Love Letters to a (post) Europe event and book

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Toynbee studios, Edge Hill Arts centre, Performance Space

October 2018

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Bios, Athens

3rd October 2016

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Book published by LADA and Unbound.

With texts from Whatever happened to the Glory days:

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A curated event of short works performed in the context of a rapidly changing Europe and in a city whose country is currently bearing the brunt of austerity.

 

Other Participating artists:

Friday 2 October
Kate Adams (UK), Demosthenes Agrafiotis (GR), Brian Catling & David Tolley (UK), Tim Etchells (UK), Alec Finlay (UK) performance: Haris Attonis, Wendy Houstoun (UK), Brian Lobel (USA/UK), Georgios Makkas (GR), Kira O’Reilly (IR/UK) performance: Vassiliki Dimou
Erica Scourti (UK/GR), Maria Sideri (GR), Jungmin Song (KR), Yoko Tawada (JP/DE)

Saturday 3 October
cris cheek (UK), Robin Deacon (UK/USA), Matthew Goulish (USA) performance: Evdokia Delipetrou, Guy Harries (UK), Steven C Harvey (UK), Georgios Makkas (GR), Mikhail Karikis (GR/UK), Claire MacDonald (UK), performance: Evangeli Fili, Ivana Müller (HR/FR), Mariela Nestora (GR) and group, Florence Peake (UK), Anna Sherbany (UK), Nikki Tomlinson (UK)

Provocation:
In the Greek language there are more than four words for Love. Five years ago Europe entered a deep crisis indicating something that ran a lot deeper still, ‘a crisis of social imagination’ in which economic dogma had ‘taken hold of public discourse’ according to Berardi. This also marked the start of Europe’s uprising by its people: the encampments in Madrid, Athens, Rome, London and beyond. The body’s presence in public squares confirmed something infinite and unquantifiable to a global system. Now we seem to have come full circle and economic dogma is being used to inflict regime change. There has been a lot of debate on what has been enacted in the name of Europe over the last few months.

This event asks artists to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter. Of now. It may also be ending it. An action approaching another, a double listening.

Levelled at this crisis of social imagination, economic dogmatism and neoliberal tyranny is imagination, empathy, sensuality, presence, being together, singular witnessing, living manifestos, stories, acts of friendship, fellowship, solidarity, refusals of order, nonsense, gifting, calls from and to the wilderness, rants, tough love, seductions, messages in brokenness, adoration, utopias and post-utopias, songs from the margins, addressing the now.

Concept and curation: Lisa Alexander
Production: Lisa Alexander & BIOS

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