Performance artist and researcher Danae Theodoridou, will conduct a research residency on the practice of democracy. Aim of the research is the study of democracy, as a notion and practice, as well as the creation of artistic structures through which main democratic processes are deconstructed and reactivated.
More particularly, the research relates to the creation of public speeches that take place unexpectedly in various places where people meet. This time, though, the speeches are not delivered by politicians but by citizens who take the floor addressing their fellow citizens, sharing concerns and exploring the dynamic of unexpected encounters in public space.
What can this mean for the practice of democracy and the way we live together? Questions such as how do we decide, how do the ‘many’ organize themselves, what do we want to decide in common etc., become the starting point for a series of stories related to the way we understand our social coexistence.
As digital forms of civic engagement are multiplying today, reaching fast, directly and abstractly the ‘many’, the research seeks to return to the micro-scale of moving ‘from the mouth to the mouth’, looking for the political action in physicality, encounter and the public as ‘commons’. Through a series of analogies between real and imaginary, individual and community, citizen and politician, the aim is to (re)consider the type of decisions we take together and the way this happens.
Τhe residency takes place with the support of the Flemish Ministry of Arts in Belgium
and of the Duncan Dance Research Center-Athens.
