists:
Sophie Fetokaki (maker/performer)
María Arnardóttir (artist/designer)
Einar Torfi Einarsson (composer/artist)
Kristian Ross (composer/sound artist)
Linus Orri Gunnarsson Cederborg (carpenter/musician)
Rebecca Scott Lord (performer/painter/writer)
Taylor Myers (director/performer/immersive theatre maker)
Thelma Marín Jónsdóttir (artist/musician)
Tinna Þorsteinsdóttir (pianist/artist)
General public and passers-by
Funded by:
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August 26th - 31st, 2019
Kaleido Cultural Centre
Piteå, Sweden
Ung Nordisk Musik Festival
unm.se/2019-festival-schedule/
www.pitea.se/kaleido
The following short fillm was shot on location in
Piteå, during the festival. The soundtrack consists entirely of sounds generated with or
around the transforming piano.
It was just there, it just stood there, in the end. And I can’t play, no one plays, so it just takes up space. We decided we would try to give it away, we asked everyone in the circle of acquaintances ... Somehow one feels respect for this instrument, which has been very central and given us a lot. One doesn't want to just throw it away. But no one wanted to have it, and we thought in the end that we would have to drive it to the dump, we will have to throw it away. But then you heard about it... And then we also thought it feels a little strange that someone should take it apart and it will sort of disappear into pieces, but it was still better. Now it feels good that it was useful.
Leyla, resident of
Piteå and
(previous) owner of the (former) piano
Participants:
Sophie Fetokaki (maker/performer)
María Arnardóttir (artist/designer)
Kristine Bech
Sørensen (artist)
Composers, performers and general public of Ung Nordisk Musik Festival 2019
The Resurrection
Created for the eavesdropping end-of-season playlist, later released with UK label nonclassical, on volume 4 of their lockdown compliation series I hope this finds you well in these strange times
Holy week on Thassos, an island just south of the Eastern Macedonian mainland. Since congregating is forbidden, religious services are held behind closed doors, delivered by the priest and two cantors and amplified via megaphone speakers mounted on the outer walls of the church.
On Good Friday, the bells perform an exquisite work of durational performance art, pealing out the three tones of a minor triad, one tone every four seconds, for six hours.
On Easter Sunday, a shortened version of the liturgy, roughly one hour long, resounds throughout the village.
On Monday, I go to the hills.
Hringflautan
Collaboration with composer Þráinn Hjálmarsson and designer Brynjar Sigurðarson and Veronika Sedlmair. The performance was built around Brynjar & Veronika’s invention, the ‘circleflute,’ which must be played simultaneously by four flautists. Together we developed a performance around themes of breathing together, attuning to stillness, and exploring the edges of gestural perceivability.
With flautists: Björg Brjánsdóttir, Melkorka Ólafsdóttir, Steinunn Vala Pálsdóttir and Berglind María Tómasdóttir
October 25th, 2018
Gerðarsafn Gallery
Kópavogur
Iceland
Cycle Music and Art Festival
Click here for the Circleflute texts, which I wrote for the project and which became the basis of Þráinn’s compositions.
After hearing about the circleflute, Björk included it in her “Cornucopia” tour.
