Formidable Persistence
A series of public events and roundtables

Curated by Dimitris Papanikolaou

In conversation with ideas shaping contemporary artistic creation—ones brought to light through the 2025 Athens Epidaurus Festival programme—this year’s public roundtables will focus on the concept of persistence. Together with our invited speakers, we will address this notion of formidable persistence, both individual and collective, that we are witnessing in the face of hegemonic discourses, socioeconomic crises, and ecological ruination.

Persistence is not a synonym of resilience. Not simply the ability to adapt and survive, persistence is a constant act of creation and transgression. It implies articulation, the development of a language, and a poetics. It is a dramaturgy without a prearranged ending, conceived instead as an open field of possibilities.

Persistence, of course, can be used today to describe opposing tendencies. It characterises communities that alert us to the destruction of the planet or propose new ways of sharing ecological resources; at the same time, it can describe those who deny the existence of climate change. Feminist or social rights movements are inspired by strategies of perseverance and persistence; but equally persistent is the return of a reactionary agenda that promotes fear, intolerance, and the dismantling of rights.

These roundtable discussions avowedly take sides while they map the positive aspects of persistence as a liberational and critical discourse. Mindful of its opposite, for us “formidable persistence” recalls new forms of collective action and resistance, celebrating life in all its diversity. We use the concept to evoke lives demanding their right to have rights and to be treated as valuable; to evoke the body, striving over time to transform its experience into choreography; the archive, telling an “other” history. Let us rethink biography and autobiography, learning from artists and institutions that stage the fight against the logics of conformity and uniformity. Let us speak of the earth, as it persists in balancing human excess; about the time of the earth, as it stretches beyond the time of the human, the Anthropocene. We will equally reflect on the importance of housing and the right to a home, on living together, on the people who persist in returning—even to a destroyed house—to rebuild and remake. On the thoughtful stewardship of resources, on coexistence and symbiosis. We will speak about the everyday and the small, persistent, habits that sustain us. Last, but not least, we will bring to the fore the 70-year history of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, a cultural institution that persists in remembering the past while seeking new ways of expression through diverse modes of revival and survival. Persistence is also an act of weaving history—of seeing the past not as a series of fragments, but as networks that expand to the present. Persistence means thinking through genealogy.

What, then, gives persistence its ethical, aesthetic, and political meaning today? What makes it so vital? This will be the first question we pose at these four roundtables, which will bring artists featured in the Festival into dialogue with authors, academics, scientists, and public intellectuals.

Programme

1/6 Poetic(s) / Persistence

15/6 Body, bios, biography

19/6 Post-Human: Earth, Technocapitalism, Εmpire

29/6 The politics of memory and mourning