Guided by Eliana Otta

AT FYDANI SPACE, ATHENS

What kind of knowledge, truths and secrets are hidden in our voices, waiting to be passed on? How often do we let ourselves be vulnerable when saying or singing what we feel and desire? How to build up spaces of trust that welcome someone else’s vulnerable sounds? 

For centuries, women and feminised bodies have been traditionally silenced, repressed, mocked or criminalised. Their voices had a similar fate and in many cases still do. To counteract the multiple oppressions, they have developed networks of resistance by bringing their vulnerability forward, despite it being stereotypically considered and portrayed as a synonym of weakness and passivity. Often at risk, they have shared and transmitted tools to support each other while making themselves heard by learning how to take up space and hold that space together. 

In this workshop we’ll explore how to collectively access what our voices, sounds and bodies have to tell us about who we are and who we can be. 

The first day of the workshop was dedicated to considering how we create space for our voices, how we can take up space through them and what can potentially happen when we do so. The second day wa dedicated to explore how we can hold the space for other voices, always within a vulnerable frame where we affect and let ourselves be affected by what surrounds us.   

During this two-day encounter we listened, watched, spoke, wrote, read, sang and played, in the company of Yorgia Karidi and Eliana Otta with a contribution by Angelikí Tzortzakaki.

Yorgia Karidi is an artist, musician and performer who has worked extensively with the human voice with a desire to understand the historical, political and cultural context that lies within the coexistence of a group of individuals and the context of being a femininity in the world. She studied theater and film methodology at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Patras and the Freie Universitaet Berlin, and is a graduate of the MFA in Digital Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Capturing and amplifying the poetics in the spontaneity, directness, and instinctiveness of the human affective gestures becomes for Karidi an important material to work with.

Eliana Otta is a Peruvian artist who creates situations where intimacy, curiosity and vulnerability can be shared. She graduated with the project Lost and Shared: Approaches to Collective Mourning Towards Affective and Transformative Politics from the Phd in Practice, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki works as a writer, curator and tutor. Her practice materialises in multiple, often performative ways, and overall looks at narratives that wish to break the nature-culture binary. In her writing, she deals with questions around agency mostly through the lens of autotheory.