ENHANCING PERFORMATIVE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN MEANS OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
(2023)
Ioannis Karounis
Through 2 workshops in Amsterdam and in Athens, we created a toolkit with artistic games and props, which all passengers can use in order to interact with others in public transport. My aim is to empower citizens to transform the non-place (Augé, 1995) in means of public transportation into performance space/time and, subsequently, social space/time (Lefebvre, 1991) through a creative form of civic encounter.
Public transport is not only a public utility and a means of accessing other public places; it is also itself a mobile public space (Paget-Seekins & Tironi, 2016). Using public transport is an outdoor "necessary activity," which is more or less compulsory, such as going to work or waiting for a bus, where people are in "passive contact" with each other -they only see and hear other people- and only minimum activity takes place (Ghel, J. 2011, p. 9-13)
" I dance in the shadows of the public and the personal.
I travel between the rational and the irrational, between fantasy and reality.
I invite you to a trip whose purpose is the journey, to introduce you to my friends, the known and the unknown, the transient, the ephemeral, the everyday.
People, passing by, hurrying along, watch me, thousands of them swarm to my temporary island, my railcarriage, my home. They sit down across from me smiling at me. Do you want to play? Do you want to play? in this game there is neither winner nor loser. The realization of the significance, and yet the insignificance of my existence gives me balance.
There is no stop-free trip, just as there is no stop without a traveller.
I liken life to a string that pulsates and is constantly reshaped at any moment without specific angles or bows and sides, a string that offers us no chance to measure it. This is the field that concerns me primarily, the general reshaping taking place on all levels.
I don’t separate life from creation nor do I separate art from life.
I bear responsibility for the act of everyday life, conscious of the whole and of the future. I am a sensor of the universe and my actions are recorded and return to me, not so much in the form of punishment or reward, rather as the trajectory I pursue in my own significant / insignificant life. "
IOANNIS KAROUNIS
Contiguous (Enlightenment Panel no 1)
(2023)
Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
Painting, digital video with dance performance, 2010-2011. Housing renovation, 2016-17.
1. What happens at the borders where two colors meet? Purposefully exposing by meticulously smudging the edges of painted surfaces shows that there is a small area at the margins that remains undecided.
2. How do we formalize external sensory information? Experimenting with painterly techniques, such as pouring paint directly onto paper and moving the paper around to apply liquid paint, processes of rationalization and abstraction for painting a tree branch were methodically followed for the final work.
The research for the painting and the final work were produced at a workshop at the Slade School of Fine Art. The digital video was recorded during a rehearsal for a dance performance by choreographer J. Y. Corti at the London Contemporary Dance School.