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“There will not be any depths of despair to worry about from the
reflection by which we will go find the tragedy of those
mothers; those mothers are called the will, the illusion, the
pain” ( quote from a projected study on the tragedy and free
spirits. Nietzsche, September 1870).
The concept of Blue Pigs, stemming from Marina Olympios’
research and experiments seems to emerge like a tenacious and
stubborn attack on existence. The body is power, it resists
anything that would strive to weaken or destroy it. Blue Pigs is
an anxiety filled and painful dream, an extreme. Is it really a
dream? It reveals itself, first, as an attitude towards the
body, to what affects it; the ferocity and constancy of the
hatred, despair, suffering, hysteria, furious invectives. Blue
Pigs is the always-precarious victory, the stylized form of a
verbal art, prey to strange deliriums, back to a quasi-animal
natural state. Even better, Blue Pigs does not contain the
echoes and essential form of spontaneous imaginary Greek drama!
Marina Olympios, accompanied by choreographer Maria Hassabi, and
artist Katerina Kana form a ranting choir, fictitious natural
beings, convulsive beauty stricken by a broken and morbid
humanity. Clothed in an ethereal white suit, face splattered
with blue, rigged with snout, hair dressed with wigs or
oversized headdresses, they draw from occult and clever forces,
moves and behaviours, miming the pathetic gesticulation of
dislocation and distraction limits of a life.
In ancient tragedy, the soot-smeared characters, whether from
minium or vegetable juices, took part in the drama cradle,
executing moves, at times singular, amidst the exhilaration of
sounds and the contagion of rhythms. This cult of irrational,
vital energy, is transplanted at the heart of our contemporary
troubles taking a teeming mythology by storm, with rituals that
bring cosmogony up to date. With its parody, Blue Pigs imitates
drama, delivers to us the lamentation of suffering heroes stuck
in daily threats: wreck, disintegration, death.
This creative yet troubling form supports a certain familiarity
with the absurd, the superfluous, with such close, scattered,
and hidden death in the symbols of life. This experience is
experienced like an integral work of art that redistributes the
relationship between artist, public, and art in an unprecedented
way, in a fusion of the vision. This notion in relation to the
public had already been developed in the “Let Me Be Your Guide”
exhibitions at Renos Xippas in Paris, or, Le repas, les
philosophes à manger” in Paris at the Galerie du Temple. The
public, physically in attendance, and real, in a state to
consider the work of art as it were, ideal audience, sighted and
visionary, in the pure tradition of tragedy. Marina Olympios
attempts a new way of revealing art to the public in situations
blending social activities and aesthetics.
Can art, by itself, transform the absurd to images that we can
tolerate to live with? Is life not possible thanks to art
illusions, to enjoyment of appearances? Placed in front of a
work of art this complex, we must learn to enjoy it with the
abundance of our senses, even though there may be reasons to
worry that, placed in front of such a work of art, we be tempted
to break it down, to break it up when it actually conceals the
primary unit of natural sovereign instincts.
Blue Pigs aims at awakening emotions, heady irrational,
saturated with sensuality. Who may belong to whom, who is
certain to be whom, when every minute is panic. Blue Pigs
carries us into the insides of a being, into the perplexity of
something beyond us and takes a little from “demon”, it is a
work of art profoundly irrigated by myth, and the will of giving
to get to know, though self-irony and despair, a human becoming.
She invites us to watch over our shoulder, be on our guards, and
face like an artist, our fear for the future of art. This
contact revival with myth and the sacred allows us to surpass
our profane condition to better conjure up contradictions and
tensions of our “individual times”. With Blue Pigs, we hope of
nothing less perhaps than an exquisite amorous, but fatal,
feast.
Elisabeth Chambon, June 1997
Art Historian - Conservateur du Musée Géo - Charles, France |
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