Before Now After is an interdisciplinary project bringing together contemporary dance, traditional live music, oral history, documentary film and photography.
Through a contemporary journey on the island of Leros, the project creates movement while focusing on the meeting with ‘the other’ body (that of the local population, the co-creator, the place, the object) and a dialogue across the collective past, present and future.
The project explores the excavation of the past as an opportunity to listen through the body and to meet with opinions and events of another era. A chance to converse through art with the local community, to set in motion different ways of relating to our history and exploring the collective undertaking of shaping our future.
IN PRESENTIA deals with the Asia Minor Catastrophe through the notion of mourning and the encounter with the sea. The work highlights the complexity of the trauma’s longevity, combining light, the sea’s movement, and sound. A visual and sound installation – it functions as a score for the performance.
A silent ‘in-memoriam’ tribute to all refugees who experienced the trauma of displacement, who lost their lives in this very sea or moved on to a new life. We attempt a dialogue inside the silence of loss, recollecting memories from our past, like invaluable flashes of insight that shed light to the darkness of mourning.
We bring the dead to life within our memory, with tenderness towards what remains in presence, as a part of our lives, invaluable.
Ammophila Vol.3: There Was Land Here Before is an exhibition that renegotiates the way in which we perceive and experience places and the dominant narratives projected onto them.
We are concerned with places, which we regard as our subsoil, rituals of coming together and coexisting, and stories that have shaped these relationships. The exhibition is inviting us to give new interpretations and stories to places that can be real or made up through our collective phantasies: phantasies of a non-existent land, a land that is different, a land that is differently inhabited.
A land that can shake us, a land in decomposition, a land in bloom, a land that trembles, a limitless land.