Asthenia Lab

Asthenia Lab was a collective performative event which took place at Circuits & Currents (project space of ASFA) on Dec 3rd 2016. It was a one day private workshop carried out by the participating artists and an 8h performative experimentation open to the public. The idea was to deal as citizens of today’s Athens with the notion of “Ασθένεια” / ASTHENIA: ATHENA, TISANE, ANISE, ASHEN, ASIAN, HASTE, HEIST, INSET, SAINT, SANTE, SATAN, SATIN, SHINE, STAIN,THAIS, TINEA, HATE, HEAT, HINT, NEAT, SENT, SHIT, SITE, SITH, SNIT, THAI, THAN, THEA, THEN, THIN, THIS..We live in-between, being sick in good health, without considering these terms as ends or wholes. We transform into scapegoats and we bring our bodies, voices, stress, wounds, poems, emails, plants, parasites, instruments, cookings, underwear, pills..We carry a disease from one person to another while looking for a secret phármakon, a way to be cured.Asthenia Lab was part of fanzine Asthenia 04  Participating artists: Yorgia Karidi will be sporadically organizing & realizing recordings of the other participants' voices. In the meantime she will receive direction by Antonis Vathis to present texts provided by the artist and repeat his sayings following his lead. Audios from the process will be presented impromptu. Charalambos Kourkoulis (Photoharrie) will heal us with a semi-private 8h djset inspired by his plants and Copernicus, while mining another dresscode.. Rilène Markopoulou is interested in subjects as mass-manipulation and propaganda. She would like to research The Culture of Fear, specifically focusing on the so-called health scares of the last decades and explore the idea of asthenia in a social context. All of this without a specific plan and by trying to keep an open approach, so as to retain an experimental attitude with the aim to interact and collaborate with artists and viewers in situ. Jan Moss will ooze in a Sturm und Drung, new-not-so-romantic performance 'well-being and purity'. it's when they want to make you understand you're black noise, even though you're not at all. Maria Nikiforaki Melodic cleanness. Youtube madness. Share with us your favourite song, dance, video or music clip and “your mood”. How does a vehicle transform into a living and breathing Frankenstein monster or an exquisite corpse par excellence? Peter Nikoltsos moves his studio inside a white car and attempts the unthinkable. Peter Nikoltsos Nana Sachini invites the viewer to activate, by himself or with the help of the performer-facilitator, various hybrid objects associated with the body in the boundary condition of motherhood and it’s medicalization. Panos Sklavenitis DV, 7 min 55 sec, 2015In recent years, I have thoroughly read readers' comments on published articles relating directly or indirectly to racism, discrimination, xenophobia et cetera…One example entailed a German politician making a statement along the lines of "Greeks can put their sun where it doesn't shine". Donald Tusk: "The Greeks can stick their sun where it doesn't shine”…'The poem begins with the unloving sun' is a work in progress… - Did you mean: grexit’… Antigone Theodorou will give you her personal prescriptions and recipes. She will treat you with therapeutic herbs at the end in case of indigestion! Sofia Touboura Dolce Vita- make a wish - in the darkest ages - don’t you see the bliss / Fontana di TreviA fountain installation in place of a donation box.* Antigoni’s Tsagkaropoulou performance is somewhere in between, from attractive to disgusting, from human to nonhuman, from reality to fantasy. Exploring the “borders” of a furry body, giving fluffy hugs and tasty presents from secret pocket-holes, she will try to make a reconciliation with the absurd, the uncanny, the repulsive, the abject. Αntonis Vathis will create a sound bulling on the limits of popular, of kitch & catch & cult , in memory of the immaterial of Lyotad and Saint John of Damaskos with handmade sauce from Marlene Dietrich. Myrto Vratsanou will be recording, manipulating, preserving and spreading around peels of fruit and vegetable and other leftovers- traces of the participants and visitors, in the form of drawings. These will be realised on transparent membrane and will be attached on objects and people in the space, as a sort of parasitism, feeding off from the surface-host, thus creating a new, third, in-between image with the "other". The duration of the performance is 8 hours and emphasis is sifted from the work to the process, hinting at how slowed-down time benefits the growth of parasites.  Organised by Antigone Theodorou