Fireflies – Someone, I say, will remember me.
Series of Open Lectures and Discussions with Performative Character

PEIRAIOS 260

30 June & 14 July / HALL E
16 June, 8, 9, 26 & 27 July / HALL B
Fireflies

Curation Dimitris Papanikolaou

In collaboration with Isavella-Dimitra Karouti

This year’s series of talks at Athens Epidaurus Festival is introduced at Peiraios 260 with the title “Fireflies.” Drawing inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s well-known “Article of the Fireflies” as well as Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Survival of the Fireflies, fireflies are seen as a symbol of resilience and precarity, environmental ethics and eco-critical engagement. A symbol, also, of contact, mobility, and perspectival change.

“Fireflies” will be a cycle of open conversations, moving between lecture, performance, and collective inquiry. Speakers from different disciplines will use discourse as a performative and analytical opening; they will revisit issues that span today’s socio-political and artistic horizon. We will focus on political and artistic research, forensic investigation, the gendered aspect of expression, the memory of performance, incarceration, persistence and survival, citizenship and participation.

In this way, the “Fireflies” events will act as small hubs of reflection and exchange that seek to open up multiple readings of contemporary reality. In this flexible presentation format, theoretical argument, direct dialogue with the audience, and the performing arts, coexist and feed into one another.

By offering glimpses into the analytical and artistic practice of the invited participants, including their artistic work and/or research in progress, these encounters invite the audience to follow how an idea, an artwork, or a research question takes shape. They aim to transform the scene of presentation into a shared field of exploration.

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Peiraios 260 ( E )
30 June / 20.00
Katerina Fotinaki – Theodora Psychoyou
Someone, I say, will remember me.
Women’s Voices from Antiquity to the Present

A lecture-performance on the female voice as trace, survival, and condensed light. Free wanderings that seek –and dare– to connect Sappho with the voices of today; a gesture that brings women poets and singer-songwriters, beyond time, age, style or idiom, into dialogue through archival recordings and contemporary performance practices.

Our narrative follows a thread, intuitively woven from countless musical and poetic strands, guided by the wisdom of the fireflies: persistence, invisibility, survival, the politics of the small, and the need to learn once again how to see and how to listen. Louise Labé, Gertrude Stein, Connie Converse, Arleta, Angélique Ionatos, Lena Platonos, Barbara, and us. Eternally bound by an invisible web. With the blessings of our “distant cousin”:

“Someone, I say, will remember me.”
— Sappho

Performance (voice, guitar, percussion) – Arrangements – Original Compositions Katerina Fotinaki
Narration –Research – Commentary Theodora Psychoyou
Videos created by Nikolas Lakiotakis