Fireflies – 100 years, 100 Days
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 (B)
9 July / 20.30

Stefanos Levidis
100 years, 100 Days

100 Years, 100 Days is a performance lecture examining the intersection between two overlapping temporalities of border violence at the Greek-Turkish river border of Evros/Meriç: the century-long production of the border as a militarised and infrastructural landscape, and the “100 days” during which asylum seekers are presently coerced into participating in illegal pushbacks on behalf of Greek border authorities. The work reflects on how histories of territorial control, exclusion, racialization and state violence continue to echo through contemporary border regimes.

Drawing on cartographic reconstruction, spatial analysis, testimony, film, and open-source investigation, the lecture traces how the river has been transformed from a fluid landscape into a hyper-designed apparatus of deterrence. It follows the shifting border from the 1926 Athens Protocol to the present-day architecture of fences, surveillance towers, military roads, detention sites, and river islets where asylum seekers are abandoned in spaces of legal indeterminacy.

At the same time, the work foregrounds testimonies from survivors who describe being detained inside border guard stations for a period of 100 days and coerced into assisting in pushbacks under threat of torture, expulsion and death. Through the method of situated testimony — reconstructing traumatic experiences within navigable 3D environments — the project examines how contemporary border regimes operate through secrecy, disappearance, and the systematic destruction of evidence.

Bringing together long-duration territorial history and the immediacy of lived experience, 100 Years, 100 Days asks how borders are continuously produced through infrastructure, law, memory, and violence, and how spatial and visual practices can make these obscured regimes publicly legible.