Mystery 151 A Rave Down Below Odete performance
project
Description
Mystery 151 A Rave Down Below was a group exhibition curated by Panos Giannikopoulos, held at the Old Oil Mill Factory from 18 Novemeber 2023 to 11 February 2024, featuring the participation of acclaimed artists from Greece and abroad and showcasing a series of new productions.
Mystery 151 A Rave Down Below explored the political dynamics of the body in motion from a simultaneously geological and cultural underground point. Alchemical wanderings from the historical past towards mythology and a post-industrial present culminated in a delirious dance. Inebriation, intoxication, revulsion, euphoria, release, vent, and ascent; a circular path from the body to the ground and back again. The exhibition’s narrative unfolded through the myths and history of the city of Elefsina and its Mysteries, with dance serving as a means of climax, a sacred ritual and a method for exploring concepts of death and loss.
The opening of the exhibition featured a series of performances, among them that presented by Odete, who creates works that operate in the domain of music, visual arts, performance, and theatre. Her work was mainly an “eroto-historiographical” and paranoid archaeology (a method she develops with her performances).
In Cicada/Cilada, departing from ancient Greek mythologies pertaining to secret processes of body transformations and manipulations, Odete traveled in a text-based act through the European Baroque and introduced people to the figure of castrati singers, prepubertal boys who underwent castration in order to maintain a soprano or contralto voice. Using the castrato figure as a starting point, the performance enabled a transtemporal connection and speculation on the relationship between the transexual body and the transcending musical body, weaving new lines of thought that aimed at healing the attempts to de-historicize trans embodiments. Through a cultural analysis voiced by a sassy character that was performed by Odete, the performance gave the tools to rethink the connection between sound and the body, life and death, in European history. Obsessed with using her trans femininity as a tool to unearth hidden histories, the performer goes on to contemplate and make associations as a pleasurable practice, understanding that if for her the time of reproduction is denied, then history and culture hold the seeds of her ancestrality.
Archival Research
Artists
Stages of Implementation
Opening and performance: 18-11-2023 Time: 20:00
Tickets Policy
Free admission.
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CC-License
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