Fireflies – Extension Leads
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 )
26 July / 21.00
Dimitris Papanikolaou et al.
Extension Leads: On Connecting Allegory, Citizenship and Persistence

“What disappears under the relentless light of power is nothing other than the faint light, the glimmer, the flicker of counter-power,” writes Georges Didi-Huberman in Survival of the Fireflies, his response to one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final political essays, the legendary The Void of Power in Italy Today, better known as The Fireflies Article.

In Pasolini’s more pessimistic take, the fact that we no longer see fireflies reveals how profoundly our relationship with the limits and rhythms of the natural world has been disrupted. At the same time, on a metaphorical level, it reminds us of the extent to which the relationship between politics, community and multiplicity has also been damaged, and how a transformed, normalized fascism has spread like a sticky terrain, furnishing the very ground on which contemporary governance rests.

The fireflies, Didi-Huberman explains, are the small acts of resistance: minority voices, marginal presences, fleeting flashes that may disappear beneath the glare of the floodlights, only to be rediscovered later, in the historical archive, where they may speak to a different future. Their complete disappearance would signal a deep, total victory for fascism. Their survival, on the other hand, remains a form of hope—provided we can find ways to ensure it.

Why does this allegory matter? How can we imagine new forms of the political today that embrace and are consistently renewed by different and minority voices? How can the past, as a constellation of small flashes, be rediscovered in the present and shape new grammars of participation for the future? How much effort, how much persistence, does it take to see fireflies again in the darkness? Why does the power of this image continue to draw us in?

With the contribution of friends and collaborators, this lecture attempts an unconventional performative montage, linking, through extension leads, the allegory of the fireflies with antifascist vigilance, our archival present with a drag performance, Didi-Huberman with Pan Pan, Cavafy and Pasolini with Spyros Angelopoulos's performances of Greek shadow theatre Karagiozis.

Presentation Dimitris Papanikolaou et al.

Shadow puppets and figures Spyros Angelopoulos