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Event Category: Visual Arts / Performance

Is It Written? Maktoub

This performance serves as a multisensory ritual of awakening, a manifesto of emancipation that connects the past to the present through the female voice, as an act of resistance and survival.

Revolving around poems by women from South Asia and the Middle East who dared to speak out in regimes of silence, this piece brings together poetry, the body, and image. Each verse turns into a gesture, each pause into a shadow, and each breath into a whisper that requests space and light.

Through the blend of performance art, original music, scenography, and technology, the production Is It Written? Maktoub highlights the female experience as a universal narrative – timeless, bold, lyrical. The female performer’s body  becomes a field of memory and metamorphosis: it challenges itself against the past, questions tradition, and creates space for freedom. Through marginalization and repression, a new figure is born – not a victim; a storyteller, a flame. Is it written? Or is it perhaps time we rewrote it?

Konstantinos Vita: Space and Memory

PCAI presents its new exhibition by acclaimed artist, musician and composer Konstantinos Vita titled Space and Memory, curated by Kika Kyriakakou, PCAI artistic director. The exhibition and accompanying live performance respond to the central thematic axis of the Ministry of Culture 2025 programmeAll of Greece, One Culture: The Reception of the Past – Today Viewed as Tomorrow and Yesterday (Andreas Empirikos).

This original programme aims to occupy musically and visually the historic Pikionis Pavilion—now known as “pi”—and to engage with the important architectural heritage of the monument, the historical weight of the Delphi region, and the surrounding natural and energetic landscape.

The title of the project is inspired by the first poetry anthology of major post-war poet Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou (Difficult Death, 1954). Vita’s prolific work over the years spans musical composition, lyric writing, poetry, drawing, and painting. This exhibition of Vita and PCAI is triggered by Empiriko’s quote and enters into dialogue with Aslanoglou’s poetry, exploring artistic connections to the past, memory and the present. In this context Konstantinos creates a series of new paintings (oil, pencil and acrylic) accompanied by a live music performance. These works are in tune with the unique natural and energetic landscape of Delphi and the architectural character of the Pavilion, inviting visitors to experience and interpret them during the event.

Konstantinos Vita states: “Memory in the poetry of Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou is not only individual, it is collective, historical and deeply Greek. Through his writing and personal experiences, the wounds and transformations of postwar Greece emerge. Aslanoglou’s Greece is a country of memory—marked by existential anguish and reflection. While reading his poems, I felt the need to create certain images. His poetic voice becomes a space of nostalgia, loss, and awareness, reflecting the soul of contemporary Greece”.

Kika Kyriakakou, artistic director of PCAI notes that: “The visual language of Konstantinos Vita is a marvelous expression of his multi-dimensional talent. As part of the exhibition and the music that accompanies it, his work harmoniously converses with Aslanoglou’s poetry and the Delphic landscape, offering us a return to the poetic self”.

Athanasios Polychronopoulos, Polygreen CEO and PCAI Founder, states: “It is a great pleasure to collaborate with the Ministry of Culture’s programme “All of Greece, One Culture” and with the prominent and highly respected artist and musician Konstantinos Vita”.

RAST Diversion

The site-specific installation and sonic happening take the myth of the Achelous River as their point of departure. Here, geomythology serves as a living memory and a transformative force. The notion of diversion refers not only to the rerouting of the river itself but also to a shift in historical and cultural narratives.

Panos Charalambous draws on familiar motifs from his practice—irrigation pipes, metal basins, a boat from Lake Amvrakia—reimagined as vessels of animate ecologies. The tsamiko, deconstructed and elongated, becomes a gesture of embodied and environmental reflection—a choreography of memory inscribed in both body and landscape.

Angelos Krallis constructs a sonic palimpsest, layering rast tonalities, micro-environments, and live processing into a form of acoustic excavation.

Diversion emerges as a practice of reconfiguring our relations with water, land, and time—toward a present of coexistence.

Before Now After

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

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

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.

From Asia Minor to Northern Evia

Seventeen refugee settlements were integrated into Northern Evia. Four out of these transformed into separate refugee villages that took their names from respective regions of Asia Minor: Neos Pirgos, Neo Mousarli, Nea Egin, Nea Sinasos.

Refugees from Prokopi of Cappadocia, Makri and Livisi, Marmara, the region of Smyrna, Ardassa in Pontus, Michaniona in the area of Kyzikos in Propontis, and Yosgati in the far reaches of Asia Minor, settled in Northern Evia, bringing along their traditions and know-how, and breathing new life into the place.

A performance combining the screening of stories of present-day descendants of refugees and archival photographs with the live presentation of original compositions based on the rhythms and melodies of Asia Minor, attempts to capture the contribution of refugees to the shaping of this place’s new identity, taking the audience on a journey across a past yet recent space-time continuum.

Prunus Armeniaca/ An Intertemporal Narration Through Images and Sounds

Two separate inter-artistic projects: a photography installation titled Compositions and a musical performance titled Zruits I-II, which means Dialogues.

Compositions presents stories from the interwar period and historical moments of the Armenian community through 150 unique pictures from the archival photographs of the “Armenika” magazine, curated by Vangelis Ioakimidis. Zruits I-II is a meeting of duduk with classical guitar, a conversation between the traditional and contemporary Armenian music by Vahan Galstyan and Lefteris Chavoutsas, performed by singer Maria Spyridonidou.

Compositions and Dialogues take root in the same place and call attention to stories and memories, whole worlds that are brought to life in the shade of an apricot tree, a Prunus Armeniaca – the symbol of Armenia.

 

2291

An interdisciplinary project by Bill Balaskas, which attempts a poetic reading of the anniversary of the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922). It revolves around a new large-scale neon installation consisting of the phrases “THERE IS NO SEA WITHOUT A LAND” and “THERE IS NO LAND WITHOUT A SEA”.

The project proposes a more contemplative or – even – optimistic approach to historical trauma, and is accompanied by a bilingual publication, two workshops, a dedicated website, and an international conference co-organized by Kingston University, London.

Through the project, 2291 becomes an imaginary date that refers not only to the universal and timeless nature of refugee disasters, but also to the hope that they will disappear sooner rather than later.

GAIA

“And yet, the Earth moves!” said Galileo in 1610 and humanity had to come to terms with the idea that the Earth does move. In 2023, however, we must accept that the Earth trembles and reacts against human interventions.

At the crossroads of art and technology, visual and musical performance, GAIA produces a different narration about the Earth and the way we should be inhabiting it. Inspired by the rich theoretical work of Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, this new – visual and stage – narration about the Earth is both about man and non-human factors, without however putting aside the human element – as is often proposed by the meta-human discourse. Yes, we do experience a destruction. But that can be reversed. We need to produce a new world creation, by renewing our representations of the terrestrial, biotic and abiotic world.

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