Talk

Total War - Information Camp

TOTAL WAR is an ongoing project that started in December 2015. The“war” has been declared by the Officer Lykourgos Porfyris.

Aims and Targets of this war are; to underline and reveal the conservatism, stereotypes and elitism that have been impregnated into alternative subculture/lifestyles/ideologies.

“TOTAL WAR” begun with barrages of guerrilla performances in specified public spaces. The selected sites were all places or areas that have been “marked” or characterized, as arenas for radical believes. Some examples are; Exarchia, which has been named as the Greek riot’s neighborhood and outside of the “Neseblod” record store which is a historical place for the Black Metal Mafia in Norway.

Now the “TOTAL WAR” project will be hosting two lectures by Dr. Kostis Stafylakis: Performing the Failures of Humanism: on the shortcomings of social affect and Lykourgos Porfyris: War Report.

Kostis Stafylakis, Performing the Failures of Humanism: on the shortcomings of social affect.

An aspect of various approaches to social-civic insurgence, during the crisis, is the pivoting of a humanist understanding of politics, art and performativity.

This theoretical regression aligns performativity with a humanist depiction of Greek social strata and collective struggles. Certain discourses depict performativity as an inherently subversive essence of humanity in order to theorize forms of public action, self-organization and cultural resistance.

What is the relation between such theoretical formulations and the perception of contemporary Greeks as a "resisting Nation" - a primordial human essence fighting against its alienation? In contrast to neo-humanism and political melodrama, various new artistic and activist enterprises have tried to challenge the safe position of the "socially sensitive" artist/performer. Some of them belong to the new experimentations of the Queer scene while others seek to update the brechtian perspective in theatre.

Lykourgos Porfyris, War Report.

In aformmentioned concept of TOTAL WAR, Lykourgos Porfyris is going to present a short documentation of the war.

Kostis Stafylakis is an art theorist and artist. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts. He holds an MA in Modern Art and Theory (Uni. Essex) and an MA in Continental Philosophy (Uni. Essex). He received his doctorate from the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University (Athens), focusing on the political discourse launched by 21st century global art shows and especially Documenta 11. He was a post-doc researcher at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2011-2012).

Along with Yannis Stavrakakis, he edited the greek anthology “The Political in Contemporary Art.” He taught “Research-based Art” at the Unit of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Athens School of Fine Arts and he currently teaches “Art and Visual communication” at the University of Patras. He was co-curator of AGORA, the 4th Athens biennial.

Along with Vana Kostayola, he runs kavecS (www.kavecs.com), an experiment with modes of overidentification. Some recent participations include 1st NSK Biennial of Folk Art (2014), Hell as Pavillion, Palais de Tokyo (2013), Truth is Concrete, Graz (2012), 3d Athens Biennial, Media Impact (4th Moscow Biennial) (2011).

Lykourgos Porfyris work depicts battles between normative models and excluded social groups or individualities, which are unable to be assimilated into the models of Western, Balkan or even eastern societies. With emphasis on issues of gender, he creates contradictory and often repellent images, seen in the light of binary gender, power relations of patriarchal structures of every form.

Lykourgos Porfyris graduated from Athens School of Fine Arts. Currently he is studying MFA at the Fine art Academy at KHiO. TOTAL WAR is a part on his first year’s master project called Scenarios for Going Public.

Scenarios for Going Public - A Pilot Project of the Academy of Fine Art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Where is the public? Do we find it or make it? Is it a Public with a capital first letter as in Oslo, Norway and the modern Nation state? Or a small p as in 'push it'? To push for a public would be the attempt to invest passion into the fiction of a place that was not already taken but, for a split second, owned by no one.

Scenarios for Going Public is a pilot project for students of the Master's programme at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. In their first year, students will seek out people and places outside the Academy and, through their art, create moments of engagement with urban culture and civil society. Risking vulnerability, they will expand their practice and test the premises of what's impossible and what's possible within the horizon of their work. Art and politics alike thrive on situations in which people can communicate their concerns to each other. Scenarios for Going Public is an experiment in generating such conversations.

Each master student will be guided by a teacher to do an independent project over the course of one year. This could include organizing encounters, research groups or public programmes, performing interventions and activating situations in the city, or any other practice which reconfigures what the public can be and what artists can do to engage it.